In the drawing Whether you like it or not, Danie Mellor continues to play with the image of an antique traveling trunk, which he uses to signify an Indigenous Australian diaspora. This diaspora has affected many Indigenous people, whether through forced relocation away from their country to Aboriginal reserves or settlements, or for other reasons such as work.

Mellor particularly looks at the effect of cultural distance from their homelands and he remarks on this phenomenon as an insider, an Indigenous man who has had minimal contact with his own people. The artist was raised in many Australian and international sites, most notably Adelaide, South Africa, Scotland and England, and he now resides in Canberra. Each is many thousands of miles from his homelands in the Cairns area. This set of concerns is also apparent in his work Trunk shield II (Middle Nellie Kelly shield) 2001. 

The trunk in Whether you like it or not is a replica of an antique trunk made by the Oshkosh Trunk Company, also known as the Eagle Trunk Factory, Wisconsin. These trunks were made with an insignia featuring an image of a North American First Nation's 'brave' on the badge — supposedly Chief Oshkosh. In this image, Mellor has removed the image of the Native American brave and replaced it with an image of a rainforest warrior, complete with fig buttress shield and club.

There is an image centrally under the antique trunk: a sketch of a mountain range with the accompanying title, 'A view across the range', which shows the artist's homeland around the Atherton Tablelands. Next to the image the words 'paradise' and 'liberation' appear. On the left side of the work there is a very faintly drawn road map, leading to a square box, above which these words appear once more.

The words 'paradise' and 'liberation' are in fact the names of deluxe model campervans. Mellor saw an advertisement on late-night television promoting these vans as a way of life, whereby you could give up a confined existence in one place and travel throughout the country, living wherever you wanted.¹ This relates to the ideas about travel recurrent in Mellor's work, and is not dissimilar to Mellor's own regionally disjointed upbringing, but also references the large numbers of southern tourists who 'escape' to his homeland for holidays. 

Below the trunk is a text from an antique book about the rainforest, as well as a hand-drawn replica of a rainforest scene from the same book. The poetic text entitled 'Twilight is descending  . . .', written by a settler of the Barnie River in c.1886, reads:

Twilight is descending, and I gaze once more into that awful realm of swimming shadows and enormous shapes, with fearful chasms, rolling billions of foam, vast cloud like vapours, descending columns of yellow, water like liquid fire, opalescent and iridescent, fantastic rocks scarred and rent by sons of ages, towering mountains crowned by mournful pines, showers of spray and wandering mist, mingled with the roar and rush and howl of immeasurable waters plunging in their deadly agonies into the 'fathomless and floundering abyss', in unutterable sublimity of unfettered chaos and illimitable madness. Alas! After all I have only proved how important is language to give more than a vague and mighty picture hung there on the swollen rocks among the grand old mountains as a presentation picture to Australia from the Art Gallery of the Eternal!²

Through separation from his land and culture, Mellor has developed a sense of identity which has been forged by his personal transitory lifestyle and a yearning for his traditional homelands. This is shown here through his juxtapositions of objects from his homeland with objects and texts signifying travel and migration — a symbol of a rainforest warrior on a travelling trunk — creating a statement to which many Indigenous people who have been separated from their lands can relate.

Essay by Bruce McLean, former Curatorial Assistant, Indigenous Australian Art, QAGOMA.

Endnotes

1. Danie Mellor, telephone conversation with Bruce McLean, 21 July 2006.
2. MA Eston, quoted in Historical Sketch of Queensland, Lansdowne Press, Sydney, 1980 (first published 1886), p.97.