the last place we looked for her by Ali Gumillya Baker & NATIVE RAGE by Dominic Guerrera.

Colonial Lies / Blak Truths

Ali Gumillya Baker is a powerful woman.

Her work stretches across multiple practices including film, academia, photography, performance art, installation, poetry, and sculptural work. A Mirning woman, or as we like to say, West Coast wena. She comes from country that is mostly flat, broad land that stretches past the horizon. There is a special connection with space and falling stars. She comes from a strong politically active family—staunch mob. She has created a strong family in return, giving birth to three children, yet nurtures so many of us.

Ali’s work is bold, historical, and critical of the colonial destruction and violence towards Aboriginal people and culture. It’s educational, but more importantly, truth-telling—Ali has faith in her audience that some hope of learning, change, or transformation can take place. Her grace is also a lesson in how to educate.

Ali has had many installations of the racist text stacks—long, almost demure-looking stacks of books, that often stretch from the ground and climb several feet tall. The stacks are made up of texts that Ali (and, for the most part, the Aboriginal community) has deemed racist material. These books contain old, outdated, and deliberately harmful representations of Aboriginal peoples. They often box us into outdated stereotypes, like the roaming nomad, or they completely create sickening romanticised love stories set on the frontier of colonisation.

The stacks showcase the extensive efforts the colony of Australia has gone to in order to create a racist ideological narrative of us as Aboriginal people—to frame us as savages and uncivilised. But most importantly, they have created this to control the narrative itself. This gives them the power to write and create their own colonial dreamscapes of the peaceful settlement, or even worse, the saviours of Aboriginal peoples.

The stacks are a towering presence and are unavoidable for people standing before them—there is no escaping the mountains of lies that have been stacked up against Aboriginal people since colonisation.

Now, for the first time, Baker expands her work and extends the space to include a counter-narrative: the Aboriginal narrative. Continuing on her educational pathway, Ali invites audiences to sit, pick up some Blak words, and read our truth—to read the truth! We have always been writing and speaking our own narrative; it’s just that colonisers haven’t been listening or reading. Regardless of how confronting the truth is, how hard the undoing of colonial lies may be, it is still your responsibility to do the work.

Dominic Guerrera

Nicole Clift is a visual artist and writer. Nicole’s painting and weaving practice engages with ancient and contemporary natural philosophy to speculate on intangible planetary phenomena.