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The art of appropriation
In ConversationA lot of the time, art students will copy the old masters to get better at painting and fix their technique. So I thought, I’m going to give this a go and copy Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus – and while I’m at it, I’m just going to make Venus brown and make her look like someone I know. I didn’t really have words at the time to say why I was doing that – I was just drawn to it.
That was almost ten years ago – I’ve continued to [create those paintings], and now I have more words to explain why. When I was doing my degree, I saw a lack of Aboriginal people being depicted in paintings in a positive light. Say I had an assignment and I had to look up work by Aboriginal artists – it was mainly traditional art [with a few exceptions], like Gordon Bennett and Vernon Ah Kee, but nothing that I felt really represented me as a young Aboriginal girl who didn’t grow up on Country. So I tried to find a way to connect to Culture, but I wasn’t taught how to do traditional Aboriginal art, dot painting or Wiradjuri painting, so I thought, ‘This [re-creation of famous works] will be my style.’
My master’s is based on the Aunty Collection and the ideas behind it. It delves into the history of how Aboriginal people have been represented: what creates a representation of someone, what goes into it, how society responds and how that shapes the way we’re seen today.
Nature through a different lens
GR OnlineOver the course of his remarkable career, Attenborough has taken us not merely to places most people are unlikely to visit but to places that are impossible to visit – into birds’ nests, burrows, termite mounds and the deepest recesses of the oceans. We’re shown things we will never encounter ‘in the flesh’ and that are simply not available to our senses as we navigate our daily lives.
A tough sell
GR OnlineWhile mine is a unique pathway to publication, the length of time it’s taken, the number of rewrites I’ve completed, and the thinly (and sometimes not-so-thinly) veiled racism that I’ve experienced are not unique when it comes to the journeys of authors who are First Nations and People of Colour (FNPOC).
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Culture Vultures
There’s no escaping the onslaught of content these days. But it seems increasingly tricky to determine what’s good and what’s not as we stream, tap and swipe our way through our endless entertainment feeds. How can we tell our own taste? Have we reached the end of culture? What place does criticism occupy in this ever-shifting landscape? And what does all this mean for the relationship between form and content?
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Women of letters
From the glass ceiling to the surface of the moon, these pieces dissect the complications and contradictions of twenty-first century gender roles.
Holding the baby
Where I live, what I earn and my level of education: these will all influence not only my decision to have a baby but the experiences that baby will then have. These four factors – education, geography, wealth and birth rate – loop around one another in infinite iterations. People in regional and remote Australia have more children younger; they also have lower levels of educational attainment.
Moonwalking
The first woman on the Moon will have to think carefully about her first words, as they will resonate for generations into the future. Neil Armstrong chose his famous ‘one giant leap’ line himself; but in this case, knowing what’s at stake, there’s bound to be a committee who gives this long and considered thought.
Erasure
It was thanks to a series of deliberate decisions made during the nineteenth century that women’s critical labours were designated ‘unproductive’ and simply wiped from view. Key to these erasures was Alfred Marshall, the revered father of neoclassical economics, who advocated strict limits on women’s choices lest they behave selfishly.
The chemical question
It’s just that time of the month. It’s only the baby blues. It’s the change, it’ll pass. It’s just your hormones. Most women have experienced a dismissal like this at some stage in their lives, whether for a genuine mental health issue or for something as minor as offering a differing opinion. But the trivialising of issues deemed ‘hormonal’, and the dismissal of associated mood disorders, can have fatal consequences.
The unwritten rules
Patriarchal power and control occurs silently, without fanfare, through institutions and their structure, including legal institutions and the family. It is in this conceptualisation that the recent public discussion in Australia of misogyny and the ‘gender card’ became distracted, focussing on a personal hatred of individual women as key rather than the daily reproduction of significant structural inequality.
Not just good girls
Women in public life in Queensland experienced criticism and ridicule that was sharper and more personal than that directed to their male counterparts. They were often said to have abandoned their rightful roles as wives and mothers, were accused of being too noisy, too silent, too dumb, too much of a smarty pants. It was suggested that wealthy women had a ‘silver spoon’, while the few working-class women who struggled into the ranks above were said to lack grace and class.
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Nature through a different lens
SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH’S latest documentary is very likely to be his last. Released to cinemas on his ninety-ninth birthday, Ocean has the tone of a valediction: a swan song with whale song,…
A tough sell
While mine is a unique pathway to publication, the length of time it’s taken, the number of rewrites I’ve completed, and the thinly (and sometimes not-so-thinly) veiled racism that I’ve experienced are not unique when it comes to the journeys of authors who are First Nations and People of Colour (FNPOC).
The drifting Miles Franklin Literary Award
The Miles Franklin Literary Award, circa 2025, is a chicken parmi and pint of lager at your local pub: dependable, familiar, decent value, filling. Each year, the Miles completes its…
Who’s next?
THE HORROR FLICK It’s What’s Inside (2024) is a bit of an eyeroll, just like a lot of films in this genre, but it’s still fun. One of the opening…
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