Conversations
This is a pull quote, Photographs serve as traces of an event or person. They are the tangible manifestation of memory, whether based on the lived experience of the beholder, or a reminder of loved ones who have passed on.
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[1] Paola Balla, Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: The Ways that First Nations Women in Art and Community Speak blak to the Colony and Patriarchy, exhibition catalogue, Footscray Community Arts Centre, December 2019, 7.[2] Balla, Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius, 2.[3] Ibid, 19.[4] Ibid, 3.[5] Paola Balla, email message to author, January 22, 2020. The artist refers to a seminal text by Jiman and Bundjalung woman and academic Professor Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: The transgenerational effects of trauma in Indigenous Australia (North Melbourne: Spinifex Press Pty Ltd, 2002). Atkinson posits that if Country is sick and traumatised, then so are First Nations peoples. According to Atkinson (2002, 24), the "physical, structural and psycho-social violence of colonisation’ causes lasting trauma which, ‘if unhealed, may compound, becoming cumulative."[6] Balla, Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius, 3.[7] Paola Balla, email message to author, January 22, 2020.[8] The story of Mok Mok can be found in Aunty Margaret Liliarda Tucker’s autobiography, If Everyone Cared (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977).[9] Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000), xxiii.[10] Paola Balla, email message to author, January 22, 2020.
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