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December 17, 2005
Goody Barrett is an Aboriginal artist from the Warmun (Turkey Creek) community in the East Kimberley region of Australia.
Goody Barrett, Untitled,
She is one of the artists in the East Kimberley exhibition at Parliament House that I have previously mentioned here and here.
This is a work that is bounded by a tradition, rather than being a great work that disrupts a tradition or history; part of a tradition that tells a story about the massacre of Aborigines in the Kimberley in the late 19th and early 20the centuries. This was made explicit in the Exhibition about the Mistake Creek Massacre around 1915- 1930. The exhibition told a story of the slaughter of a large number of Aboriginal women and children of the Kiji people who were shot and burnt in or near a dry creek bed in the Kimberley at the foot of an old boab tree. This art challenges the view that colonial frontier was less violent than many of the historical revisionists have claimed and therefore less destructive of Aboriginal society.
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