The Blakyard

Dr. Paola Balla

The exhausting difficulty of being a Blak woman in the colony is that we are always having to disrupt its racism while we’re trying to survive and thrive.

In showing care for language and lineage, I pay particular respect by ensuring the word Blak is attributed to Destiny Deacon, the acclaimed photographic artist and KuKu and Erub and Mer Torres Straits woman. In the catalogue for the 1994 exhibition, Blakness: Blak City Culture at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), in collaboration with Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Co-operative, curators Clare Williamson and Hetti Perkins wrote: “The term ‘Blak’ was developed by Destiny Deacon as part of a symbolic but potent strategy of reclaiming colonialist language to create means of self-definition and expression.”1 In conversation at the 2020 Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Deacon stated:

“I just wanted to take the ‘C’ out of ‘black.’ I was able to convince Hetti Perkins and Claire Williamson to alter their curated urban Indigenous exhibition to ‘Blakness: Blak City Culture (ACCA, Melbourne) without the ‘c’ in 1994!”2

This Blak womanist act of resistance, dropping the “c” to de-weaponise the term “black cunt,” is an act of disruption that has grown through use, particularly by young Aboriginal women on social media and in new and emerging Aboriginal arts dialogue and Blak arts businesses.

I ask how we, as Blak women, assert our sovereignty in visual ways, as well as how our very survival as sovereign warrior women acts as resistance against white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy and state settler violence. My work seeks to create a dream world of unconditional love, contemplation and respite where Aboriginal women embody the disruptive and transformative work of art and resistance. It also speaks back and Blak to dominant white and patriarchal public narratives and spaces that enact and hold violence and erasure. I created Ghost Weaving in dialogue with Professor Tracey Bunda, Ngugi/Wakka Wakka scholar, to name a matrilineal, intergenerational approach which could embody curator Stephen Gilchrist’s adaptation of the term, the “everywhen.” In his exhibition, “The Everywhen, the Eternal Present in Indigenous Art in Australia” (2016), Stephen Gilchrist stated that he utilised:

“the elastic paradigm of ‘the Everywhen’ to explore the ways that Indigenous Australians conceptualize, mark, and manipulate time, rather than separating past, present and future… The past is not inaccessible to Indigenous people. It is instead part of a cyclical and circular order. Indigenous conceptions of time rely on active encounters with both the ancestral and natural worlds, and these dynamic relationships find expression in artistic production.”3

Ghost Weaving disrupts old white readings of Aboriginality and makes intimate connections between the urban and the rural as extended practices of Country. It also speaks to the practice of making art in family spaces: Blak women’s homes becoming places to gather, re-create cultural practices, tell and listen to stories, negotiate difficulties and struggles, and share in private the very public work of survival.

These places that we make a home in, sometimes away from our own Country and Homelands, hold weavings of home, a gift from your grandmother, an artefact from your great Uncle, a weaving your mother makes, the jewellery an Aunty made you for Christmas. Homesickness and longing for Country are entwined in our lives as Blackfullas. Our little urban patches become Black Yards of love for gathering, respite, safety, caring and sharing for our families, visitors, and chosen family.

I created a new series of work responsive to Aboriginal women artists before me including Judy Watson, Lisa Bellear, Brenda L Croft, Tracey Moffatt, Destiny Deacon, Fiona Foley, Brownyn Bancroft, Vicki Couzens, Maree Clarke and The Unbound Collective: Ali Gumillya Baker, Faye Rosas Blanch, Natalie Harkin and Simone Ulalka Tur. This does not exclude the work of my grandmother, Rosie Tang, a painter and poet, and my mother, Margie Tang, a craft maker and performance artist, who both utilised creative practice to name their experiences as Blak women surviving white so-called australia.

I acknowledge these seminal artists and their bodies of work as disruptive and foundational, iconic bodies of Black women’s work that draws on the archive, history and surveillance of Blackfullas and speaks back and Blak to the dominance of heteronormative, patriarchal and colonial narratives.

My practice-led works took the form of photography, personal memoir, family narratives, performative elements, installations, and portraiture work – along with analytical and theoretical meditative statements that aligned with my exhibition works. I wanted to understand the diverse, creative, analytical and deadly ways that Blak women artists, community women and activists – who sometimes act as all three (and more) in community life – disrupt the notion of Terra Nullius, refusing the virtual no (wo)man’s land in white man’s history. History literally and figuratively ejects Blak women out of the picture - in art as much as politics, language and daily family and communal life.

