Resistance and Innovation
In City and Bush Studios
Level Two
Installation view of 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, 2025. Photography by Christian Capurro
About the room
This gallery features a selection of works by pioneering city-based artists Trevor Nickolls, Harry J. Wedge, Julie Dowling and Destiny Deacon, who use art as a form of political activism. The movement of these architects of change working in coastal cities gathered momentum during the 1980s, when Koori Art 84 was held in Sydney and Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative was founded in Redfern. The artists from the east coast, who include Robert Campbell Jr from the regional town of Kempsey and history painter Vincent Serico, are connected through similar experiences and by the magnitude of European impact, their ancestors having been dislocated and disempowered by colonising forces a century earlier than in many other regions of Australia. They developed new strategies to create visibility and agency, acknowledging and using raw materials from their specific urban environments.
Complementing these powerful works of innovation and resistance is a selection of paintings by singular Indigenous artists such as Ginger Riley and Billy Benn Perrurle, who use colour and expansive space to conceptualise their ancestral lands and waterways. This gallery also features Segar Passi’s observations of weather patterns on Mer in the Eastern Torres Strait, Sally Gabori’s cultural memories of Dibidibi on Bentinck Island and Danie Mellor’s connections with the Queensland Rainforest.Artist Statement
Naomi Hobson
These photographs represent a true picture of our way of life. They are intimate pictures of river life and my connection to Country. Living on the river is part of our daily existence and defines who we are as people from Coen, how we look and how we live. The river is spiritually important to us. It represents our history. Our people are buried along the river and there are special birthing sites. The river has fed us for thousands of years – we have lain on the sandbanks and looked at the same star constellations as our ancestors. For us – it’s life. This series of photographs tells our river story.
