Gordon Hookey
A MURRIALITY

These early paintings set in Sydney introduce Gordon Hookey’s use of anthropomorphism and ideas of corruption, brutality, and injustice around Indigenous land rights. The characterisation of police officers as pigs follows the work of leading African American artist and activist Emory Douglas, who used pig illustrations to satirise the US police force. Sydney’s iconic TNT towers also point to a history of the NSW police force monitoring residents in Redfern.

In a 2018 interview, Hookey described his interest in depicting humans as animals: “I was always moved by George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He looked at a farm of animals as a microcosm of humanity. I started symbolising Aboriginal people as native animals, from crocodiles to goannas, kangaroos, and wombats. But then, when I was representing introduced people, they had to be introduced species. So, I started using sheep, cane toads, pigs, camels, and other invasive animals.”

Xanthorrhoea takes over the suburban backyard is Gordon Hookey’s response to the hysteria surrounding the issue of Native Title and the political and media campaigns that ignited widespread paranoia that private landholders were at risk of losing their property to Aboriginal people. The painting depicts the once average quarter-acre plot of land in Sydney surrounded by a white picket fence that Xanthorrhoea shrubs have infiltrated. A native plant to Australia and formally known as black boys or spear grass, it takes the form of literal spears within the surrounding chaos.

Ten point scam is a response to the 1998 Native Title Amendment Bill, commonly referred to as the ‘10 Point Plan’. A ruling made by the High Court of Australia in the 1996 Wik Peoples v Queensland Native Title Case allowed for the coexistence of both Native Title and pastoral lease on Australian land. However, the amended Bill created by the John Howard-led Liberal Government made such coexistence impossible, effectively disabling Native Title claims on pastoral leases and a wide range of other land tenures.

Gordon Hookey responds to the denial of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty with works rebuking the systems of control and structures under which Indigenous people are governed. They include Brick shithouse and King hit ( for Queen and Country), exhibited alongside Ten point scam in the 2000 Adelaide Biennale ‘Beyond the Pale’. Hookey has said of the former painting, “Often to symbolise the way non-Aboriginal people are disconnected from the land, I use bricks in my work. Bricks are land, but it’s land that has been burnt, everything living inside it destroyed, and then that is what’s used to build.”

Aboriginality victorious features the character of Fruit Flee, a diminutive figure of resistance inspired by martial artist-actor Bruce Lee. In a 2017 interview, Gordon Hookey stated: “My work is not only about resistance and protest, but also about empowerment. If I am dealing with a situation where Aboriginal people are subjugated, dehumanised, or treated unjustly, I subvert the scenario, turn it around to make blackfellas strong, powerful, and victorious.”

King hit (for Queen and Country) features a punching bag depicting former Prime Minister John Howard, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and former politician and One Nation co-founder David Oldfield. Each raises their gloves, ready for a fight. For Gordon Hookey, a set of boxing gloves painted with the Aboriginal flag represents “Aboriginality fighting against these things that we see as subjugating or oppressing us as a people.” Written around the bag is the 1946 prose by Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller about the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the personal responsibility of standing against persecution, violence, and injustice.

In a 2012 interview, Hookey stated: “King hit is of a time and place that is still impacting us today and will probably continue to make an impact for generations. It was made around the time that John Howard was Prime Minister of Australia, while Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party was at its peak. Hanson was saying all these racist things against Aboriginal people, against migrants and even attacking workers and single mothers. It was a verbal attack on human rights – I believe that Aboriginal rights are human rights. Howard just stood back and did not react. In retrospect, he used Hanson to gauge how far his right- wing views could be manifested.”

Gordon Hookey’s large-scale tableaus often depict anthropomorphic kangaroos in conflict with introduced species such as cane toads, camels and pigs. For Hookey, these encounters are a powerful visual metaphor that represents “the ugliness of invasive peoples to our lands, country and culture."

In All the natives laughed, Hookey reverses the story of an old blackfella who goes into a pub and has his chair pulled out from under him. In a 2021 interview Hookey explained “I’m trying to show this ugly, horrible, terrible reality in maybe a beautiful or a funny way. Humour for me has been a device to seduce people into the harsh political realities of my people.”

Wreckonin is one of several works Hookey has made in response to the fight for justice following the 2004 Palm Island death in custody. At the time, Mulrunji was the 147th person to die under police watch since the Australian Government released its 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody report. Mulrunji’s death sparked enormous civic unrest in the community, including the burning down of the local police station and courthouse. Imagined here as conceptual payback, Wreckonin depicts a resounding guilty verdict for Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, the officer acquitted of manslaughter in relation to the case.

For Hookey, “Just being a blackfella in this country is political. All I do is look at the world as a blackfella and translate that world visually, be it on a canvas or in a sculpture, installation, or poem; I metaphorically clarify or describe our realities."

In hoogah boogah, Hookey speaks to the commodification of Indigenous creative expression for non-Indigenous audiences and the need to recognise the social and political realities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The phrase appears in several works, including a 2011 drawing which adds further: “THEY WANT OUR SPIRITUALITY BUT NOT OUR POLITICAL REALITY / THE PEDDLERS OF HOOGAH BHOOGAH / THE PERPETRATORS AND PERPETUATORS OF CULTURAL COLONIALISM.”

Hookey’s belief in ethics is a central tenet that runs through all of his work. In his 2021 triptych Ethics, Hookey spells out his hope for society through E (empathy), T (truth), H (honesty), I (integrity), C (compassion), and S (sincerity). Similarly in ethics, c. 2005, honesty, humility, credibility, integrity, and dignity are upheld by the artist as universal values.

For Hookey, art can encourage communities to act on civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights. While visiting for the installation of A MURRIALITY in Eora (Sydney), he remarked: “I’ve been trying to put right, in a small kind of way, the damage done across the world.” The artist here is offering us all a skeleton key for change, showing us possibilities for civic resistance, and ways to feel mobilised and ready to effect change.

Since 2020 Gordon Hookey has made placards and banners which explore the visual histories of protest and his feelings about activism in the present.

For this new body of work, Hookey revisited his forty-year-old poster archive, which he plastered to a wall in his studio. The eight banners on display take inspiration from this personal collection which cover subjects including land rights, refugee advocacy, revolutionary leaders, deaths in custody, health campaigns, and Indigenous excellence in sports, music, art, and theatre.

Conceived with a primary side/scene and a reverse that features an Aboriginal flag/heart or one of his ongoing ‘dot’ and ‘pixel’ paintings, the banners comprise “a punchline first, and then something that happens afterwards.”

Sacred nation, scared nation, indoctrination speaks to the destruction of natural environments by the government of the United States of America in its search for oil and of the Australian government’s complicity in such behaviour. It also expresses more broadly a frustration and anger at the greed for natural resources that exacerbates environmental degradation and climate change.

When it was exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2004, it was subject to intense criticism in the media, with then Victorian Liberal Opposition Arts Spokesman Andrew Olexander calling for its removal. In a 2009 interview, Gordon Hookey stated: “The worst type of censorship is not from the police, the government bureaucrats, the Censorship Board, the church or the community; it comes from within. We won’t censor ourselves.”