Destiny Deacon: Collecting Australia

Mon 8 Jul 2019

As a poet, Ellen Van Neerven loves the challenge of responding to artworks, meeting them with her own craft. This poem inspired by Destiny Deacon’s Portrait – Eva Johnson, writer is from a series titled ‘Collecting Australia’, and includes poems created for the works of D Harding and Judy Watson.

In celebration of NAIDOC Week, we invited award-winning author and Mununjali woman Ellen Van Neerven to develop a series of written responses which draw inspiration from works featured in our Australian Collection.

This is the second in a three blog series, combining Van Neerven’s poetry with works within the QAGOMA Collection.

Collecting Australia

I deliberately chose artworks from Queensland artists to respond to, because this is where I’m from. I wrote ‘Portrait of Destiny’ because Destiny Deacon is always highlighting our people through portraiture and I wanted to flip this around and highlight her and how strong she is, contributing to this very Indigenous way of honouring each other and those who have come before us.

Deacon’s Portrait – Eva Johnson, writer is about the poet, actor, director and playwright who was born in Daly River, Northern Territory of Australia. Eva Johnson began writing in 1979; her first play was titled When I Die You’ll All Stop Laughing. Her writing spoke about Aboriginal Australian women’s rights, the stolen generation, land rights, slavery, sexism and homophobia.

This series reflects on what it means to ‘collect’ Australia, and how the tension between the Eu-Grip and Dhagan (Aboriginal land) manifests. I hope my words on this art in turn inspire future art and/ or creations/ imaginings.

Destiny Deacon ‘Portrait – Eva Johnson, writer’ 1994

Portrait of Destiny

I don’t live as an artist.

Destiny Deacon, 2018.

multi-dimensional magick K’ua K’ua Erub/Mer woman

funny sharp strong communal

history politics radio performance

photography video installation

Thanks, Sis, for dropping the ‘c’ for us urban blaks

You gave us way to break free of the whitefellas expectations

define our identity on our own terms

Thanks for taking the white people’s invention

putting your blak eye behind the lens publishing protecting

the humanity of us women us men us children

You know I also feel when I’m sitting on the couch

I am always feeling too much

storytelling sometimes is the only way out

you gave those dolls a home!

Brunswick Sista wherever you go living room Island

darkroom gallery classroom kitchen lecture hall

you fly tid you fly

Ellen van Neerven (Meanjin, July 2019)

Destiny Deacon

The politics of representation and their implications for Indigenous people are at the core of Destiny Deacon’s artistic practice, which is largely photography, but also film and installation. Her works combine wit and anger to subvert ethnographic misconceptions about Aboriginal people. Deacon’s low-tech, snap- shot type images humorously redress stereotypical Anglo-European portrayals of Indigenous peoples and seek to confront viewers with unacknowledged prejudices and anxieties. In doing so, she takes control of how Aboriginal peoples are represented.

The image Portrait – Eva Johnson, writer 1994 is appropriated from J M Crossland’s painting Namultera, a young cricketer of the Native’s Training Institution, Poonindie 1854, in the collection of the National Library of Australia. Deacon had seen the work on loan at the National Gallery of Australia and later improvised with her friends Eva Johnson to pose, with the assistance of Virginia Fraser, artist, writer, editor and curator, to stage the image. In Deacon’s version however, the subject’s cricket bat has been replaced by an axe.

The subject, Eva Johnson (b.1946) is an Aboriginal Australian poet, actor, director and playwright, and was named Aboriginal Artist of the Year in 1985, and in 1993 received the inaugural Red Ochre Award from the Australia Council for the Arts for lifetime achievement.

JM Crossland ‘Namultera’ 1854

The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islander peoples, and Elders past and present. In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge the immense creative contribution First Australians, as the first visual artists and storytellers, make to the art and culture of this country.