Wonnarua is a contemplative moving image installation work that aims to provoke discussion around themes of Indigenous ways of living in juxtaposition with western settler-state system's unsustainable, damaging ways of using stolen lands.
The video diptych contrasts living portraits of six First Nations people from the Wonnarua Nation with drone shots of the Muswellbrook coal mines, which are situated in the heart of Wonnarua Country.
The frame in which the work sits is an 1820's antique Victorian era influenced design, which correlates with the exact time period that European settlers first reached Muswellbrook Wonnarua Country. The symbolic frame also addresses my blatant hypocrisy of critiquing destructive Western energy systems although at the same time growing up and still presently living and benefiting from an extremely privileged Western lifestyle.
The work is a provocation around the urgency for enquiry into how our environment is currently being managed, and alludes the remedy is to intergrate aspects of traditional First Nation’s sustainable practices for caring for Country.
