Views of Archie Moore’s kith and kin 2024, installed at GOMA, October 2025 / Mixed media / Presented to Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and Tate by Creative Australia on behalf of the Australian Government 2024 / © Archie Moore / Photograph: N Umek, QAGOMA

First Nations peoples of Australia are among the oldest continuous living cultures on Earth. Archie Moore’s kith and kin affirms this by tracing the artist’s maternal Kamilaroi and Bigambul relations over more than 65 000 years. In this expansive work, Moore also traces his paternal ties to convicts, linking himself to the British carceral system that founded the Australian state with penal colonies from 1788.

Moore’s use of fragile chalk on blackboard for this celestial map of names addresses the insufficient teaching of Indigenous histories when the artist went to school. The chalk lines map the complexity of First Nations kinship systems that exceed the segmented genealogical chart used by anthropologists to study First Nations social structures.

Moore’s extensive drawing captures the common ancestors of all humans, emphasising our kinship responsibilities to one another. Words are taken from archives, newspapers and government documents, including family names and racist slurs, as well as Gamilaraay and Bigambul kinship terms to enact Indigenous language maintenance. While speculative ancestor names redress omissions in written records of oral cultures, gaps remain in the lineage, signalling the severing of families through massacres, diseases and the deliberate destruction of records.
 

Another void is the reflective pool, a memorial for First Nations individuals who have died in police custody. Indigenous Australians are some of the most incarcerated people globally, and the volume of coronial inquests hovering above the water makes visible the vast scale of this unabated horror. The 557 inquests are dated between 1991, coinciding with the release of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and 31 December 2023 when Moore was finalising this artwork. Names are redacted out of respect for the deceased. Reports that are not publicly accessible are represented with a blank ream of paper, expressing gaps in the record.

Moore also incorporates archival records referencing his kin that evidence how laws and government policies have curtailed Indigenous life since colonial times. These administrative markers of the deceased are cradled by the watery reflection of the handwritten family tree, commemorating their ties to this vast web of relations.

In a First Nations understanding of time, the past, present and future are co‑present. By placing tens of thousands of years of kin on a single continuum, Moore enfolds audiences in an Indigenous world view.

Visit the Creative Australia kith and kin website.

Viewers are advised this installation contains names of deceased persons, and language offensive to today’s standards presented within its historical context.