How can notions of home, community, and Country be represented within histories of both endurance and dislocation?
In March 2022, Brenda L. Croft gave a talk as part of The First Nations Speaker Series presented in collaboration with GML Heritage and the Research Centre for Deep History.
Brenda presented a Gurindji-specific historiography that engaged with the pastoral impact on Gurindji Country from the late nineteenth century, the experience of Stolen Generations members and their descendants, and contemporary Gurindji experience into the 21st century. These are themes represented at ‘Still in my mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality’, a national touring exhibition Brenda has collaboratively curated with Gurindji family and community members, reflecting on events preceding and following the 1966 Walk-Off at Wave Hill Station that sparked the national land rights movement.
This work presents an enduring, collaborative practice–led research journey representing a distinct Australian First Nations Storying/Storywork and First Nations Performative Autoethnography as subalter/N/ative archive and methodology – created from the rememorying, re/imagined standpoint of a Gurindji | Malngin | Mudburra | Anglo-Australian | Chinese | German | Irish woman.
Catch up on Brenda’s presentation in the video below.
About Brenda L Croft
Professor Brenda L Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra Peoples from the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and Anglo-Australian/ Chinese/German/Irish heritage. She has been involved in the Australian First Nations and broader contemporary arts and cultural sectors as a multi-disciplinary creative practitioner since the mid-1980s as an artist, consultant, curator, educator and researcher. She has received numerous regional, national and international awards, fellowships and residencies throughout her professional practice, and is extensively published nationally and internationally.
*Kurrwa (stone tool/axe head); to listen to Gurindji pronunciation, click on link, then letter, then scroll down to the word and click on speaker icon, http://ausil.org/Dictionary/Gurindji/lexicon/index.htm; see also p. 37, https://www.cdu.edu.au/sites/default/files/artcollection–gallery/docs/simm–teachers–notes.pdf. NB – all Gurindji language words in this exegesis are from this source.
**Kartak (container, cup, billycan, pannikin), ibid; see also p. 38, https://www.cdu.edu.au/sites/default/files/artcollection–gallery/docs/simm–teachers–notes.pdf.