Unfortunately, a comprehensive herstories of resistance by Indigenous women has not been researched and documented, unlike the frontier political activism of Indigenous men, which has been recorded in the works of historian Henry Reynolds.4

Detail of Mission House (2019) with Still of Super8 Film Footage of Moonahcullah Mission site (Hercus 1961). Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: the ways that First Nations women in art and community speak Blak to the colony and patriarchy (2019), Footscray Community Arts Centre. Image credit Paola Balla (2019)

By learning how Aboriginal women subvert and utilise art to disrupt both the erasure of our voices and experiences in history, and through art as history, I was able to utilise matrilineal and contemporary art modes to have unspoken community stories and memories seen and heard, to be re-membered in spaces that are usually impenetrably dense with racism, whiteness and applied colonial patriarchy. I applied a Blak way of working to the existing theories of practice-led research methodology, de-colonial research, and participatory art research.

I believe that these methodologies and fields are appropriated from Indigenous modes of working without acknowledgement by the Community Cultural Development field which, historically, has espoused justice-driven, community centred work but continues to be led by white people and apply white structures of management in and to community arts settings.

Ghost Weaving is an act of de-colonial practice, drawing on Aboriginal ways of “being, knowing and doing;”5 an assertion of sovereignty in which I situate the contribution of Aboriginal women artists and activists to resistance, naming traumas and critiquing structural oppression. This is done whilst developing an evolving language and practice that is also non-colonial, responsive and resistant in “talkin’ up to the white cube,” - to paraphrase Alieen Moreton-Robinson (2000) and her seminal book Talkin up to the white woman - into the field of art.6 The work performs as a speaking Blak, to paraphrase bell hooks, subverting the dominant whiteness of gallery spaces, the white cube and void created by the statement of “Terra Nullius.”

Aboriginal women’s art work, as research and practice, is one form of representing the epistemologies and knowledges embodied in practices that become our archive, our gallery, our museum, a continuing process of remembering, recovering and passing down the generations.

Utilising art for personal and community memory work means naming the pain and the resistance to it, the healing that is needed and the processes by which such healing can be mobilised. It involved a process of localising historical and transgenerational traumas with localised acts of healing. These works were to be an invocation of “aesthetic repair,” and an expression of “daily acts of repair” for colonial traumas and wounds, as curator and academic Kim Kruger spoke of regarding Indigenous and diasporic cultural practices of decolonisation, repair and renewal in the Great Ocean/Pacific Rim region.7 Since colonisation is a structure, not an event,8 it requires these daily acts of repair as healing to exist under its oppression. Blak artists, activists and creative workers thus become critical to “survivance”9 by making private, shared, collective and public events, communities, places and spaces to disrupt what functions to uphold dominant colonial narratives.

Our bodies, birthing rites and sites are pathologised, tested and medicalised, in particular during the destruction of Djap Wurrung Birthing Trees and sites by Vic Roads and the Victorian State Government in June 2018. Here, the resistance, activism and protective actions of Djap Warrung women is disruptive, revolutionary and incredibly courageous.

These are disruptions to the ongoing colonial project that includes ecocide, erasure and desecration of sacred sites – and the hypocrisy of doing so whilst attempting to create a treaty with Victorian Aboriginal Peoples. The use of the term healing and its practice as trauma treatment speak to the “daily acts of repair” needed to both remember and to reconstruct sovereignty. As a Wemba-Wemba woman, I researched Aboriginal women artists’ work, and women’s work, to recover matrilineal relationships between my mother’s, grandmothers’ and great and great-great grandmothers’ experiences of surviving, experiencing and resisting colonisation. Indigenous art standpoints and theories, particularly those in which Aboriginal Peoples name their own traumas and healing processes, are largely neglected from the white research curriculum.

Curating a space of resistance through cultural architecture: Blak Women’s Houses

The mission houses of Wemba-Wemba women, and in particular the stories and memories of my matriarchs’ little bush homes at Moonahcullah Mission on Wemba-Wemba Country, were the starting point for creating an immersive installation of memory, respite, healing and timelessness. My standpoint as a Wemba-Wemba matriarchal woman, a river woman, was something I drew on to articulate a three-dimensional temporal space in my exhibition held at Footscray Community Arts Centre in December 2019. The Mission House installation was created from over two hundred and fifty pieces of bush dyed calico, cotton and op-shop women’s and children’s clothing, which I collected and created over six months in 2019.

This space was built to hold an immersive sense of unconditional love. My matriarchs developed a way of curating their homes and gardens to give a sense of safety, welcome and nurturing to our families and communities. To curate means to care. The first curators I knew were my mother, grandmother and Aunties. With very little materially, they were able to create homes of love and beauty that made us proud to live in. However, the narrative surrounding us in the white world was to tell stories that we destroy homes and don’t deserve the homes we are apparently “given” by the government. Such lies persist today. Angry, hateful white children at my primary school would scream in my face that “Your people get everything! You get houses and cars! And you burn everything down!”

