My heart

The 1962 Hollywood epic Mutiny on the Bounty is a vivid reflection of the crisis of masculinity that existed in its era. Although marketed as a historical retelling of the 1789 mutiny on the HMS Bounty, Lewis Milestone’s directorial vision imbues the dramatic narrative with an unmistakably camp tone. Marlon Brando’s theatrical portrayal of Fletcher Christian amplifies the film’s imperialist undertones, presenting Tahitian women as exoticised commodities – infantilised and disoriented under the gaze of empire.

Ironically, or perhaps tellingly, Brando’s character meets his end in the arms of Maimiti, his Tahitian lover. The film’s technicolour spectacle further romanticises this dynamic, recycling tropes of Indigenous dependence on empire, underscored by an eroticised mood that ties the ‘naughty-nautical’ adventure together.

It is fitting, then, that scenes from the film appear in Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg’s 2010 montage Other. The filmic collage splices together imagery from television and cinema to examine the intersection of sexual desire and threat between First Peoples and colonial powers. Through this lens, the fantasy of Indigenous exoticism is exposed as a reflection of the imperialist mindset, rather than as any inherent truth. If not legitimised by the ranks of Hollywood cinema, who decides who is sexy? Who decides who is beautiful?

Gary Lee has been asking these questions for some time now. Born in 1952, Lee is a Larrakia man whose photographic work celebrates the beauty of his subjects – individuals who have historically been confined to narratives of ethnographic significance through archives, both visual and written, often at the expense of their broader humanity. Through his portraiture, Lee imbues his subjects with an incantatory charm. Ethnographic portraiture, in particular, references the history of a visual culture that positions Indigeneity as ‘other’.¹Jane Lydon, ‘“Behold the tears”: Photography as colonial witness’, History of Photography, vol. 34, no. 3, 2010, p. 240. This abject visuality continues to pervade contemporary consciousness, as these historical images transcend their original context to shape enduring perceptions of First Nations peoples. The implicit authority of the photograph – as a supposedly neutral witness – relentlessly constructs colonial mythologies which, in the Australian context, have perpetuated racial narratives of Indigenous inferiority.

With a background in anthropology and experience working in the fields of sexual and community health, Lee situates his practice within a framework of social consciousness. In 1993 he wrote a play titled Keep Him My Heart: A Larrakia-Filipino Love Story. ‘Keep him my heart’ is an Aboriginal English phrase that describes keeping love alive from afar. Through his photographic series exploring the beauty of the other, Larrakia strength and the resonance of historical injustices, Lee has made an immense contribution to Australia’s art history, offering both academic and aesthetic insights that, in most cases, pre-empt trends in art theory and curating.

A recent work from 2023, Lee’s Self-portrait as Paul Foelsche functions almost like a guardian – a protector – over his archival work. Paul Foelsche (1831–1914) was a German-Australian photographer who practised between the Northern Territory and South Australia. As the first police superintendent of the rapidly growing Palmerston precinct, Foelsche supervised the relentless violence against, and displacement of, First Peoples throughout the Northern Territory. A collector of ethnographic portraiture and photography of landscape and settlement life, Foelsche contributed to colonial narratives of First Peoples, narratives often rooted in ideas of the exotic and ethnographic.

Over the course of his career, Lee has acted as an ‘archival-mediator’ between Foelsche, Lee’s ancestors and the contemporary Larrakia community, highlighting how First Nations approaches to photography destabilise imperialist histories. In negotiating how Indigeneity has been constructed, Lee celebrates Aboriginal beauty and dissolves previous histories that attempted to push Aboriginality into obscurity. His self-portrait parallels Foelsche’s own from circa 1900, taken when he was around the same age (seventy). In Lee’s self-portrait, a white cloth backdrop acts as a neutralising backdrop – little pockets of foliage sneak into frame.

This work bookends multiple others in which Lee has taken the archive itself as source material. In works such as Billiamook and Shannon, 2023, and Mei Kim and Minnie, 2023, the pairing of contemporary and archival photographs visualises an ancestral connectedness that will not be disrupted. In Billiamook and Shannon, Foelsche is removed from the narrative – unnamed. Rather, the diptych crafts a temporal, aesthetic and ancestral dialogue between Lee’s nephew, Shannon, and ancestor, Billiamook. Lee starkly contrasts the minimalist stage space of Foelsche’s portrait – the clinical, ethnographic sheet removed – and places Shannon in situ. Shot on Larrakia Country, both works have a relational connection. By positioning Shannon within the native flora of Larrakia Country, Lee offers a sense of reconciliation to Billiamook, the archive now enlivened with energy.

Lee’s work has not always been celebrated in this way, however. A work from his 2003 series Skin, titled Self-portrait with Manish, was rejected from the National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 2003 due to its lack of ‘Aboriginal content’. This, unfortunately, is not an isolated thread in the world of First Peoples’ art. A friend of Lee’s and perhaps one of the most significant contemporary artists in Australia, Gordon Bennett (1955–2014) wrote in his 1996 text ‘The manifest toe’:

The reality is, however, that I never really had much choice; and I have been faced with my work not entering some collections on the grounds of it not being ‘Aboriginal’ enough, to being asked to sell my work through stalls at cultural festivals, to being described … as ‘Urban Aboriginal artists’ whose ‘most peculiarly Australian characteristic of their work is the lesson they carry from their bush-dwelling cousins’. Such is the politics of my position.²Gordon Bennett, ‘The manifest toe’, in Aileen Burns & Johan Lundh (eds), Gordon Bennett: Be Polite, Institute of Modern Art & Sternberg Press, Brisbane/Berlin, 2016, p. 117.

In these instances, Lee and Bennett are othered within their communities through external (Western) modes of categorisation and prejudice. Cycles of colonial logic persist, weaving their way into all aspects of life. The title of Lee’s current display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Another Other, is an exasperation: a sigh. While the art market – and art histories at large – may continue to push First Nations artists to the periphery, as Lee illustrates, it is in these margins whereby the expansiveness of identity is revealed. Through an exploration of beauty, sexuality and the body, Lee plays with the erotic as a rejection of colonial attitudes. He explicitly implores sex as a lens to create, refuting the infantilising media of figures such as Foelsche and Mutiny on the Bounty. Rather, he asserts Larrakia sovereignty.

Michael Gentle is NGV Curator, Australian and First Nations Art.

Notes