This was published 7 years ago
Sydney Festival: Artist Vernon Ah Kee says he had 'no status' when he was born
By Elissa Blake
Gaze into the eyes of one of Vernon Ah Kee's portraits of his family members and you can see the range of human emotion: tenderness, anger, curiosity, sorrow and surprise. These huge charcoal drawings are full of life.
But they are also the faces of Aboriginal people who were considered "not fully human," says Ah Kee. They are the faces of people who didn't count.
"So I'm not talking about history here. I'm talking about my own life": Vernon Ah Kee with Sydney Festival Director Wesley Enoch.Credit: James Brickwood
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum in Australia, which recognised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as people and included them in the census. Ah Kee turns 50 this month. When he was born in January 1967 in Innisfail, in northern Queensland, he was not considered an Australian citizen. He was a "non-person."
"I had no status when I was born," he says. "None at all. My skin is too dark to be considered a white person. My status was non-person. It would have been possible for a policemen to shoot me dead and there would have been no repercussions for him whatsoever. So I'm not talking about history here. I'm talking about my own life."
Self portrait by Vernon AH Kee.
Ah Kee, a Brisbane-based conceptual artist, is in Sydney to unveil the largest solo exhibition of his art works shown to date. Not an Animal or a Plant includes large-scale drawings, text-based works, paintings and custom-made surfboards. Some images are confronting: violent deaths and "disgraceful" graffiti found on toilet doors.
Pointing at large charcoal portraits of his grandfather and great-grandfather, Ah Kee says he worked from photographs in the archives of anthropologist Norman Tindale, who took images of Aboriginal people in the 1930s as scientific subjects.
"They were photographed because they were seen as a dying species," Ah Kee says. "I wanted to humanise them. My grandfather was one of my heroes growing up and I wanted to monumentalise him. I wanted to make him big, as big as I thought he was."
Ah Kee went on to draw his cousins, uncles, grandparents and great-grandparents in a series now on loan from the MCA Collection. "In these drawings there is a gaze consistent in not just my family but in all Aboriginal families. It is a gaze of persistence and endurance and determination and survival, and also a gaze of intelligence and empathy and all of the emotions that anyone working in portraiture would want to achieve in a portrait. But Aboriginal people are prescribed such narrow parameters."
He says those narrow parameters apply to himself as an artist, too. "I've had to barrage audiences into accepting that I'm Aboriginal, in terms of what I make. People expect Aboriginal art to be benign and decorative. Aboriginal art would have you believe that we exist in a utopian world where we are happy to sit on the ground and paint. That's how crazy Aboriginal art is ... like, crazy. Not left of centre. Just crazy.
"My work is Aboriginal art. It describes the life and history of Aboriginal people in this country. It describes the life of Aboriginal people in contemporary and modern terms. We are not Stone Age people."
Fifty years on from the referendum, Ah Kee believes many Australians still don't consider Aboriginal people "fully human".
"We are going backwards as a country, especially in the last 15 years with Palm Island, the Cronulla riots, the re-election of Pauline Hanson, the intervention policies in northern communities, and the latest developments with asylum seeker policies. Anyone can see we are moving backwards. Quite a bit. Australia is no shining star in the human rights arena."
Not an Animal or a Plant is at the National Art School as part of Sydney Festival.