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Mission Boy Dreams Mural reviewed by Dennise Terry

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CREDITS

Wyanga Aboriginal Aged Care Program Inc., 35 Cope Street, Redfern

 Music - Down City Streets - Album - Charcoal Lane by Archie Roach

The Art Gallery of NSW. The Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund for the Home: Aboriginal art from New South Wales digital learning resource. 2013The Gallery respectfully acknowledges the participating artists, their families and communities and appreciates the expert support provided by the artists and their agents. The Gallery thanks the following institutions and organisations for permission to use images of artwork in this education resource: Bidjigal Aboriginal Arts and Crafts, Huskisson; Goondee Aboriginal Keeping Place, Lightning Ridge; Grafton Regional Gallery; Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; Moree Plains Gallery; and Wollongong City Gallery.

The Art Gallery of NSW Interview with Roy Kennedy: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/artboards/home/item/xbt2uk/

 Artist Blak Douglas aka Adam Hill

www.blakdouglas.com.au/portfolio/archiebaldprize

 I acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land on which this artwork is located, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.

I also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country, to Elders both past, present and emerging.

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Reflection

In 1880 one of the earliest Missions erected in NSW was established at Darlington Point, on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, in Waridjuri country. Roy Kennedy’s mural, ‘Mission Boy Dreams’ depicts the homes and structures of this Mission where he was raised, representing his memories of family and community. The mural was painted on the wall of the Wyanga Aboriginal Aged Care building in Redfern in 2006. Dotted with fences, gates, houses, animals and people but foregrounded by the larger figures of a policeman and the Minister. The mural is in a quiet street off the main road but central to an area that has been a gathering place for Aboriginal people for thousands of years. 

Roy’s interview with the NSW Art Gallery when his Mural was photographed and exhibited in 2013, describes the power of the Police and Church over their lives but also his feelings of loss after the Mission was closed. As a place that represented home, despite its restrictions, prohibition on use of language, and strict control over their movement on and off the Mission – this was home and Community. 

Redfern, traditionally belonging to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation has been a meeting place for Aboriginal people for thousands of years. In modern times it saw the first Aboriginal Medical Centre, Legal Centre and Children’s Services in the mid 1970’s; the 1980’s were a time of growing drug and alcohol problems, unemployment, brutal policing and riots; in 1992 Paul Keating made his famous Redfern speech here. Today it remains a meeting place and centre for many Aboriginal creative, political and community groups. Roy figures largely in the Redfern community, an artist that has let his art speak to history and to the present need for a reconciliation of past violence and loss. It is non-political in nature but reveals an emotional sense of loss and need for reparation that has the ability to reach others in a non-confrontational way. He exposes a life of hardship and dispossession that has chosen to be ignored or forgotten but at the same time re-enforcing his right to reclaim his culture and his identity within Australian contemporary society. 

Roy’s artwork continues to influence - Adam Hill’s (aka Blak Douglas) portrait of Roy was a Finalist for the 2018 Archibald Prize. Depicted with Roy’s face starkly contrasted in a modern synthetic product against a backdrop of traditional colours, Adam said, ‘I’ve used a cracked acrylic surface – my trademark – around his face in the ochre colours of the earth. This represents the hardness of a man forged from an ancient past whilst living within a fractured present.’ (https://www.blakdouglas.com.au) Roy similarly etches metal plates which recalls the traditional carving practices of his ancestors. Lines intertwine across the paper to create Kennedy’s distinctive black-and-white vignettes of his childhood. (The Art Gallery of NSW Interview)

Finding Roy’s painted history has clarified for me the links to the past and the present, the old Mission and a modern Redfern, a life of hardship and loss with his present success and influence. The lessons from this Unit are evident in the artwork and his interview of the complex connectedness of Aboriginal identity that weaves the time, ancestors, land, culture and language together.