Stockmen

Pastoralism was part of the foundational experience of Aboriginal people across Australia during the twentieth century. Fencing, moving cattle and sheep from place to place, maintaining bores, castrating and branding have become a cultural memory of a hard and glorious times. The originality of the Stockmen exhibition lies in showing this legacy not only in paintings of horses, cattle and stockmen, or in verdant landscape paintings of hills and waterholes, but also in dot painting and paintings of traditional weapons. While they do not picture the iconography of stations, they bring to mind fixing windmills, making fenceposts and traversing great tracts of Country wrangling cattle and sheep. The experience of Country for those living on stations was not only in the breaking of horses, fixing windmills and singing the cattle at night. It was also seeing and performing in ceremonies on station camps, visiting ancestral waterholes and traversing stock routes that had been created atop ancient Songlines.

It is with a view to capturing the totality of the pastoral influence upon remote Australia that Stockmen brings a range of visual ideas together, from dot painting to visionary landscapes. It is often said that contemporary art charts ideas of the future, while in this exhibition it is possible to envisage the fullness of the lived experience of a quickly receding past. These artists offer a sense of just how much remote Australia has changed, while grounding these changes in Country that remains ever present and within view. They remind us that pastoralism did not destroy ancestral practices and perceptions but created new ways of embedding them in contemporary life.

Full text by Darren Jorgensen in the catalogue.

Exhibition Catalogue (PDF)