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An ink drawing in Sydney’s short-lived Daily Guardian newspaper in 1927 depicts the moment in 1770 when Captain James Cook and his crew – ‘the first white men to set foot on this coast’ – encountered two Aboriginal men with spears at the ready. What happened next? This full-page advertisement for Tooth’s KB Lager asserts that the ‘weaving of a history’ is a ‘peaceful progress’.
Journalism and advertising, like art, can, of course, tell lies. This tear sheet is surrounded on a wall by a selection of ‘Aboriginalia’ collected over decades by the Townsville-born Girramay, Yidinji, and Kuku Yalanji artist Tony Albert: kitsch art, boomerangs, ashtrays, and home bric-a-brac sourced largely in op shops but originally pumped out for tourists, caricaturising Indigenous people while simultaneously erasing the specificity of their cultures.
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In 1789, Woollarawarre Bennelong was famously kidnapped and shackled in leg irons under the orders of the New South Wales Governor Arthur Phillip, who had been tasked by the British Government to begin a dialogue with the “natives”.
The colonists prized this Wangal man as a potential negotiator for the Eora (sometimes written as Yiyura), the Dharug language name for his wider community. Bennelong became fascinated by his captors and even agreed to go to England if a younger Wangal kinsman, Yemmerrawanne, went with him. The two Indigenous men set sail from Sydney with Phillip in December 1792, arriving in London the following May.
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Picture this: the British viola virtuoso Lawrence Power portraying a classic sea mariner, breathing life into the late 18th-century verse of English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his 416-year-old Amati instrument as his storytelling companion.
Such was the scene in Paris in January when Power, 49, gave the French premiere of the Viola Concerto composed by his friend Garth Knox at the Société Française de l’Alto’s 50th International Viola Congress. The performance took place a few weeks after Power gave the world premiere of this same rollicking piece for viola and strings – co-commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra – in Bern, Switzerland.
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