Art/Literature

Earlier this year, Wiradjuri Blak Queer artist Clinton Hayden was confronted with cultural and professional harm at the hands of an arts organisation he was commissioned to exhibit with. His experience, Clinton writes, is not an isolated incident, and shows a need for not just acknowledgement of cultural significance, but guaranteed survivance for First Nations artists and cultural practitioners in so-called Australia.

So-called Australia has a long history of white voices being the ones who speak on First Nations stories, and how we’re represented. Thankfully, Blak voices have been emerging in academia and literature, and more stories are being told our way. These Blak voices are especially important now, Darby Jones writes, in the wake of a failed referendum, where 60% of the nation expressed their desire for our silence.

Post-lockdowns, and even just as our lives get busier, it can be difficult maintaining connections with friends. Ellen van Neerven writes of prioritising Blak friendships can be significant in times like these.

Ooodgeroo Noonuccal was a First Nations poet, activist, and educator. She was a significant voice for First Nations peoples' rights as citizens through her writing and her work as an advocate. To celebrate Ooodgeroo's birthday, award-winning Mununjali Yugambeh author, playwright and poet Ellen van Neerven has written a poem to reflect on Oodgeroo, and how she has inspired them.

Australia needs to decolonise its mental health system and empower more Indigenous psychologists.

For COOKED a group of young Indigenous people (aged from six years to 27 years old) posed questions to the settlers/colonisers and newcomers of so-called Australia via a website where mob could submit anonymous answers and also ask questions of us. We then turned that into a show. And what a journey it has been.

As a proud Wailwan arts administrator & producer, it gives me such joy to see mob front and centre representing and excelling in performing arts! But I’m also often thinking about the responsibility we have to model best practice behind the scenes, about the additional cultural load mob are expected to take on when working with white arts institutions, and worrying whether those of working in non-blak spaces are being taken properly care of. 

Boomalli has helped me find a voice as queer blak woman and it’s inspiring to see our  LGBTQIA+ community can come together yearly with such incredible work and stories . It’s important that people know we are here and we’re not going anywhere!

As we bump-in the 2022 Mardi Gras exhibition, Deadly/Solid/Staunch, on a hot summer’s day in early February we don’t have many of the pieces yet. What we do have creates the skeleton of the exhibition including beautiful textile pieces by Boomalli senior artist Uncle Jeffrey Samuels and a handful of other pieces by emerging artists such as Nola Taylor.

Always and Again is a poem written by queer Goorie writer, Brooke Scobie.

My mum’s pop was an African American man from Boston who came, in the 1800s, to this particular colony. The circumstances of his coming, the…

Artists James Alberts aka ‘Jimblah’ and Marlon Moltop address racism in the AFL with “Lean on Me”, a song of resilience.

Jared Field discusses beautifully the search through story for a word that sheds colonial norms and labels.

As a former volunteer of Supanova, an Activist and the writer of this article, I myself have to express my absolute disgust that Homophobes and White Supremacists were allowed to push their propaganda at Supanova, and have decided to never attend a Supanova again.

There is a stark difference between hurting for and channeling your pain into your art, and demanding that Indigenous peoples bleed for your art so that you can tell everyone how bad colonisation and the crimes of the British Empire are.

Dr Chelsea Watego celebrates the genius of Steven Oliver and the themes he addresses in 'Bigger and Blacker.'

Barpirdhila are a not-for-profit community-led organisation established to nurture and develop First Nations artists and arts workers.

Surviving New England is impossible to put down. Its accounts shatter the colonial storying of the frontier. Mob in New England were not only resilient, as the current progressive narrative would have us believe, to colonisation — they resisted, fiercely, doing much more than surviving.