Juno Gemes: PROOF

Proof is a testament to one artist’s sustained engagement with issues central to contemporary Australian culture.
~ Catherine De Lorenzo, ‘Photographic Proof’, Art Monthly #166 Dec 2003 - Feb 2004

Saturday March 27th 2004, 2pm
Dennis McDermott, Martin Thomas, Martin Harrison, Kim Mahood

Saturday May 1st 2004, 2pm
Anita Heiss, Barry Hill, Romaine Moreton, Robert Adamson

The Proof Readings are a unique opportunity to hear from Indigenous and non-Indigenous poets and writers whose work crosses over between cultures, between land and memory, between contemporary engagement and historical imagination. Each reading brings together the best of new writing from poets and writers whose work is in dialogue with a deep understanding of Australian identity, place and inheritance. Director of the National Portrait Gallery Andrew Sayers spoke of Juno Gemes’ remarkable photographic documentation of three decades of Indigenous protest as a major achievement in Australian photography which is “clearly and unambiguously an engaged body of portraiture.” Co-ordinated by poet and critic Martin Harrison, The Proof Readings are a response to the continuing presence of that unambiguous engagement in contemporary poetry.

About the Readers

Dennis McDermott
Dennis McDermott is a poet, psychologist and academic. He currently teaches Indigenous Health to medical students at the University of New South Wales. Although he grew up in Tamworth NSW, like many Aboriginal Australians his mob is from here and there, Sydney and Donegal. He has alternated pouring beers and driving cabs with work in radio, as a therapist and as an educator in Sydney, Brisbane and the bush. His poetry has appeared in Southerly, the Sydney Morning Herald and Poetry International. A first collection, ‘Dorothy’s Skin’, was published by Five Islands Press in 2003.

Martin Thomas
Martin Thomas studied history at the University of Sydney and cultural studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, where he is now an ARC postdoctoral fellow. He has worked as a writer, editor, and a radio producer. He has also been an historian for the National Parks and Wildlife Service of New South Wales. Martin lives in Katoomba and is the author of The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains, a study of myths and narratives that have shaped the cultural landscape of the area. In 2000 he won the NSW Premier’s Audio/Visual History Award for his work on the Aboriginal sound recordist Jimmie Barker. The Artificial Horizon was recently short-listed in the Festival Awards for Literature.

Martin Harrison
Martin Harrison’s most recent poetry collection, Summer (Paper Bark Press 2002) won the Wesley Michel Wright Award. A collection of literary and critical essays, Who Wants to Create Australia? and Other Essays is about to appear from Halstead. He is the editor of a significant Australian and New Zealand section in the Fall 2003 edition of the California-based poetry magazine, Poetry International. He has worked as an ABC broadcaster and radio producer and he regularly writes performance works for sound and radio. Currently at work on a new poetry collection, he was awarded an Established Writers Fellowship from the Australia in 2002. He teaches writing and poetry at the University of Technology.

Kim Mahood
Kim Mahood is a visual artist and writer whose first book, Craft for a Dry Lake, won the NSW Premier’s Award for non-fiction and the Age Book of the Year. Her work as both an artist and a writer draws on her relationship, past and present, to the Tanami desert country and its people. She is currently working on a novel.

Anita Heiss
Anita Heiss (Wiradjuri nation) is an author, poet, historian and social commentator. Her books include a poetry collection Token Kooris (1998), an historical novel Who Am I? The Diary of Mary Talence, Sydney 1937 and the satire Sacred Cows. Her most recent book is Dhuuluu Yala: Talk Straight – Publishing Aboriginal Writing. She is currently writer in residence at Macquarie University.

Barry Hill
Poet, fiction writer and biographer Barry Hill is the author of three poetry collections, Raft, Ghosting William Buckley and most recently The Inland Sea (Salt 2002). His most recent publication is the multi-award winning biography of Central Australian anthropologist and translator, T.G.H. Strehlow, Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession. Barry is also poetry editor of The Australian newspaper and an Honorary Fellow at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. The Song Company will be performing his libretto, based on the Song of Songs with music by Andrew Schulz, at the Opera House on May 8th.

Romaine Moreton
Romaine Moreton is an Indigenous performance poet, film maker and writer. Originally from Stradbroke Island, her family settled in the country town of Bodalla, New South Wales, when she was a child. She says of her work: “The things I have to say and how I say them are a direct response to the environment in which I have grown up and continue to live in. To create works that do not deal with the morbid and mortal effects of racism for one, and the beauty of Indigenous culture for another, would be for me personally, to produce works that are farcical.” A new collection of her poetry, Post Me To The Prime Minister, will be launched at the Sydney Writers Festival this year.

Robert Adamson
Robert Adamson is one of Australia’s best known poets, poetry editor and publisher. Text have just published Inside Out, Adamson’s autobiography. In May 2004 Reading the River, Selected Poems by Robert Adamson is published by Bloodaxe UK. Adamson has won the National Book Council award for poetry and the NSW and Victorian Premier’s Prize. In 1994 Robert Adamson was awarded the Christopher Brennan Prize for lifetime achievement and service to Australian Literature.

Portraits from The Movement 1978 – 2003

MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
Building E11A, Macquarie University, Sydney
LOCATION MAP

Exhibition opening hours: 10 March — 10 May 2004
Monday–Thursday 10am-5pm or by arrangement
Extended opening hours: Saturday 10am-4pm
13 & 27 March, 10 & 24 April 1 & 8 May