From Palestine to Country: transcultural exchange beyond the settler-colony

In 1967, my grandfather had been displaced for nineteen years and an Australian citizen for eleven of those. It was a(nother) painful year to be a Palestinian: the so‑called six‑day‑war adding Naksa (setback) to Nakba (catastrophe). It was also the year my Pa was brought into acute confrontation with the Australian state, having acquired the right, and indeed obligation, to vote in the referendum to change the constitutional exclusion of First Nations peoples. But if Pa had to vote through the state, his views were less concerned with its violent intercession than with the experience of people oppressed by it. Apparently, Pa made one definitive pronouncement on that ballot: ‘I see how it is here, it’s the same as for us; the owners of this place are not wanted and they are not welcome in their own land’.

More from this Issue

Editorial: Artlink_Indigenous 2022

Tristen Harwood

The Tennant Creek Brio: Taking care of business

In the rapidly expanding literature on the Tennant Creek Brio, writers have touched upon a decidedly ‘masculine’ quality in the group’s work. John McDonald calls the Brio’s work ‘incredibly aggressive’ and ‘raw’ and ‘wild.’ Erica Izett, the Brio’s regular curator and greatest advocate, refers to their work as a form of insurgent ‘guerrilla theatre.’ These masculinist tendencies should be of little surprise. The Brio started in 2016 as an art therapy group as part of Strong Men, Strong Families through funding from the Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation facilitated by painter Rupert Betheras. It grew to have about twenty men involved before moving to the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre in 2017, where it was declared an artist collective.

Lévi McLean and Paris Lettau