Blood on the wattle, blood on the palm 2009

A veteran of the Aboriginal protest movement, Gordon Hookey began working as an artist in the late 1980s, encouraged by the growing numbers of urban Aboriginal people expressing their contemporary reality through art. This work was created in response to the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee in 2004 and the ensuing political unrest on Palm Island. Standing in solidarity with the people of Palm Island, a group of Hookey’s trademark kangaroos are defiant in the face of the riot police sent to the Island in the wake of the turbulence. The title references Bruce Elder’s 1988 book entitled Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788, about frontier violence against Aboriginal people. Hookey has extended Elder’s study to include acts of violence committed against Indigenous peoples today.