Acrylic on stretched canvas, ready to hang.

Signed on the back.

I recently saw maps of the lands my family first lived on when they came to Australia, lands that belonged to indigenous peoples first. I saw later photographs of country, grainy black from distant Melbourne newspapers. I saw sandy banks and waterholes, birds and tracks. Marsh plains and a creek that flooded vast acres when the season changed. I read histories and newspaper articles and textbooks. I read about massacres. I learned about a dialect that is considered extinct, and what happened to the peoples that spoke it. I learned about towns that are still named for the waters that came together at a sand hill, and for the path people travelled to meet. I learned that some few white people did stand in solidarity, but they were few and far between, and ultimately not enough. I learned about the sketches of skulls in the creek bed from 50 years later, giving lie to the stories of one or two criminals lynched - men, women, children and babies. This painting is all the bright colours of sky and soil. But it is also the colours of the struggle of blood at the waterhole, at the meeting place so many came to.