William Rowell, Explorers, Sturt, Murray River, Incident in Swanston Street, City Gallery
Summary
In 2012, as part of the Indigenous Festival, this painting was a central element of an exhibition at the City Gallery curated by Paola Balla. Its title, ‘Incident in Swanston Street’, riffed off the title of this painting.
‘After the loss of land rights, cultural practices and destruction of language use, the last bastion of a people’s colonisation lies in romanticised depictions and ideas about them and the control of their very identities and how they are presented.
Indigenous people have been depicted, dissected, examined and debated about since the arrival of the First Fleet. In 2010, nine Aboriginal people successfully sued a tabloid journalist for vilification and labelling them “political Aborigines” and only identifying as Aboriginal for profit and gain.
The Rowell painting of the Sturt expedition in which he “discovers” the Murray River, already a river charted by the thousands of Aboriginal owners over thousands of generations, seemingly places the artist as voyeur, standing back amongst the gum trees observing this incident of which Sturt documented in his journal as having “full control of .”
It ultimately depicts a white man taking control of one of Australia’s most significant water ways and sources of life and nourishment for all Murray River and surrounding communities and brings us to a point in time of exchange, negotiation and sad final resignation that the colonisation of land and water would be complete and final.
Within the story though, despite the bowed head of the Chief, are men on the other bank, in resistance, standing in wait with their spears. These people are our forebears asking us to remain vigilant, to remember who we are and daring us to respond.’
Paola Balla (Wemba Wemba and Gunditjamara)
