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Koiki (Eddie) Mabo (1937-1992), Torres Strait Islander man, initiated a legal case for native title against the State of Queensland in 1982. Along with his fellow Meriam people, Mabo was convinced that he owned his family’s land on Murray Island (Mer) in Torres Strait. By contrast, Queensland Crown lawyers argued that on annexation in 1879, all the land had become the property of the Crown. In 1992, the seven Justices of the High Court found 6-1 in favour of Mabo and his co-plaintiffs, overturning the accepted view that Australia had been terra nullius (empty land) before white settlement. Mabo died before the historic decision, which was to lead to the Land Title Act of 1993, and permanently to alter the way Australians think about Aboriginal land ownership.
John Citizen is the artistic alter ego of Australian artist Gordon Bennett (1955–2014). Bennett, who worked under his own name and that of John Citizen, grew up in Nambour, Queensland and only learned of his mother’s Indigenous heritage in his early teens. He went to art school as a mature student. Stating early in his career that ‘the bottom line of my work is coming to terms with my Aboriginality,’ he continued to engage with questions of cultural and personal identity, interrogating Australia’s colonial past and postcolonial present through a succession of allusive postmodern works. He won the John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize of the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997, and the NGV mounted a touring exhibition, Gordon Bennett, in 2007–08. Bennett said that when he began to think about Eddie Mabo he ‘could not think of him as a real person … I only [knew] the Eddie Mabo of the “mainstream” news media, a very two-dimensional “copy” of the man himself.’ In making his portrait of Mabo, he used a newspaper image and headlines from newspaper articles about the Native Title furore, and combined them with an image by the American artist Mike Kelley. ‘To me the image of Eddie Mabo stood like the eye of a storm,’ Bennett said, ‘calmly asserting his rights while all around him the storm, a war of words and rhetoric, raged.’
Purchased with funds provided by L Gordon Darling AC CMG 1999
© Gordon Bennett Estate
This is a portrait of Eddie Mabo, an activist from the Torres Strait Islands by Gordon Bennett. Its full title is “Eddie Mabo (after Mike Kelley's 'Booth's Puddle' 1985, from Plato's Cave, Rothko's Chapel, Lincoln's profile) No.3”.
It is a large and extremely complex painting on unframed, stretched canvas. Painted with acrylic paint, it is 168.0 cm high x 152.5 cm wide. The upper part of the painting has a background covered by words and phrases and the oversize smiling face of Eddie is centrally placed and dominates the image. The bottom third of the painting breaks out into a series of different styles.
The background of the upper larger section of the portrait has words and phrases in white, yellow ochre and red ochre, varying sizes and fonts layered over each other and crowded within the frame. A visual cacophony. The phrases include: people dispossessed, hurt lingers, white myths damage our souls, rednecks rule, abo threat, opinion analysis, underbelly of racism.
The oversized face of Eddie Mabo is centrally placed overlaying the mass of text. He is recognisable yet not painted realistically. He has dark, tightly curled hair brushed back off his high forehead. His face is an unusual combination of black, tan, white and green, the white indicating light and the green showing shadow. There is pixilation across his forehead, his broad nose and his left cheek.
His wide set, semi-circle eyes gaze to his right as if amused at something just out of view. His lopsided broad and beaming smile rounds and lifts his cheeks, and his generous mouth is open, revealing large, white teeth. He has a thick bottom lip.
His ample moustache extends into his beard which covers the lower part of his face and chin. At his neck his beard merges into the ochre background. Three fine lines, cobalt blue, mid-green, and black outline Mabo’s head and beard. Scribbly black lines of varying thickness that look like the outline of hills are where his left shoulder would be. Underneath these lines is the statement ‘Make no right turns’.
Below this an expanse of vibrant, mottled yellow contains simple white outlines of leaves, animals, hand prints and concentric circles forming a distinct yet irregular pattern.
The bottom of the painting is a modern cityscape, a picture within a picture. Skyscrapers of varying heights extend from the left edge of the painting to just past the centre where the built environment collapses into a mess of black angular and curving lines.
A strip of red paint extends cross the bottom printed with the statement ‘That fork in the road leads only to despair – madness’. In the far-right corner is the signature J Citizen ’96
Audio description written by Krysia Kitch and voiced by Rory Walker
The Gordon Darling Foundation (36 portraits supported)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves: who we read, who we watch, who we listen to, who we cheer for, who we aspire to be, and who we'll never forget. The Companion is available to buy online and in the Portrait Gallery Store.
A new painting by Jiawei Shen captures the vision and resolve of the Gallery's founder, L. Gordon Darling AC CMG.
This exhibition showcases portraits acquired through the generosity of the National Portrait Gallery’s Founding Patrons, L Gordon Darling AC CMG and Marilyn Darling AC.