By Jena Carr and Matt Hewson
Winchelsea and Geelong are honouring this year’s NAIDOC Week theme, ‘For Our Elders’, with events across the region.
Yorta Yorta and Baraparapa artist Dr Jenny Murray-Jones will host her ‘For Our Elders: Beyond the Voids in Colonial History’ exhibition as part of Winchelsea’s NAIDOC Week celebrations.
Dr Murray-Jones said the exhibition at the Winchelsea Shire Hall on Thursday, July 6, from 6pm to 8pm, formed part of her PhD work on indigenous families’ history, including her own.
“It was quite a journey and there was certainly much more that I learned,” she said.
“My grandmother and her little sister, at eight and 11 were stolen. They were abducted from a station where their father, my great grandfather, was working.”
Dr Murray-Jones said the information she collected led her to talk with her elders and explore their history through 40,000 words and 10 oil paintings on exhibition from July 7 to July 11.
“A lot of those elders have now passed and it’s good to know that they passed on their stories and tales of how the family survived, and so that’s what I painted about,” she said.
Geelong’s NAIDOC Week celebrations will include nightly projections of First Nations art on City Hall from Sunday, July 2 to Sunday, July 9.
The projections will feature the works of Yorta Yorta and Bunjalung man John Patten, an educator, historian, artist and head of Diversity and Belonging at Melbourne Museum.
Local projectionist Matt Bonner, who has illuminated Geelong for White Night and other events in past years, will light up City Hall with Mr Patten’s artwork from dusk till 11pm every night of NAIDOC Week.