Installation image of Unconditional Love Space (2019). Works from left to right: Kalina Moonahcullah (2019), Mission House (2019), Clothes Line (2019), Clothing Pile (2019). Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: the ways that First Nations women in art and community speak Blak to the colony and patriarchy (2019), Footscray Community Arts Centre. Image credit Anthony Balla (2019)

Moonahcullah was deemed a reserve from 1896 until 1962, and operated as a government-run Aboriginal reserve administered by the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM). The Mission school was established in 1911;10 it was gazetted and then revoked in 1964. In 1898, the cemetery was established, and our family and people continue to be buried and cared for there.

In 1941, Mission Managers were appointed by the state government to take over the running of the mission. In protest at the oppressive, racist treatment of our people, my great grandparents, Nancy Egan (née Day), a Wemba-Wemba woman, and Robert Wallace Egan, a Gunditjmara man of Framlingham Mission, left Moonahcullah with their ten children and made their way to Echuca, Yorta Yorta Country. They were forced to leave Wemba-Wemba Homelands for the first time in history. This caused a fracture in our lives, but not an ending of our sovereignty.

A wave of community re-occupation of Wemba-Wemba Country took place during the 1970s and 1980s and returning families took up life once again, rebuilding little homes after the little Mission Houses community had been demolished by settlers, along with the schoolhouse, church hall and gardens created by Wemba-Wemba Peoples. Together they were walking through various ghost weavings, layers of occupation, culture, history and activity of Wemba-Wemba Peoples on Country: scar trees, cultural sites, gathering places, story places, weaving places, hunting, fishing, cooking and eating sites that were erased through genocidal acts by the first wave of colonisation. My mother took us home to Moonahcullah regularly as a child growing up with my brother and cousins for family camping trips, hunting, fishing, swimming and learning in the same places our Wemba-Wemba Peoples had for hundreds of generations before us. The places where we camped corresponded to the positioning of the original Mission Houses, including where each family group had negotiated their positions.

The original Mission Houses were the very embodiment of surviving colonialism through built visual sovereignty: small houses and mission buildings, a schoolhouse, church and store. Homes had one room, wood-framed, with compacted dirt floors that were kept meticulously clean by sprinkling with water and brushing with gum leaf brooms. The walls were insulated with old newspapers, and they were lit by lanterns or candles. There was no electricity or heating, other than stoves that were added later.

Paola Balla Unconditional Love Space (2019) bush dyed calico Mission House (2019), recycled timber, gum leaves, foam mattress, pillow, voile, interfacing, op-shop bedding, 3m x 3.5 metres by 4.5m, with Clothes Line (2019). Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: the ways that First Nations women in art and community speak Blak to the colony and patriarchy (2019), Footscray Community Arts Centre. Image credit Anthony Balla (2019)

Our esteemed Wemba-Wemba Matriarch, my great-great grandmother Papa Mariah Day, was moved from her place onto the Mission site, forcing her from her sovereign position on the Tumudjeri Creek, a woman’s place. Disrespecting her sovereignty, but not destroying it. In fact, remembering and telling stories and facts of genocide are ways of maintaining our unceded sovereignty as Wemba-Wemba Peoples and the fact that the settler state still has no Treaty with us. Current negotiations on the stalled Treaty with the Victorian State Government neglect to include Wemba-Wemba Peoples at all, as we are not a Registered Aboriginal Party as required by the Victorian State Government. The settler borders that encroach on our lands leave us, in a sense, stateless. We stand alone, unrepresented, but also sovereign from this flawed process that has embodied state-sanctioned colonial ways of doing things. We remain as Wemba-Wemba Peoples still being, doing and knowing who we are.

I grew up in town at Echuca, on Yorta Yorta Country. For the longest part of my childhood I lived in Aboriginal housing — that is, housing funded by the Australian government, managed by white offices where we paid our rent for the house with minimal heating and no air conditioning for the summer heat, with mission brown bricks and thin hard carpet. It was a house we never ever felt truly safe in, knowing that we could be kicked out at any time. There were times — due to financial stress and poverty — that my mother would get behind on our rent and had to appear in the Bendigo Magistrates Court to plead for more time to catch up. When I was sixteen, I went with Mum and watched her plead for our rental. I will never forget the fear of seeing the Sheriff drive up to our house and having to speak to the Sheriff while our mother hid inside, lying to him to protect Mum from potential jail time.

