When I first moved to a new house in London, which I’d bought with my Scottish husband, the bottom three metres of the garden had somehow been left off the registered title. I immediately proclaimed it terra nullius—my lifetime of political conditioning trying to reclaim and colonise the coloniser. It was my way of linking my two homes and rejecting the colonial past.
My formal arts education began in a strange place: the Elisabeth Murdoch building at the University of Melbourne where I took an art history elective. Built in 1885 by Joseph Reed, the Gothic architecture reinforced the rigid authority of the colony. Glaringly elitist, it resembled both church and orphanage. It was full of confusing hallways, which remained impossible to navigate. Inside its constructed edifice, middle-aged white men in paisley shirts lectured, with exotic hand gestures, on First Nation artists (when they were spoken of at all). And white women in the faculty asserted a self-righteous paternalism that was far worse.
