In recent decades, culture wars have raged over Australia’s colonial history: on one side are the traditionalists of the colonial settler narrative, who’ve always held the power and peddled their stories as truth; and on the opposite side are the revisionists, who have re-read and re-examined archives and collected stories from the fringe, establishing compelling bodies of historical fact that often conflict with the established truths. Today, our national histories have been all but cleaved in two. 

Artist Danie Mellor creates composites that bring together pictorial records, written archives, oral histories and personal imagination, to create compositions of cultural complexity that provoke us to question our assumptions of our historical ‘truths’. Mellor’s works are often fugitive. Richly rendered and realised but defying proscriptive readings, they pull at the loose threads of Queensland’s colonial and Indigenous histories; messy, murky, murderous and magical. Yet in his most recent works, one constant, one single immovable truth has emerged, that is of Country — the land — as witness. 
 

Mellor attempts to maintain a position of neutrality in his works, creating historical tableaux in which figures are presented together in a landscape, but rarely divulging any sense of narrative. Instead, he allows the viewer to narrate the scene in their mind. In doing so, he subtly prompts the viewer to question their own interpretation of the image by asking us how our cultural conditioning and understanding of history, both taught and learnt, has created the story we imagine. Given to us without supporting information, any stories inspired by Mellor’s images, as read by the viewer, are precisely that: stories.

It is important to note that many of Mellor’s more elaborate scenes are themselves a fabrication, a composite built from many historical sources. The figures within are real people from our past; however, most would never have met each other, nor would they have been posed together in the same image. Here, Mellor questions the very concept of history, drawing our attention to the idea that ‘history’ itself is a lie. Obviously, many things have objectively happened in the past, and these provide the historical facts on which broader histories are based. But the construction of history depends on the selective harvesting of data to build a grand narrative. Mellor’s work draws our attention to these ideas by offering us a set of data in the form of these historical figures, prompting us to re-imagine our own history. 
 

A new element in Mellor’s most recent works is the presence of a rainbow, appearing in the background of these historical scenes. Here, he extends the presence of the land from a stage on which history is performed to a figure, an active participant uniting jujaba (deep ancestral time), the recent past, the present and the future. This rainbow represents Yamani, the Rainbow Serpent, as known by the artist’s Ngadjon-jii and Mamu peoples and their Rainforest kin.¹ As the highest being of this place, Yamani is a unifying thread that pulls together divergent histories, staged scenes and ancestral narratives into a single moment. Country has seen and experienced it all — every gunshot, kiss, birth, death, love, laugh, word spoken and step danced, from the beginning to the end — and Yamani binds the truths of these experiences together. 
 

The invention of accessible and accurate photographic processes, following the discovery of the daguerreotype in the 1830s and the rapid popularisation of the medium, including the development of the albumen print and carte-de-visite formats in the 1850s, coincided with the expansion of the Queensland colonial frontier from 1859. Today, a rich and detailed photographic record, taken in the aftermath of the colonial frontier, leaves a rare, unique and lasting pictorial legacy. Mellor’s recent oeuvre has focused almost exclusively on these historical images taken as the waves of the frontier crashed over his Country on the Atherton Tablelands. The mining of these archives allows Mellor to make multiple transhistorical cultural and artistic connections; to history, to ancestors, and to Country. 

Interestingly, photography — with its images mechanically captured through light reactive chemical processes — has long been considered a source of truth. However, we now know that most historical photographic images were heavily staged — the subjects chosen, posed, often made-up — and that post-production interventions were commonly used to highlight different aspects of the resulting image. Even in photography, the hand of the artist is always evident. Photographer Richard Daintree is a key example of this: his depictions of the Queensland frontier were used to advertise the land to white colonists and investors from the south and overseas.² The images generally feature picturesque landscapes ripe for European settlement, and heroic white pioneers at work, largely excluding any images of Aboriginal people — or the South Sea Islander, South Asian, Chinese and other non-white peoples who shared that physical and historical space — and their labour. Daintree’s body of work is a prime example of the photographic archive being as flawed as any other subjective body of knowledge involved in building a grand historical narrative. Yet the truths of the lives of the people who are pictured remain. And it’s in this juncture between historical truth and fiction that Mellor’s works often live. On the Queensland colonial frontier, everything was black and white, but nothing was straightforward.  
 

Danie Mellor  Ngadjon-jii/Mamu peoples / (l-r) Before the corroboree (bayi barrngan) I, II and III  (within the installation Shadows of history 2025) 2023 / Courtesy: The artist / © Danie Mellor

As an artist who has worked with the knotted threads of Australian history for decades, Mellor’s focus on Country as the one constant — his rock in a narrative storm — has provided a grounding presence to which his multiple fields of artistic exploration can be tethered. In his most recent moving-image work, Mellor presents his Country in infrared imagery. This new format follows his interest in the colours of Country through recent history: many of his early works feature a blue-and-white palette reminiscent of early colonial renderings on Spode and Wedgwood crockery; while more recent works show sepia-toned images, evoking the metallic processes of early photography. Each of these approaches distorts Country in some way, changing how that Country is viewed, experienced and understood. By extending this to infrared, Mellor allows us to view his Country differently again, to experience his Country differently, and to understand his Country differently. 
 

Seeing things differently, we observe what we couldn’t before. Through the medium of infrared videography, which enables us to see things invisible to the human eye, we are invited to look inside Mellor’s Country rather than merely at it. In many ways, the work is an anchor to the exhibition, an allegory on the ways in which the artist renders visible that which was previously unseen, whether through presenting forgotten images from our contested past, or challenging the grand narratives and national myths of our histories, or being invited into his lush, dense, Rainforest homeland. Danie Mellor reveals the unseen truths of our shared experiences in this Country. 
 

Wierdi/Birri-Gubba independent curator Bruce Johnson McLean MAICD is a First Nations art and culture specialist.

Endnotes  
1 For more in formation on Richard Daintree’s photography, see Richard Daintree, ‘Images of Queensland’ c.1870, collection.qagoma.qld.gov.au/stories/1199, accessed December 2024.
2 Information gathered during studio visit with the artist, 16 October 2024.