Housing instability trailed us in our lives and resulted in an event where our home was emptied out in our absence and the majority of our belongings taken to a charity op-shop. It was devastating to lose so many of my childhood toys, books and the few things I had been able to hang onto, after moving multiple times with my mother and little brother around the state, to different homes and new schools. By coincidence, when I was nineteen years old, I was with a friend and visited this op-shop, finding what was left of our belongings. It was a strange event. All of my life I had op-shopped with my family for clothing and household items. It was surreal to see our own life displayed there: I felt as if our very life, our struggles, were on display for everyone to see. It was like being turned inside out, shocking and confronting. Our privacy and dignity were violated. It required drawing on a fierceness within me to explain to the white women who worked in the op-shop what I believed had happened and to demand our things back.

Clothes Line (2019), bush dyed Indian calico, op-shop lace, baby clothing, dresses, clothing, rope. 10m x 5m x 3m. Clothing Pile (2019), baby clothing, dresses, lace doilies, calico ground sheet. Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: the ways that First Nations women in art and community speak Blak to the colony and patriarchy (2019), Footscray Community Arts Centre. Image credit Paola Balla (2019)

The Department of Housing and the Aboriginal co-operative itself had sent the charity in to empty us out and change the locks. My friend backed me up and helped explain while I became slightly hysterical, because I was in shock. Because I had been through so much transgenerational trauma and transgenerational racism, I reacted in the way that people with trauma do: I yelled, swore, and confronted and expressed my grief at seeing our lives spread out in public for literal consumption and shaming. This was before mobile phones were common and I couldn’t call Mum to tell her. I was living in Melbourne with her then, until we were able to get our things and move to our new rented flat.

Charity, trauma and capitalism all collided. In this strange intersection I remembered my painting and asked where it was but was informed that I had made my very first art sale. A painting, a very detailed, large portrait of my mother and little brother — who were my whole world — for my Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) art subject had been sold to a white woman who lived on a farm. For a moment, the shock of having our lives displayed in public was suspended and I revelled in someone liking and actually paying for one of my paintings. Then, after that momentary joy and pride were gone, I was left with the horrible duty of transporting our lives in seven green garbage bags back on the train to our new city, a three-hour trip. I had to tell Mum that not only was my painting of her gone — I had given it to her as a surprise at the end of the school year — but so were many of her things, despite my best efforts to gather and reclaim as much as I could. I went on to write about this story for a reading, my first ever, at La Mama Theatre in Carlton, in 2010. Such experiences of “home” were woven into the Mission House installation for the ontological space in my PhD exhibition.

African American professor of architecture La Verne Wells-Bowie highlights in her writings the significance of architecture created by people who were not schooled in the profession or even in the art of building. She offers the insight that “vernacular architecture is a language of cultural expression” that “exemplifies how the physical environment reflects the uniqueness of a culture.”11

Interior detail view of bush dyed calico Mission House (2019) with Still of Super8 Film footage of Moonahcullah Mission site (Hercus 1961) with Clothes Line (2019). Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: the ways that First Nations women in art and community speak Blak to the colony and patriarchy (2019), Footscray Community Arts Centre. Image credit Paola Balla (2019)

In Art On My Mind (1995), Black feminist bell hooks talks about little Black houses in America: the way that Black women make little, modest, poor homes into places of love, beauty and respite.12 She points to the way families put verandas on little houses, surprising white people that little poor homes would even have a veranda. She describes her grandmother’s house, which

was not unlike the small shacks that were the homes of many Southern black folks. Her place was just a bigger, more elegant shack. Wood-frame dwellings that were fragile or sturdy shaped my sense of meaningful vernacular architecture. Many of these structures, though fragile and therefore altered by time and the elements, remain and offer a wealth of information about the relationship of poor and working-class rural black folks to space.”13

In her chapter, Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice (1995), hooks invokes hope of another kind for Black people in Turtle Island, by reflecting on a high school art class activity where she was asked to imagine and draw her dream home. She was “to design a dwelling place of dreams.”14

In the ontological “Unconditional Love space,” of my PhD exhibition, this installation, and in particular the little Mission House I created, was a place of respite and an embodiment of healing and repair, not only offered to others, but also as a place for me and my family to rest at the end of this project. It was a place of dreams, and of memory/memories. To draw further on this sense of dreaming, sleeping and rest, sorely needed by Blackfullas, and Blak women in particular, I included a bed lined with gum leaves in reference to my grandmother’s poem, Childhood Memories,15 essentially a nihilist meditation on suffering, hunger and colonial poverty. In the poem, my grandmother invokes the comfort from her mother’s “gentle and loving black hand.”

