Aboriginal Artists

The Hon. T.T. NGO (15:01): My question is to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. Can the minister tell the council about the success of Aboriginal artists internationally?

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Attorney-General, Minister for Industrial Relations and Public Sector) (15:01): I thank the honourable member for his question and I am very happy, always, to inform the chamber of the international success of Aboriginal artists. We have seen some remarkable success with Aboriginal artists recently. I will be speaking after the Hon. Tammy Franks in the next sitting week in much more detail about the remarkable achievements of Zaachariaha Fielding, with his offsider Michael Ross, at Eurovision, so I won't speak much about it now because I am very much looking forward to talking about that a lot more in the next sitting week.

I have also informed the chamber previously about the remarkable success of Dem Mob, who hail from Pukatja in the APY lands, who recently performed in Italy and are on an Australia-wide tour at the moment, supporting Seth Sentry, who I had the distinct pleasure of seeing in Adelaide only a couple of weeks ago. I am also thrilled that an Aboriginal person has won the Golden Lion, the prize for the best national participation at the Venice Biennale, none other than Archie Moore, a 54-year-old Kamilaroi man who was born in Toowoomba and is the first Aboriginal solo male artist to represent Australia at Venice. On Saturday 20 April, he made history as the first Australian to win the coveted Golden Lion.

It is awe-inspiring to see Aboriginal excellence recognised on the world stage, as it has been for some time now with the art, live music performance and visual artists. The work entitled Kith and Kin traces Moore's relationship with the land for over 65,000 years, and was commissioned by Creative Australia and curated by Ellie Buttrose. The five-metre high walls of the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale have been covered in chalk on blackboard paint, reminiscent of the schoolroom, and Moore has hand chalked an expansive family tree of thousands of names of his ancestors going back more than 2,000 generations. The process took months.

I congratulate Archie Moore on winning the Golden Lion prize and also congratulate those other Aboriginal artists who have represented the oldest living culture in the world so proudly on the international stage in recent months.