Animation not visible? Upgrade to Flash 4	high resolution image

by Gordon Bennett
synthetic polymer on linen
168.0 x 152.5 cm
Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra
Purchased 1999

Artist’s Statement

"Behind every cave…there is, and necessarily must be, a still deeper cave: an ampler, stranger, richer world beyond the surface, as abyss behind every bottom, beneath every ‘foundation’". Friedrich Nietsche.

When thinking about Eddie Mabo I realised that I could not think of him as a real person. I could not know him in the way his family and friends knew him. I could only "know" him through his image in the newspapers, through what was written about him and his role in overturning the great white lie of Terra Nullius.

Like most Australians I only know the Eddie Mabo of the "mainstream" news media, a very two dimensional "copy" of the man himself, a mere "shadow". The name "Mabo" seemed to whip up fear and hysteria in many non-Aboriginal Australians who seemed to think that land claims would be made on their backyards. I am still disgusted by the lies that were told by opportunistic politicians who played on the public’s fear and ignorance. Australia’s racist underbelly remains exposed. The image and name Mabo seemed to me to take on the qualities of a demigod, to many a symbol of joy, of hope and justice, yet able to strike fear into the hearts and minds of others.

In making this work I decided to use a newspaper image of Eddie Mabo and some of the headlines from the many newspapers articles I collected about the "Native Title" furore, and furore it was indeed! People seemed to go mad. Wild claims were made about what Native Title would mean and the headlines screamed about a "Nation Divided". I couldn’t help but think that justice hurts sometimes, and that the mask of Australia as a just and egalitarian nation had slipped a little more.

To me the image of Eddie Mabo stood like the eye of a storm, calmly asserting his rights while all around him the storm, a war of words and rhetoric, rages. I chose to use an image by the American artist Mike Kelley, an artist I admire, because it seemed to fit perfectly in a number of ways. The image of the edge of the city I related to work I did in 1987 called The Coming of the Light which was how some indigenous people of the Torres Strait referred to the coming of the missionaries. In this work the arm that holds the" light" (of enlightenment) is doubled sided and also holds a crisis of belief and a questioning of faith; a deconstruction of Western perspectives that I feel intuitively intersects with Kelley’s work of 1985, though I was unaware of Kelley at the time, but I don’t have the space to follow these threads and elaborate. In any case the work should remain open, and (I) have an abiding aversion to providing the "author’s voice" as final arbiter of meaning (courtesy of Roland Barthes and John Berger).

The black man in The Coming of the Light is portrayed as victim, but Eddie Mabo is the direct opposite, and as such may represent a reversal and inversion, a mirror image of the latter work, perhaps it is "other"? But that is my speculation. The image of the city is changed also. In another work I did in 1987 called Perpetual Motion Machine I depicted the edge of the city as ploughing onward, steam-rolling over a huddled group of Mimi spirit figures while a group of white heads bang together suspended by strings from the doors of their houses like the steel balls on some executive toy. Now the city is disintegrating at its edge the balance of the Perpetual Motion Machine is upset, and from now on any "forward" motion may involve a more careful process of negotiation.

Gordon Bennett
2 February 1996