Detail of Clothes Line (2019), bush dyed calico, Unconditional Love Space (2019), with Still of Super8 Film Footage of Moonahcullah Mission site (Hercus 1961). Shown in Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius: the ways that First Nations women in art and community speak Blak to the colony and patriarchy (2019), Footscray Community Arts Centre. Image credit Paola Balla (2019)

These gentle and loving Black hands have soothed and guided me in my life, and inspired me to remember, name and share my matriarchs’ power and unconditional love as sovereign warriors through story and art.

Their love is present.


  1. Clare Williamson and Hetti Perkins, Blakness: Blak City Culture! (South Yarra: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1994), 20–31. ↩︎

  2. Kate L Munro, “Why ‘Blak’ not Black? Artist Destiny Deacon and the origins of this word,” National Indigenous Television, June 29, 2020, https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2020/05/07/why-blak-not-black-artist-destiny-deacon-and-origins-word-1↩︎

  3. Stephen Gilchrist, Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia, ed. Stephen Gilchrist (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Art Museums, 2016), 19. ↩︎

  4. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and White Feminism (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2000), 152. ↩︎

  5. Karen Lillian Martin, Please Knock Before You Enter: Aboriginal Regulation of Outsiders and the Implications for Researchers (Teneriffe, Qld: Post Pressed, 2008). ↩︎

  6. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and White Feminism (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2000). ↩︎

  7. Kim Kruger, “De-colonial work and ‘daily repair’ and geographical boundaries of colonialism, mapping and damages and the unsung South Sea Islanders Peoples and the history of Black Birding in Australia.” Kader Attia Symposium: La Colonie (SUD), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, November 11, 2017. ↩︎

  8. J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “A Structure, Not an Event: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral 5, no.1 (Spring 2016), http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/Forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/↩︎

  9. Gerald Vizenor, Survivance: narratives of Native presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1. ↩︎

  10. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Moonahcullah ration books: MS 5056, Item 1, p 4. ↩︎

  11. bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: New Press, 1995). ↩︎

  12. Ibid. ↩︎

  13. Ibid., 149. ↩︎

  14. Ibid., 145. ↩︎

  15. Rose Tang, “Childhood Memories.” Sydney Review of Books, 2020, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/tyirrem-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-knew-it/. Accessed 27 July 2020 ↩︎


Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Moonahcullah ration books: MS 5056, Item 1, 4.

Balla, Paola. 2016. “Disrupting Artistic Terra Nullius, The Ways In Which Aboriginal Women Artists and Activists Speak Back to Colonial Australia Through Art, PhD thesis, Victoria University

Gilchrist, Stephen, ed. Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia. Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums, 2016.
hooks, bell. Art On My Mind, Visual Politics. New York: New Press, 1995.
hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. New York: Imprint Routledge. 2014.

Kauanui, J. Kēhaulani. “A Structure, Not an Event: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity.” Lateral 5, no. 1 (Spring 2016), http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/Forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/.

Kruger, Kim. “De-colonial work and ‘daily repair’ and geographical boundaries of colonialism, mapping and damages and the unsung South Sea Islanders Peoples and the history of Black Birding in Australia.” Kader Attia Symposium: La Colonie (SUD)., Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, November 11, 2017.

Martin, Karen Lilian. Please Knock Before You Enter: Aboriginal regulation of Outsiders and the implications for researchers. Teneriffe, QLD: Post Pressed. 2008.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters. Crows Nest, NSW:Allen & Unwin, 2007.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin’ up to the white woman: indigenous women and white feminism. St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press. 2000.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2015.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “Towards An Australian Indigenous Women’s Standpoint Theory: A Methodological Tool” Australian Feminist Studies 28, no. 78 (2012): 13–16.

Munro, Kate L. 2020. “Why ‘Blak’ not Black? Artist Destiny Deacon and the origins of this word.” SBS, June 29, 2020, https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2020/05/07/why-blak-not-black-artist-destiny-deacon-and-origins-word-1

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: Otago University Press. 2012.

Tang, Rose. “Childhood Memories.” Sydney Review of Books, Accessed 27 July 2020. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/tyirrem-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-knew-it/

Vizenor, Gerald. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

Williamson, Clare and Perkins, Hetti. Blakness: Blak City Culture!. South Yarra: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1994

This article was peer reviewed.

Dr. Paola Balla is a Wemba-Wemba & Gunditjmara woman & is a visual artist, curator, writer, lecturer and researcher at Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Centre, at Victoria University. During her candidature Paola was a Lisa Bellear Postgraduate Research Scholar. Her practice led research, art and writing focuses on Black women’s contributions & activisms & their roles in disrupting racism, and white dominant narratives & spaces.