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Pamela Rabe emerges from theatre rehearsals where she is playing a strict Catholic nun, the actor seeking divine order from a grey late afternoon on the wharf above Sydney’s Walsh Bay. “Do we walk – in the rain?” she asks crisply.
The clouds yield and the rain loses its nerve as the tall, formidable Rabe steps onto the steel balcony to pose with laser focus on the camera lens. Canadian-born Rabe first sought early career traction in Sydney in the late 1980s and early 90s to distinguish herself from her Melbourne acting milieu, where she was revered as an “actress with a capital A”, of whom a critic remarked, “makes strong [people] swallow hard and lesser mortals involuntarily bow”.
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An ink drawing in Sydney’s short-lived Daily Guardian newspaper in 1927 depicts the moment in 1770 when Captain James Cook and his crew – ‘the first white men to set foot on this coast’ – encountered two Aboriginal men with spears at the ready. What happened next? This full-page advertisement for Tooth’s KB Lager asserts that the ‘weaving of a history’ is a ‘peaceful progress’.
Journalism and advertising, like art, can, of course, tell lies. This tear sheet is surrounded on a wall by a selection of ‘Aboriginalia’ collected over decades by the Townsville-born Girramay, Yidinji, and Kuku Yalanji artist Tony Albert: kitsch art, boomerangs, ashtrays, and home bric-a-brac sourced largely in op shops but originally pumped out for tourists, caricaturising Indigenous people while simultaneously erasing the specificity of their cultures.
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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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