From the beginning of time the First Peoples of Australia1 have lived along the coastlines and inland waterways where the rhythmic waves of water washed along the shoreline carry nourishing and life sustaining food. The cyclical light of sunrise, sunset, the night skies and fire have also lit and guided countless peoples across landscape and waters. Country holds the Ancestors and spirits between realms, with culture embedded in the land, waters and sky.

These life sustaining elements have connected people to their homelands, to their Communities and their culture for millennia. The artistic and cultural expression of Indigenous people have always been evident in the landscape if you know where to look: from rock art and engravings, to carved trees and stone formations. Indigenous artistic expression in all its forms – art, dance, song, and now moving image and writing – conveys and reinforces artists’ identity, which evolves over time through collective experience and individual innovation. It’s this continuity through time, space and place that connects and informs Indigenous people today.

From 1770 onwards, however, these same salty waters also floated in outsiders and catastrophic change, with waves of Aboriginal smoke signals rising along the east coast warning others of their presence. Starting at ground zero, the initial clash between the Gweagal people of the Eora Nation and the British at Kamay/ Botany Bay, was rapidly followed by frontier wars and waves of disease, death and destruction, as colonisation rippled across the continent forcing dispossession and displacement that shattered cultural life.

First Nations art and culture was also collected, stolen, plundered, destroyed, appropriated, and ironically used as identity icons for the newly formed Australia. Despite this, nineteenth century artists like Wurundjeri-balluk artist William Barak (1824-1903) and Kwatkwat Tommy McRae (c.1835-1901) had thankfully documented and drawn ceremonial life from memory and experience, and recorded visions of colonisation in Victoria. Dhurga artist Mickey of Ulladulla (1820- 1891) from New South Wales also documented local flora and fauna and Larrakia artist Billiamook Gapal from the Northern Territory had his drawings of ceremonial dancers and food sources shown in Naarm/Melbourne at the 1888 Intercolonial Exhibition, albeit as ‘primitive art’. This event showed Naarm as one of the earliest cities in Australia to officially feature Aboriginal art. These early artworks continue to provide important counter narratives and invaluable perspectives and reference points for many Aboriginal artists and Communities today.

For the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung, Boon Wurrung and Bunurong peoples of the South-Eastern Kulin Nation of Naarm/Melbourne, their waves of change started before colonial establishment in 1835. Now, other off Country Indigenous artists who live in Naarm have formed new connections to people and place.2 For the nine artists and one collective featured in Between Waves their established and new connections are crucial to their experiences and memories of place. Their works and stories are interlinked through a collective First Nations memory and through acts of reclamation using new technologies and innovative ways of creating and engaging cultural knowledge.

For senior Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung artist Maree Clarke, the reclamation and revival of cultural practice taken and made dormant since colonisation is central to her practice. Known for her visionary life-sized possum skin cloaks, kangaroo tooth necklaces or up-scaled Phragmites australis/river reed necklaces, her innovative culturally informed contemporary practice also includes photography and moving image. Maree’s newly commissioned work explores the microscopic internal and external structures of Phragmites australis. The use of light and coloured dyes to penetrate the thin cross sections of cell walls, exposes the organic structures and unique patterns within, revealing the cellular in between spaces that still hold Country and memory. Her ambitious photographic projections highlight the visible and invisible, and the interrelationship between light, sound and material memory as part of her collaboration with The University of Melbourne Histology Platform. The interrogation of this organic material normally used in traditional necklaces creates a continuity of the old and new combining culture and science that advances her arts practice to new levels.

Worimi artist Dean Cross cleverly juxtaposes memory through the physical representation of photos, letters, objects and paintings he has collected and carried with him since birth. The evocation of emotion, connection and memory through these items tell a very personal story and journey. He asks, ‘are we the sum of all our experiences? Or are we somehow something more?’ Does the collection of things provoke important memories or does it represent identity through life’s physicality and experiences, through archives and stories? Traditionally events and information were told and retold through oral stories and through the memory and meaning of objects over time. Dean, growing up off his Country, re-positions his connection in new places, family and identity through his work.

Aboriginal cultural presence in the landscape is everywhere. For South Australian Narungga artist Brad Darkson his work, featuring a traditional stone fish trap, typically located in a riverbed, waterways or ocean shoreline, is moved into the white cube gallery and digitally represented through interactive photogrammetry software. By encouraging audiences to engage through physical interaction, the work creates movement in the three-dimensional plane. This active engagement temporarily arranges the digital stones before they realign to their original position. By combining tradition with new technology and encouraging active audience engagement, Brad highlights ongoing cultural conservation and restoration practices used by his Community.

Yorta Yorta artist Matthew Harris’s works feature a re-creation of seven large- scale minimalist paintings featuring museum archival shelves. Using ochre, he has painted ‘stacked’ archival boxes on each shelf giving a view of standard museum storage. These shelves reflect the centuries-long museological practice to collect, study and exhibit Indigenous Ancestral Remains, cultural and restricted objects and art. Museums contain many dark secrets and have a problematic history with Indigenous peoples. Matthew aims to interrogate these gate-keeping institutions and to shed a light on this history through his work.

For Jaadwa artist James Howard his sound sculpture installation elicits emotion through the hidden vibration of sound. His audio field recordings, gathered from invisible and visible sites around and under ACCA’s building, amplify the embedded sounds of Country. His asynchronously layered sonic response to deep sounds remind audiences of the eternal earthly presence of Aboriginal culture. Often overlooked, audio works are an important inclusion in the exhibition, challenging the hierarchy of other senses, and privileging their conectedness.

