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In 1789, Woollarawarre Bennelong was famously kidnapped and shackled in leg irons under the orders of the New South Wales Governor Arthur Phillip, who had been tasked by the British Government to begin a dialogue with the “natives”.
The colonists prized this Wangal man as a potential negotiator for the Eora (sometimes written as Yiyura), the Dharug language name for his wider community. Bennelong became fascinated by his captors and even agreed to go to England if a younger Wangal kinsman, Yemmerrawanne, went with him. The two Indigenous men set sail from Sydney with Phillip in December 1792, arriving in London the following May.
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Picture this: the British viola virtuoso Lawrence Power portraying a classic sea mariner, breathing life into the late 18th-century verse of English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge with his 416-year-old Amati instrument as his storytelling companion.
Such was the scene in Paris in January when Power, 49, gave the French premiere of the Viola Concerto composed by his friend Garth Knox at the Société Française de l’Alto’s 50th International Viola Congress. The performance took place a few weeks after Power gave the world premiere of this same rollicking piece for viola and strings – co-commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra – in Bern, Switzerland.
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As a child growing up in Meanjin/Brisbane in the 80s and 90s, Gurrumbilbarra/Townsville-born Tony Albert would scour op shops to buy Indigenous memorabilia: ashtrays, plates, cups and saucers with Aboriginal faces and motifs and storybooks such as author Brownie Downing’s tales of “piccaninny” child Tinka.
In his childhood innocence, these treasures helped him understand his own identity. “There was a genuine love for this iconography,” he recalls now, at 45, his red beard tinged with grey on this hot late summer’s day in his spacious work studio in the same city, his large illustrations of aliens flying about in spaceships on the wall behind him.
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