Frontier Wars between Indigenous people and settlers the focus of Wyndham Art Gallery exhibition.
Dylan Rainforth. The Sydney Morning Herald. July 7, 2015.
National awareness of the Frontier Wars is gradually building and, along with it, recognition that's what the colonisation of Australia amounted to: an ongoing military engagement in which Indigenous people fought against settlers and soldiers.
War, at Wyndham Art Gallery, represents the first Victorian exhibition to include artworks addressing the Frontier Wars alongside others about the two major world wars.
It includes works by a number of prominent Aboriginal artists, including Megan Cope, (who this week won the Western Australian Indigenous Art Award).
Working in painting to decolonise geological maps, Cope turns her attention here to the little-known Indigenous history of the Ballarat gold rush.
Other artists include Fiona Foley (pictured is an image from her Bearing Witnessseries) and Bindi Cole. The exhibition, curated by Maree Clarke and Megan Evans, also looks to conflicts left in the wake of the colonisation of Africa, including artists with links to Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia.