Presenting Maralinga: How are artists addressing our nuclear history?

Mumu Mike Williams’s protest paintings, which confront Australia’s devastating history of British nuclear testing at Maralinga and Emu Field from 1953 to 1963, provide impetus for a broader conversation. How and why do visual artists, playwrights, filmmakers and choreographers keep returning to this history and its lasting impact on Aboriginal people and the land?

Torika Bolatagici’s interdisciplinary practice investigates the relationship between visual culture, human ecology, postcolonial counter-narrative and visual historiography of the Black Pacific.  Bolatagici is interested in exploring the tensions and intersections between gender, embodied knowledge, commodification, migration and globalisation. 

Jessie Boylan is a photomedia artist who explores issues relating to human impacts on the land and communities in relation to environmental and social devastation: nuclear testing, mining and war. Boylan’s work investigates ideas of history and place in relation to contemporary Australian identity, community and activism.

Judy Watson is a visual artist currently in the Black Mist Burnt Country exhibition touring nationally, which explores nuclear testing and Australian art. Her work takes its inspiration from the land and traditions of the Waanyi culture. Watson distils her distinctive stained canvases into powerful poetic abstractions. The artist has written about her experiences in France during the nuclear tests in the Pacific and created a corresponding body of work as part of her 1995 Moët & Chandon residency.

Dr Diana Young is the Director of the UQ Anthropology Museum. Her research interests include material and visual culture and more specifically Australian Indigenous material culture including local art histories, cultural heritage and cultural brokerage.

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