I still remember Steven Oliver’s (Kuku-Yalanji, Waanyi, Gangalidda, Woppaburra, Bundjalung and Biripireading) reading of his poem ‘Real’1 at the Khuril Dhagun at the State Library of Queensland many years ago. I had previously seen him deliver it online, a performance which had been circulated widely among mob, but to hear him deliver it in person, each line so clearly, was something else.
This poem was a creative re-enactment of a most violent conversation that that so many of us as Blackfullas have been forced to have with colonisers in this place. One which is rarely a conversation, but a contestation about the realness of our Aboriginality. Oliver speaks back to the dispossessing discourse of the supposed ‘half-caste Aborigine’; a construction that is theirs, rather than ours, revealing how the racist designation is fraught with contradictions. Oliver gave expression to something with which some Blackfullas have long endured, but not always with the borne with the same confidence, flair and humour that he had offered. I still remember the final line of ‘Real’ in which Oliver declares,
“And because I have other bloodlines in me, it does not alter my identity”.
Dylan Mooney’s exhibition ‘A story of my people’ also speaks on the matter of identity, but not in Oliver’s way of resisting against racist eugenics of a diluted identity. Mooney’s exhibition forces us to consider both the real and full array of Black identity as Yuwi (Aboriginal), as Torres Strait Islander and South Sea Islander. He reflects that during his career to date, rarely has he had the opportunity be all these things at once, noting that typically he is called to represent these ‘parts’ of himself independently of each other. The requirement to dissect these ancestries represents a similar dispossessing effect that the very history from which his body arrives, has experienced.
In ‘A story of my people’ Mooney delivers to us a history lesson about what Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander peoples have experienced, and through this we come to understand how he really came to be – “still here and thriving”. The embodiment of this Blackness is a distinctly ‘Queensland’ experience, and such bodies in their being tell of the violent history of this place.
Mooney follows in the tradition of other Black artists from so-called Queensland such as Fiona Foley (Butchulla), Vernon Ah Kee (Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr) and Richard Bell (Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang) whose literal bodies and bodies of work speak to the violence of colonialism; but in doing so these also speak to the enduring power and strength of Indigenous peoples, communities, cultures and identities. And it is through such things as sugar, paper and dress that Mooney brings together not only his multiple Black bloodlines, but varying creative techniques and styles to tell stories of a past, a present and a future, all at once.
Mooney, like Oliver, refuses to subscribe to the designated positions in a racial hierarchy demanded by colonisers. ‘A story of my people’ demonstrates that there is a richer ontology to be enjoyed and Mooney follows the voices that affirm his birthright. An impressive narrative indeed and one he should feel justly proud.
It is via his digital works, for which he is most known for, that he speaks to the future that Dr Lilla Watson (Gangalu and Birri Gubba) called on us to imagine, when she insisted that we need to “see our future stretching out as far in front of us as it does behind us”.2 Mooney’s digital works see such a future, which comes from a Blackness that extends beyond his immediate ancestry, but which has been central to his sense of being – here. These words, memorialised in his work, draw inspiration from the phrases heard at Black protests and rallies, words which he says continue to “ring through his head” long after the crowds have moved on. These are the words that have held him, as with so many of us.
Those strong voices in this time, as with those powerful voices of his past, remind him who it is he is accountable to. For when Mooney speaks of ‘my people’ he is not speaking of self in the possessive individualised sense, but of the shared experience of oppression and resistance of Indigenous peoples in a collective sense, from the mainland, to the Torres Strait to the South Pacific.
The story of his people is a story that many of us share, namely, what it means to be Black in this place – as full and real. As Steven Oliver too reminds us:
“A quarter, a sixteenth, an eighth or a half;
Fuck all that shit cause I’m full in my heart,
I’m full and I’m rich thanks to my history
The roots firmly planted in my family tree”
References
- Oliver, Steven (2018) ‘Real’ https://medium.com/poem-of-the-day/steven-oliver-real-7cf04aa1dd75
- Watson, Lilla (2004) ‘Let Us Work Together’ Uniting Church in Australia Assembly. 2004. Available online: https://uniting.church/lilla-watson-let-us-work-together/ (accessed on 4th May, 2022).
