May 2017

Indigenous art triennial: a haunting exhibition of shock, celebration and defiance

Featuring 30 early- to mid-career artists, Defying Empire is a compelling, unsettling rumination on the Indigenous experience

Defiance is a word which characterises Indigenous Australia better than any other.

It’s a defiance of wildly divergent land and seascapes, by vastly different peoples, which have proven fatal for others. And since 1788 it’s a cultural, physical and political defiance of violence, oppression, assimilation and the intent – and attempt – to vanish a people from this continent.

Five factors that will shape the outcome for 'recognise' at Uluru | Paul Daley

Politicians are hoping for a consensus to come from the constitutional recognition conference this week. It’s unlikely to happen – here’s why

Australia’s federal political leadership wants a momentous thing from this week’s big meeting of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates about constitutional “recognition” at Uluru.

Ethical art: how online entrepreneurs are selling Indigenous artists to the world

Indigenous Australian artists are frequently exploited and underpaid: now an ethical online gallery is connecting community art centres with collectors

For many decades now Indigenous Australian art has adorned boardroom and salon walls from Double Bay to New York City and from Berlin to London.

Sovereignty never ceded: how two Indigenous elders changed Canberra's big day

Jimmy Clements and John Noble’s presence at the opening of the provisional parliament house in 1927 was a precursor to a history of Indigenous activism

Two old blackfellas, Jimmy Clements and John Noble, made a big effort to turn up for the opening of the provisional parliament house in Canberra nine decades ago.

But, for 50 or 60 years, many historians seemed to think – despite their very different appearances, the photographs of them together, separately and with their dogs – that Clements and Noble might have been the same old bloke.