PUBLIC HANGINGS Art reviews with Clyde Selby

Colonial After lives Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre Until April 27

Until well into the second half of the 20th century, along with portraits of the king and/or queen, the next most likely picture to be found in Australian schoolrooms was the landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay in 1770. With an alternative view of history, Daniel Boyd has reworked the celebratory, Federation-era painting of E. Phillips Fox and presented Cook not as an English hero and outrider of civilisation but as a marauding pirate with his gun-toting henchmen.

Framed by the perspective of this gallery’s wooden columns, the sizeable 1902/2006 piece formed a backdrop to the opening speech by Governor Kate Warner.

In Boyd’s piece, Cook takes centre stage in the grand manner befitting an iconic figure and his crew of sailors prepare themselves for defence against savages. Professor Warner reminded the assembly that indigenous people today are 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-indigenous Australians.

Colonial Afterlives makes a clear assertion that colonisation and its aftermath have not been overwhelmingly beneficial for the original inhabitants of Terra Nullius or other places.

The exhibition is a major initiative from the Salamanca Arts Centre which is being toured by Contemporary Art Tasmania to many interstate venues. After casting a net far and wide in former Commonwealth states and territories, 14 disparate artists with aboriginal ancestry were invited to take part in the exhibition.

Victorian Maree Clarke has contributed four impressively large photographs of indigenous people and their adornments. As well as the ochre, reeds and feathers there are the government-sanctioned breastplates worn by designated tribal chiefs which all also have certain contemporary references.

As a total contrast, Guyana’s Huw Locke focuses on the elaborate and pretentious symbolism that was enshrined in certificates of stocks and shares issued by exploitative companies.

Ewan Atkinson, of Barbados, examines the sex-role stereotyping that was prevalent in traditional children’s reading books that he contrasts with digital photographs containing much symbolism.

Equally colourful, fancifully animated images in a quaint Victorian-era style are used by Joan Ross, of NSW, to provide mixed messages of discovery and settlement.

On a more homely level are the visual statements of Julie Gough that snuggle disconcertingly alongside Scottish plaid. Gough has photographed wayside barbecue huts that abound all over Tasmania and are in areas of 19th-century “land grabs”.

Yvonne Rees-Pagh offers a quartet made by etching and screen printing. With its distorted heads in angry red tones it confronts the viewer and invokes memories of the ugly racist riots at Cronulla in 2006.

Geoff Parr’s 1983/2015 uses multiple images to give a contemporary reappraisal.