Visual Art
In the Melbourne exhibition Revisions, more than 60 Warlpiri artists remake photographs and archival records to question colonial histories. By Michael Winkler.
Revisions exhibition brings Warlpiri narrative to the fore
The colonial war has never ended, and one of the frontlines runs through Yuendumu. The high-profile deaths of Kumanjayi Walker and Kumanjayi White are recent instances of the dispossession and disharmony that continue to afflict the Northern Territory community.
Standing against this damage is Warlukurlangu Art Centre, a site of Warlpiri culture and creativity in Yuendumu. More than 60 artists from Yuendumu and Nyirripi collaborated with British photographer Patrick Waterhouse to create Revisions, an exhibition both accessible and political. This is the first time an Australian gallery has hung the full show, previously displayed in European locations including Antwerp, Amsterdam, Cologne and Whitby, the port from which James Cook departed aboard the Endeavour in 1768.
The central idea of the work is simple: Waterhouse provided his own photographs and archival materials such as maps and textbook illustrations, and Warlpiri artists amended them by overlaying acrylic paint.
The work is shown across three rooms at Burrinja Gallery, in Upwey, in outer-east Melbourne. One screens the 13-minute documentary The True Story, a primer on the project and its aims. The video uses two rectangular frames side by side, mirroring the contrasts between Warlpiri and non-Indigenous ways of seeing.
Otto Jungarrayi Sims, former chairman of Warlukurlangu Artists, says in the video, “When the First Fleet arrived … they believed they had discovered us. [The Union Jack] is what they pierced in the ground as their symbol of power and domination.” Three large flags are displayed, two red ensigns and one Union Jack. The stand-out is an ensign “revised” by Margaret Nangala Gallagher, everything except the telltale edges overpainted with earth and sky tones, the colonial artefact writhing with new colour and coded symbolism.
The simplest works are some of the most effective. In the Restricted series, Waterhouse’s black-and-white photos of Warlpiri are altered by the subject or a close relative dotting over the figure with bright acrylic. It is a straightforward intervention that creates startling visual impact and renders the image multivalent: Warlpiri simultaneously in and out of the photo, both the subject and the co-author of the image; individual de-identification speaking to the precedence that collective connection with Country holds over personal particularities.
Another series of works, Revised, takes a similar approach to lithographs (most notably John Gould’s drawings) and photographs of native and introduced fauna. The inclusion of farm animals speaks to the tension between Country indivisible from Jukurrpa versus land as exploitable resource.
Shrewd use is made of pages from the 1958 Australian Children’s Pictorial Social Studies series. But This Land Is Ours. They Know That, a comic-style page revised by Christine Napanangka Michaels, looks at first glance like a Roy Lichtenstein for a new country and a new millennium, but it dares the viewer to think about the past 60 millennia or more. Look. It Belongs To England, Now is a revision by Magda Nakamarra Curtis, wild and unbowed, conjuring Marie Geissler’s notion of postcolonial art reimagining “a carnivalesque upside-down world”.
In contrast with these thrumming images, some interventions are so subtle that the viewer needs to stand close to understand the transformation. Athena Nagala Granites’ ethereal dotting over a photo of a Cook statue and an astronomical chart is as light as insect footfalls. There is an echo of early Papunya Tula work, when dots were used to camouflage symbols relating to privileged knowledge. The inversion here is that, rather than hiding sanctified meanings, the dots call attention to the primacy of Indigenous lore.
It also sparks off the work of ethnologists Francis Gillen and Baldwin Spencer, whose photographs of Warlpiri and other groups around Alice Springs were published in Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899).
“In many ways, [Gillen and Spencer] were the liberals of their time,” says Waterhouse. “They reached outside of their culture and actually looked to understand people. But, looking back now, their work is deeply problematic. It opens up a whole series of issues around the power dynamic in photography – the person taking the photograph, and the person in the lens.”
Waterhouse has explored these difficult issues throughout his career. He first visited to photograph Central Australia more than a decade ago. Before that, he spent six years documenting the infamous Ponte City tower in Johannesburg, working collaboratively with residents.
The last large idea explored in the exhibition involves maps and satellite images. An aerial photo of Nyirripi has been reworked by artists from that community, the lines and iconography a reminder that borders, denotations and demarcations existed long before Europeans charted the land. It chimes with Geordie Williamson’s recognition that Alexis Wright’s novels “dramatize the tensions that flow when duelling political frameworks coexist in a single geographic domain”.
The colonial archive is rich material for contemporary First Nations art. Examples include Archie Moore’s Venice Biennale triumph, kith and kin, Warraba Weatherall’s Dirge, a music box playing sounds based on translation of racist historical documents into braille, Megan Cope’s repurposing of military maps, much of Brook Andrew’s cerebral output, and the Potter Museum’s Scientific Racism room in the exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art. Other First Nations artists create meaning through ablating and adorning historical artefacts, such as Christopher Pease’s radical reconfiguration of 19th century landscapes, Ryan Presley’s wry banknotes and Helen Tiernan’s reworking of colonial wallpaper.
Most of these artists are based near the continent’s edge, while this show explores similar ideas from a Central Desert standpoint. Of course, no idea is completely new – overlaying contemporary maps with traditional knowledge has also been explored extensively by Kim Mahood and Warlpiri artists further west at Tanami Downs.
Waterhouse contracting artists connects further to the legacy of Spencer, who in 1912 commissioned Kakadu people of Western Arnhem Land to create paintings on bark, replicating the iconography traditionally painted on rock shelters. He paid the artists in sticks of tobacco. Issues around postcolonial commodification rumble beneath Revisions.
A didactic at Burrinja tells of Jacob Jungarrayi Spencer trying to paint arrows on a photo to depict the direction in which snake dreaming journeys through Country. Realising the arrows looked like the emu track totem, he asked Waterhouse to paint over it, because “we can’t paint another person’s Jukurrpa or the designs for another person’s country”.
Waterhouse observed “an arrow going in one direction representing an emu foot that’s going in another seemed like a good analogy – what to a Western eye is pointing in one direction may mean the opposite from an Aboriginal perspective”. These revelations can emerge through overlapping and two-way approaches, bringing the Warlpiri narrative to the fore. This is an important show, overdue for exhibition in a country where sovereignty has not been ceded.
Revisions is showing at the Burrinja Gallery, Upwey, until March 1.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 8, 2025 as "The corrections".
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