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In the 1990s, Aunty Sandra Saunders and Aunty Ellen Trevorrow were among the Aboriginal leaders protesting the proposed building of a bridge from the South Australian mainland near Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island—known to Indigenous peoples as Kumarangk—because on this isle, cultural information sacred to Ngarrindjeri women was kept.
“It was unrelenting, like we were under siege,” recalls Aunty Sandra, 78, from her home at Wangary (on Nauo land), where she paints using acrylics and oils on hardboard and Belgian linen. “It didn’t matter which way you turned; we were under fire all the time.”
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The play begins with Simon Burke’s bare arse, facing the audience and bouncing side to side in time with David Bowie’s The Jean Genie. In this new production of a queer Australian classic, the actor is playing 56-year-old elocution teacher Robert O’Brien in stockings and suspenders, rouge on his face, caressing himself before a poster of Mick Jagger.
While teaching, O’Brien wears a fusty green vest and brown suit and tie that blend with his living room furnishings; in private, cigarette in hand, he resembles Norma Desmond in cloth cap and dressing gown.
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Afro-Asian Creole artist Thania Petersen makes evocative sound, smell, textile, photographic and video works with cross-cultural joy and empathy at their heart. For the past five years, she has been working with musicians from the city of Makassar in the Indonesian province of South Sulawesi.
Last September, during her second visit to Makassar, a group of Yolngu Elders and artists from Arnhem Land also flew there to help Petersen make new recordings for her project, in the process strengthening their cultural ties forged by trading with the Makassans long before European colonisation.
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