Goolmary symbolically brings displaced sheilds of Mooney's Yuwi anscestors back to Country.
Goolmary was made during Mooney's artist-in-residency program in which he made a large-scale mural. The series of goolmary (shields) inspired by traditional designs by Yuwi people of the Birri Gubba Nation.
Mooney's research is state, national, and international museum collections has indentified fourteen shields from the Mackay region, reproduced and repositioned in their former Cape Hillsborough landscape. For millennia, the forests of Cape Hillsborough have been a significant site for the initiation rites of young Yuwi men, including shield making from the bark of the kurrajong and corkwood trees. The meeting of cultureal materials with their place of origin helps Mooney's mural speak to the reclamation of Indigneous cultural materials and knowledge. For the artist, the shields' visual presence in this artwork is in contrast to their current physical displacement in far-away museum collecitons, 'still unable to be held and cared for' by their rightful custodians.
