Since visiting Mellor’s studio, I’ve spent a long time untangling my own thoughts and mulling over the words I would write down. There is a certain type of relationality that occurs through his work for me. While we have ancestral roots to different First Nations lands, cultural practices and beliefs, his work is imbued with an intangible yet enduring presence of Indigenous people and culture that speaks clearly to my own cultural memories. This is particularly evident in works such as The forest of the living (bala jindagaa) 2023. 

Each First Nations community has its own set of highly significant funerary and mortuary customs. The Zenadth Kes have burial rituals such as tombstone-unveiling ceremonies, which celebrate the life of the deceased and to ensure their spirit is at peace. In the past, and depending on the island group, a two-part burial custom might be performed, during which the bones — and particularly the skull — would be decorated and placed in sacred sites, such as caves. Skulls hold significant value, culturally and spiritually, across Indigenous communities. With the arrival of settlers and the impact of colonisation, however, our traditional burial customs were interrupted. Throughout Mellor’s practice, skulls have made an appearance. In this exhibition, they suggest a potent sense of remembrance and presence, reminding us of the ancestral living, rather than of death or as a notation of a memento mori. I am reminded of our ancestral remains having been taken from their sacred sites to sit, dislocated and suspended in unknown time, within cardboard boxes in haunted museum collections. I wonder if the skull in The forest of the living (bala jindagaa) is tasked as a comment on repatriation, or as the inherent ancestral presence embedded in the landscape. Maybe it represents the sacredness of our ceremonies and customs. Perhaps it’s all three.

 

Mellor’s landscapes, layered as they are with intricate details, pull me into a world where a dominant history refuses to be buried, while another history is undeniably haunted — and this haunting is rightfully relentless. As I reflect on my own cultural ties back to the islands, I am inevitably drawn into the violent past of colonisation — a past that continuously seeps into our everyday present. Through this act of remembering, artists such as Mellor can respond to that which is absent from the colonial record. Whether he depicts displaced Indigenous peoples, eroded cultural practices or altered landscapes, I find myself transported through his work to an eerie space, one in which time collapses, counter-memories emerge, and ghostly presences refuse to fade. These lingering forces of cultural memory have been passed down through generations, for whom the memories of colonisation and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander resilience are deeply entangled. In Mellor’s artistic practice, I witness an unspoken dialogue between past and present, where his work does not simply depict history, it also resurrects it — making absence a palpable presence that lingers long after.

So much of this country’s history is told from the perspective of colonialists and European explorers, leaving Indigenous voices fragmented, distorted or erased. But Mellor’s work resists this erasure: each brushstroke, each carefully rendered figure, speaks to the ongoing impact of colonial disruption. I am drawn to the remarkable way he subtly reclaims and re-centres Indigenous perspectives within our nation’s collective memory. Mellor intentionally illuminates these intersections, highlighting how various narratives coexist, shaping and informing one another within a relational matrix of people, place and history. His thoughtfully constructed visual spaces emphasise memory not as singular or static entity but instead as a shared, multidirectional process. Engaging with one history inevitably illuminates others. 

History, like time, is not linear; it is filled with temporal and spatial overlaps. While Danie Mellor’s art foregrounds acts of reclamation and centres the Indigenous experience, it also reshapes how we perceive history itself, reminding us that remembrance is dynamic, inclusive, and ever-evolving.

   

Meriam Mir woman Rebecca Ray is a First Nations curator, writer and cultural heritage researcher with a passion for anticolonial/decolonising methodologies and practice. She is Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections and Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney.

Further reading
M Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford University Press, Standford, 2009.
Eve Tuck and C Ree, 'A glossary of haunting', in Handbook of Autoethnography, by Stacy Linn Holman Jones et al., Left Coast Press, Inc, 2013, pp.639–56.
V Whittington, 'Memorialisation, reconciliation and truth-speaking: The role of explorer and massacre memorials in settler-colonial Australia', Journal of Australian Studies, vol.48, no.1, pp.87–105, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2023.2260397