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When Indigenous artists collaborated inland from the New South Wales south coast on making an enormous architectural gunyah (or gunya, meaning house or hut, according to Sydney language linguist Jakelin Troy), their initial wish to fell gum trees to make the installation raised “interesting schisms” and a “cultural tussle” about managing Country, says Wiradyuri/Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones.
The gunyah was eventually made of 80 turpentine trees, not gums, harvested from around the Bundanon Art Museum site, says Jones, curator of the new exhibition bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country, who also argues native logging bans are “really strange”.
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In 1954, when the 22-year-old Sydney model Shirley Beiger went on trial for the alleged murder of her live-in lover, hundreds of spectators, many of them women, queued outside Darlinghurst’s courthouse with sandwiches, Thermos flasks and even babies, hoping for a seat.
“They were yelling, ‘God bless you, Shirl,’” says the award-winning theatre maker Sheridan Harbridge. “They were fully behind her and what she’d done.” The playwright and director is speaking while seated by the dock where Beiger stood trial 70 years ago.
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In Telly Tuita’s self-styled “Tongpop”, time and space are circuitous, like the traditional Tongan manulua pattern he often incorporates into his art that shows two birds circling one another.
Dressing as divas and deities in Tongan-style kiekie girdles made of dyed raffia for “performative self-portraits”, Tuita also decorates himself, his paintings and installations with “crazy colours and materials”. These shiny plastics and ribbons represent his fascination with the “maximalist” approach of pop art, he says, that first inspired him to become an artist after he came to Australia 35 years ago.
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