Longing for Home

The melancholy of longing is caused by an inner tension between deep love and deep sorrow. Also termed nostalgia, melancholic longing is an emotion characterised by both yearning and distance, time and space. Ultimately, it is a desire to return to another time or location, when returning is no longer possible.

Longing for Home presents works by six Aboriginal artists who explore the ideas of history, place and the incomprehensible connection we have to the land where we come from or belong to. Together, their works reflect the idea of home from an Indigenous perspective – home being any place that possesses important truths and traditions, especially those that we sometimes have trouble holding on to.

The exhibition Longing for Home is at the Art Gallery of NSW from 6 March to 22 August 2021.

Roy Kennedy’s works are powerfully emotive memories of his childhood that relate to specific places and time. They provide an important visual record of ‘mission life’, with Kennedy referencing growing up on Police Paddock Reserve at Darlington Point, NSW, along with the shared experiences of segregation and assimilation experienced by Wiradjuri people at that time.

Kennedy came to art-making late in life, studying painting before moving to etching – now his preferred medium. Uncle Roy often accompanies his works with little stories that recollect the mood of the time. Having grown up on the fringes of society facing incredible hardships, he longingly reflects on the memories of his childhood with a mixture of affection and loathing.

Jinparrak 2015 takes its name from the Gurindji word for Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory. It was from there that Gurindji people famously walked off on 23 August 1966, beginning their nine-year strike against poor working conditions and a demand for the return of their land. Their brave act of self-determination is perhaps best remembered by the iconic photograph of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring soil into the hands of Gurindji Elder Vincent Lingiari in 1975.

In these prints, Brenda L Croft depicts the remnants of station life to remember the oppression and dispossession of Gurindji people on the pastoral frontier. The series marks an interesting shift in her practice from photomedia to printmaking, and importantly considers her emotional response to returning to Country to walk on her ancestral land. The rusted old horseshoes, fencing wire and discarded drinking mug were all collected by Croft along the Wave Hill track, and contribute to her understanding of Gurindji location, experience and visuality.

In Untitled 2012, Daniel Boyd explores the connection he has to kin and place through his reclamation and appropriation of an archival image. The image is a depiction of Boyd’s Ni-Vanuatu Country, Pentecost Island. Boyd’s great, great paternal grandfather was ‘blackbirded’ from this place and brought to the sugarcane fields in Queensland to work as a slave. The work implicitly becomes a comment on the subjugation of First Nations people, exposing injustices of the past from Boyd’s viewpoint in the present.

This idyllic scene is covered in thousands of raised dots or ‘lenses’ – a reoccurring element in Boyd’s work – that represents our perception. The ominous veil of blackness that surrounds these lenses highlights hidden or incomplete understandings of time, history and memory. Rendered in a reduced palette and devoid of human activity, the work stands in stark contrast to typical depictions of carefree island life.

From the series Returning to places that name us

Photographed close up, the faces of these five Wik Elders are raw and powerful, intense and uncompromising. Their faces reveal the two-decade long struggle they spearheaded for the recognition of their people and the landscape they inhabit. Their portraits speak to lived and shared experience, and their resolute statements of identity and home.

Returning to places that name us was made in response to the landmark 1996 Native Title ruling that the High Court of Australia passed regarding the Wik people from Cape York. The Wik claim was the first case to rule that pastoralists did not have exclusive rights to land and could not extinguish Native Title. Ricky Maynard said in relation to these works: ‘To know the meaning of a culture you must recognise the limits of your own. You can see its facts, but you cannot see its meaning. We share meaning by living it’.

From the series Portrait of a distant land

Ricky Maynard began his Portrait of a distant land series in 2005 in an effort to evidence the complex histories of Aboriginal occupation in Iutruwita (Tasmania). His documentary-style landscape images mark sites of historical and cultural significance to the Ben Lomond and Cape Portland peoples, creating an intimate record of history embedded within the environment.

There is an overwhelming sense of longing and contemplation in these images, as Maynard brings previously silenced histories to life. As a Tasmanian Aboriginal man, he is able to offer an honesty that only an insider can provide. Derived from collective oral histories, these works are very much about people and their Country – what is presented and, most importantly, what is absent.

Maynard created The mission 2005 from historical records that recount the christening of a small Tasmanian Aboriginal boy, following the murder of both his parents in the 1803 Risdon Cove massacre. The work highlights the disparity between written, oral and visual histories, with Maynard challenging the perception of history under a different cultural lens. The Risdon Cove massacre occurred when the rayti (white men – soldiers in this case) murdered men, women and children of the Mumirimina who were out hunting kangaroo. Lieutenant Charles Jeffreys recalled in 1820 that the Mumirimina at Risdon Cove were ‘innocent and well-disposed creatures’ whose ‘tokens of friendship were returned by heavy firing of musquetry from three military detachments which was drawn up for the purpose’.

Maynard’s Death in exile and The healing garden 2005 both document Wybalenna on Flinders Island, one of the most significant historical places in lutruwita (Tasmania). In creating a visual history of his people, Maynard uses each image to reveal distinct, polarising aspects of the human condition: good and bad, life and death. To the Aboriginal people who were removed to Wybalenna in the 19th century, this location was a site of exile, broken promises and death. But as a reflection of their resilience, it is also a location of birth, survival and healing. By presenting two juxtaposing readings of the same landscape, Maynard encourages viewers to consider how we define and tell our histories, along with how we identify with them.

Broken heart 2005 is an intimate image that speaks to the notion of intergenerational trauma. Maynard himself is the lone figure staring out to sea, and his expression reflects the heartbreak Aboriginal people often feel from the awareness of the scars of history that remain in Country. Deeply personal, this hurt is felt for the suffering experienced by previous generations. It took Maynard more than a year of working on the Portrait of a distant land series before he was ready to make this image. In a 2010 essay, Maynard recalled: ‘I’d walked the coast up and down. I don’t live very far from here ... a very special place for all of us, Wybalenna, the big burial ground and place which we hold dear to our hearts. We go back to Country a lot, but I walked all down the coastline for kilometres trying to work out how I could actually portray the way those people would have felt.’

Throughout her painting career, Carlene West has consistently given form to her birthplace of Tjitjiti, the great salt lake in the Southern Desert region. It is Country that she was denied access to for decades, as a direct result of the British atomic weapon testing program undertaken at the Montebello Islands, Maralinga and Emu Field between 1953 and 1963. In the lore of the Spinifex people, Tjitjiti it is a highly sacred location. In the late 1990s, many Spinifex people began to paint evidence of their innate connection to their land to use in their Native Title claim. Working out of Spinifex Arts Project, West contributed to all of the women’s collaborative works that were used in the claim’s preamble, documenting her birthplace.

West’s earlier works of Tjitjiti were more structured, but here the form of the salt lake dominates the canvas, floating on a void of blackness. West uses varying brushstrokes to give the lake a gestural quality, layering the whites and creams against a veil of fine red dotting. With texture and movement, the lake comes alive with memories of ancestral beings, as West demonstrates her enjoyment in the act of mark-making itself.

Peter Mungkuri is a leading painter recognised for his refined palette and distinctive painting technique. His atmospheric works give brilliant form to the different species of punu (trees) found on his Country. He is also particularly noted for his ink drawings on paper.

Ngayuku ngura (my Country) 2018 is a deeply personal reflection that refers to Fregon Creek (Kaltjiti), where Mungkuri was born. It dwells on the experiences he has had with that place over the course of his life and the good memories he has of it. Mungkuri recalls how ‘this Country is my home. I know this land all over, this is strong Country. These things, everything, is my memory – my knowledge.’