Frontier fluidity — the colours of Danie Mellor’s Country

Thu 20 Mar 2025

On the Queensland colonial frontier, everything was black and white, but nothing was straightforward. ‘marru | the unseen visible’, an exhibition of new works by Ngadjonjii/Mamu artist Danie Mellor shows historical truths — particularly those informed by colonial-era photography — in a new light, approaching history with corresponding visual tropes, and inviting viewers to see inside his Country, near the Atherton Tablelands.

Artist Danie Mellor creates composites that bring together pictorial records, written archives, oral histories and personal imagination, to create compositions of cultural complexity that provoke us to question our assumptions of our historical ‘truths’. Mellor’s works are often fugitive. Richly rendered and realised but defying proscriptive readings, they pull at the loose threads of Queensland’s colonial and Indigenous histories; messy, murky, murderous and magical. Yet in his most recent works, one constant, one single immovable truth has emerged, that is of Country — the land — as witness.

Mellor attempts to maintain a position of neutrality in his works, creating historical tableaux in which figures are presented together in a landscape, but rarely divulging any sense of narrative. Instead, he allows the viewer to narrate the scene in their mind. In doing so, he subtly prompts the viewer to question their own interpretation of the image by asking us how our cultural conditioning and understanding of history, both taught and learnt, has created the story we imagine. Given to us without supporting information, any stories inspired by Mellor’s images, as read by the viewer, are precisely that: stories.

The invention of accessible and accurate photographic processes, following the discovery of the daguerreotype in the 1830s and the rapid popularisation of the medium, including the development of the albumen print and carte-de-visite formats in the 1850s, coincided with the expansion of the Queensland colonial frontier from 1859. Today, a rich and detailed photographic record, taken in the aftermath of the colonial frontier, leaves a rare, unique and lasting pictorial legacy. Mellor’s recent oeuvre has focused almost exclusively on these historical images taken as the waves of the frontier crashed over his Country on the Atherton Tablelands. The mining of these archives allows Mellor to make multiple transhistorical cultural and artistic connections; to history, to ancestors, and to Country.

Interestingly, photography — with its images mechanically captured through light reactive chemical processes — has long been considered a source of truth. However, we now know that most historical photographic images were heavily staged — the subjects chosen, posed, often made-up — and that postproduction interventions were commonly used to highlight different aspects of the resulting image. Even in photography, the hand of the artist is always evident. Photographer Richard Daintree – whose work is often reproduced in Mellor’s paintings – is a key example of this: his depictions of the Queensland frontier were used to advertise the land to white colonists and investors from the south and overseas. The images generally feature picturesque landscapes ripe for European settlement, and heroic white pioneers at work, largely excluding any images of Aboriginal people — or the South Sea Islander, South Asian, Chinese and other non-white peoples who shared that physical and historical space — and their labour. Daintree’s body of work is a prime example of the photographic archive being as flawed as any other subjective body of knowledge involved in building a grand historical narrative. Yet the truths of the lives of the people who are pictured remain. And it’s in this juncture between historical truth and fiction that Mellor’s works often live. On the Queensland colonial frontier, everything was black and white, but nothing was straightforward.

The end of certainty 2020

On the edge of darkness (the sun also sets) 2020

Wierdi/Birri-Gubba independent curator Bruce Johnson McLean MAICD is a First Nations art and culture specialist. This text is adapted from an essay first published in QAGOMA’s Members’ magazine, Artlines

Collection Online: Delve deeper into the exhibition artworks.

Danie Mellor: marru | the unseen visible
15 March – 3 August 2025
Queensland Art Gallery
Brisbane, Australia
Free entry