Bliss 2006

Foley’s Bliss is a powerful example of her career-long interrogation of Queensland’s Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 — the history of which is shrouded in what the artist describes as ‘historical amnesia’. This Government policy stringently legislated against the supply and sale of opium to Aboriginal people, in tandem with recommendations that reserves be established — to which Queensland Aboriginal people were forcibly removed until the Act was repealed in 1969.

In her opium poppy works, Foley poetically engages with the Act to give visual expression to a dark period in Queensland’s history when opium and other addictive substances were a mechanism for control of Aboriginal people.

Depicting a field of blooming poppies growing in present-day Tasmania, the hypnotic swaying of the flowers against a dramatic sky elicits a giddy sensation that alludes to the effects of taking opium. This evocative setting is overlaid with quotes from Rosalind Kidd’s 1997 book The Way We Civilise that speak to impact of the opium and the Act on Aboriginal people.