Aboriginal people have been recorded, photographed and filmed extensively by colonist authorities. As an act of reclamation and repositioning, Gunditjmara artist Hayley Millar Baker has created a new video work focussing on internally restrained rage and grief expressed through a singular female protagonist. Titled Entr’acte – referring to an interlude performed between two acts of a play – the work provides a voyeuristic view of the relentless and inequitable emotional, spiritual and mental weight women are forced to carry and contain, often socially restricted from release. Simultaneously light and dark, hidden and revealed, the work exposes the emotional focus, determination, strength and power intensely projected in this intimate portrait.

As a writer and poet, Wiradjuri artist Jazz Money has created an immersive three- channel video work that expands her unused personal archive of writings and ‘lost lines’, presented in unrestrained and arbitrary configurations. The known text is indiscriminately revealed in unknown and infinite arrangements reflecting the random and ever relentless information accessible to humanity and the constant desire for total understanding. In its unpredictable arrangements, the work becomes a poetic ‘exquisite corpse’ as fragments of text are juxtaposed to create an ever changing composition.

Visions and memories of Country are diffused across palawa artist Cassie Sullivan’s large-scale monoprints on clouded acrylic sheets. They are reminiscent of a thick mist that floats across her Country in lutruwita/trouwerner (Tasmania). The works create a maze that audiences navigate, as they view imprints of cloth that Cassie has dragged and pushed with her body over land and water at sites of significance on melukerdee and nuenonne Country. The cloth captures and reflects the physicality and bodily memory of action, also the capturing of Country and the generational memory that accompanies it, enabling the creation of new memories for her.

The blak arts collective this mob have created an exciting interactive digital zine by core members Yorta Yorta/Wurundjeri/Wiradjuri artist Moorina Bonini, Taungurung artist and writer Kate ten Buuren, Gulumerridjin(Larrakia)/Wardaman/Karajarri artist Jenna Lee, Luritja artist Jenna Rain Warwick, and Lardil/Yangkaal emerging writer and curator Maya Hodge. Their new digital commission features an array of creative and cultural works of photography, poetic texts, recorded yarns, mini feature films, interviews, recipes, gardening tips, crossword puzzles, and more. Together, this mob weave conversations, experiences, and memories that unfold through a considered process of deep listening and collective making, to map connections and disconnections with one another, the self, and the world.

Trawlwoolway and Laremairemener artist Mandy Quadrio sublimely uses netted steel and wire mesh fabric to respond to the buried and hidden colonial histories in lutruwita (Tasmania). Her twisted metal forms look like smoke slowly billowing up, much like the warning signals about colonial outsiders. The forms also recall x-rayed landscapes with undulating hills and valleys as the metallic mesh moves and transforms, perhaps hinting at or revealing the hidden histories of her Tebrakunna, Cape Portland homelands. Her steel wire forms aim to undo historic denials and imposed Aboriginal invisibility, with Mandy’s weaving of metal and use of light creating shadows across the installation space – in doing so, she scours away the injustices and weaves Aboriginal perspectives back into the historical narrative of Australia.

For Southeast Indigenous artists living and working on or off Country they continue to tell and reveal personal experiences and collective memories, all importantly from Aboriginal perspectives. Naarm held the earliest showcasing of works by Aboriginal artists and this continues today with the Yalingwa exhibition series at ACCA. For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists who continue to live on Country, and for those who live off Country, the memory of, or desire to, stay connected to culture, Community and Country remains strong. For many living in the Southeast they still tell the stories hidden and known, reclaiming, and repositioning their original versions of history.

The powerful curation and artworks in Between Waves nod to the first waves of incursion between insiders and outsiders along the Southeast of Australia, whilst elevating the artists’ voice and hidden stories. The exhibition showcases and reinforces the dynamic excellence of Southeast Aboriginal art. It shows the ongoing presence of Indigenous people in place, across time and between space. Importantly the exhibition honours the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung word ‘Yalingwa’, shining a light on the times, by bearing witness to truths.

For palawa/pallawah curator Jessica Clark, the third curator in the Yalingwa initiative, she has drawn together these incredible emerging and established artists to present their newly commissioned video, installation, poetry, projection, sculpture, sound, and performance works that respond to identity, site, sight, sound, space and time. Jessica’s multidisciplinary framework for the exhibition also explores the cyclic and sensory rhythms of light, time, and vision. The memory held in each work also adds to the collective memory of place at ACCA. She has proudly repositioned each artist within the context of Naarm/Melbourne, on Wurundjeri Woiwurrung Country, to create alternative narratives and memories that illuminate a better understanding of the multiplicity of First Nations identities in the Southeast.

Between Waves is part of the Yalingwa Visual Arts Initiative, an invaluable curatorial opportunity for outstanding practitioners to present a major exhibition focusing on Southeast Australian First Nations artists within a national context. The initiative also provides an opportunity for a major senior Aboriginal artist living in Victoria to be recognised and celebrated with an Artist Fellowship. Opportunities like these are critical to elevate Indigenous presence and creative and cultural practice in place.

This major exhibition remains an important legacy to those gone before us and those with us now and those yet to come. Between Waves positions artists at the forefront and makes their artworks and stories visible; acting as constant reminders that we always have and always will be here, to let the art speak and shine a light on the times.

1. All words with a strikethrough denote British assigned place names before Federation and the establish- ment of Australia to disrupt their colonial names. See: Matt Chun and James Tylor, The UnMonumental Style Guide, 18 January 2023, unmonumental.substack.com/p/the-unmonumental-style-guide.

2. Off Country describes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who live away from or have never been to their traditional homelands and are not the traditional custodians for the places in which they currently live.