Gordon Hookey
A MURRIALITY

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.”