Reproduction Print on paper

Signed and numbered on the front.

The fastest recorded time for an Australian sprinter over 200m was set at the Mexico Olympics of 1968.

The record stands today and the time fast enough to have scored a place on the podium at the Sydney Olympics.

The athlete in question, Peter Norman, chose to stand in solidarity with the two Americans he shared the Mexico podium with. He wore a human’s rights badge on his Australian tracksuit.

A move that ended his career and meant, but for a documentary made by his nephew, that he would have slipped into obscurity. Though he was never invited to participate in the Sydney Olympics, he is viewed as a hero abroad by Americans. For Australians filed away, in the ‘repressed memory folder’ of the Australian nations childhood in the basement, under a rug, behind a locked door.

The power of wilful ignorance cannot be overstated; it is the state sanctioned censorship behind our nations ‘Colonial Stockholm Syndrome’.

I couldn’t paint Peter… I’d sat on the idea for too long, I rushed the painting, and I didn’t have the adrenalin rush of violent potential to armour me against the heartbreak… so I painted Sidney Nolans Ned Kelly in his place.

Ned Kelly is an interesting example of oppressed people… the motive, or social situation that he endured was poor Irish catholic rebelling against the rich squattocracy of the establishment -and the British colony. His actions brought about a royal commission into police corruption.

This isn’t really why Sidney Nolan related to him, Nolan was on the run under an assumed identity, to avoid war - The outlaw helmet is symbolic, with the sky showing through, as though empty.

The image is best appreciated as a diptych alongside ‘dark emu, black swan theory’ the horizon lines mirror one another and the story of both helps explain the complexity of the issue

These images take me out into the big open space of western and central Australia. The process of making them has given me a new place inside, which is quiet and open and vast.
I had thought of calling it, ‘don’t mind the great barrier reef’ or ‘Daniel O’Connell and Fredrick Douglas on a staircase’