Sucker Punch

For the exhibition Joan Ross: Those trees came back to me in my dreams, the artist was invited to explore the National Portrait Gallery’s collection and select historical portraits to sit alongside and in conversation with her own artworks. Larrakia, Jingili, Filipino and Anglo writer and curator Coby Edgar, a close collaborator with Joan Ross, worked with the artist and the Gallery’s curator Emma Kindred to present First Nations and non-First Nations perspectives on colonial narratives in the collection. Here Edgar shares her experience of working with Ross and reflects on some of the works in the exhibition.

For the exhibition Joan Ross: Those trees came back to me in my dreams, the artist was invited to explore the National Portrait Gallery’s collection and select historical portraits to sit alongside and in conversation with her own artworks. Larrakia, Jingili, Filipino and Anglo writer and curator Coby Edgar, a close collaborator with Joan Ross, worked with the artist and the Gallery’s curator Emma Kindred to present First Nations and non-First Nations perspectives on colonial narratives in the collection. Here Edgar shares her experience of working with Ross and reflects on some of the works in the exhibition.

The first piece of advice Joan gave me was to put something heavy in my bag. I’m not a girly girl, I carry totes mostly. Lots of space. The comment came with one of Joan’s signature raised eyebrows as her blue eyes caught the only light in the room. She waited for me to figure out why in the world I would do such a thing. I was new on the Sydney scene, and at that point I was a single woman, often out late at events, and I was telling her how I didn’t trust this new city. Her reply was to travel with something heavy in my bag like a brick, something her father had tasked her with doing as a young woman. The point was that if someone looked dodgy I could clock ‘em, swinging my bag to deliver a hit from a safe distance or just freak them out with strange behaviour. Good advice from a Glaswegian father who was not foreign to the aggression of men. The switch in narrative changed how I felt moving through the city.

Recently, driving home together from Canberra, Joan told me the story of a garage sale she was hosting where a man transgressed the unspoken boundaries of societal propriety, walking up onto her verandah and into her personal space, his energy, expression, large body scary, intimidating and unstable, like he could blow his top off. So Joan decided on the opposite approach. What if I smile widely at him and see what happens? He softened, told her about his bad day and left with arms full of goodies. Again, a shift in the expected narrative.

I point to these two anecdotes because they demonstrate Joan’s considered use of psychological tools in the everyday. What happens if we don’t believe the story we are told?

Colonial Australian stories and images bring up a predefined narrative and suite of emotions. For First Nations people, not many of those emotions are positive. Lots of non-First Nations Australians probably aren’t sure how they really feel either. Unfortunately, many people believe what they are taught to feel in the history books; a tale of colonial conflict, written only by those on one side of the struggle. So as a nation, how do we collectively start to change the narrative? How do we shift our perspective? We start by asking ourselves why we believe what we’ve been told. Recognise it, observe it.