INCARCERNATION
An off-site exhibition at at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA), Parap, Northern Territory
Presented in partnership with NCCA (Darwin) and co-curated by Djon Mundine OAM, Don Nawurlany Christophersen, Jo Holder and Petrit Abazi
Exhibition runs 5 August – 26 September 2026
Artists
Hoda Afshar, Vernon Ah Kee, Billiamook, Nick Bland, M. Boko, Behrouz Boochani, Selma Nunay Coulthard, Mathew Dargan, Unrupa Rhonda Dick, Charlie Flannigan, Nicholas Gouldhurst, Jack Green, Zak Grieve, Gary Lee, Chips Mackinolty, Sara Maiorino, Georgie Mattingley, Archie Moore, Sally M Nangala Mulda, Albert Namatjira, Vincent Namatjira, Sandra Saunders, Gordon Syron, Jason Wing, Anwar Young and Frank Young
PREFACE
This exhibition confronts Australia’s disgraceful and systemic mass incarceration crisis and the over-representation of First Nations people within it. Curators Djon Mundine OAM, Donald Nawurlany Christophersen, Jo Holder and Petrit Abazi, have backgrounds in art curating, writing, art history and archiving stories with an emphasis on equity and social justice. While we come from various cultural and geographic backgrounds, our focus is largely on northern and central Australia.
Our decision to collaborate was first provoked by the growing number of prisoners, often young people, in the Northern Territory. Secondly, we were inspired by recent exhibitions: Dreams Nursed in Darkness (Wollongong Art Gallery, 2024) and Blak In-Justice: Incarceration and Resilience (Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2025). Also influential was Christophersen’s exhibition and book A Little Bit of Justice: The Drawings of Charlie Flannigan (Parliament House, Garramilla/ Darwin)(1), which told the story of an Aboriginal prisoner, the first person to be executed at Fannie Bay Gaol in 1893. Djon Mundine brings experience of art made in prisons and has curated exhibitions ‘outside’ on the subject.(2)
In the exhibition, Charlie Flannigan’s modest lead and colour pencil drawings of animals and habitat, and his life as a stockman, confront racial conflict and injustice with the richness of Aboriginal history. We also refer to a colonial exhibition of prison art The Dawn of Art, which was presented at Melbourne’s Centennial International Exhibition in 1888–89 by J.G. Knight, Deputy Sheriff of Palmerston. Knight, who trained as an engineer and architect, had recognised the prisoners’ artistic talents and exhibited their work as art rather than as ethnography or ‘primitive art’.(3)
In this context, Flannigan’s story meets that of Larrakia artist Billiamook, locked up on minor charges through the 1880s, and works by Flannigan and Billiamook and their tragic encounter with incarceration preface IncarcerNation.
Billiamook, whose Larrakia name was Gapal, worked as an interpreter for amateur photographer Paul Foelsche, the first Superintendent of Police, who arrived in the new settlement of Palmerston in 1870, a year after its founding.(4) As a diplomat, Billiamook drew on centuries of Larrakia experience negotiating the multilingual crews of Makassan prahus. Larrakia artist and anthropologist Gary Lee championed Billiamook’s life and art in the exhibition Billiamook: A Larrakia Legend (Charles Darwin University Gallery, 2004). Lee has continued to retrieve ancestors from colonial archives, as in his splendid gold-leaf embossed tribute to Gapal (2026) in this exhibition.
Also featured is a wooden amirre/spear-thrower made by Albert Namatjira, painted with an image of a traditional Arrernte man. It sits beside an early painting by Vincent Namatjira, his great-grandson, that recounts Albert’s story with all its tragic implications. Albert Selling Craftwork to Policemen (2013) depicts a real-life incident, positioning beefy state troopers against a stark brick wall to evoke feelings of foreboding: Namatjira’s later life was destroyed by run-ins with police and the legal system. In the late 1950s most Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory were wards of the state, but Albert, by then regarded as a ‘success story’ who had met the Queen, was made an Australian citizen under 1957 legislation. As such, if he shared a drink with a kinsman, he was breaking the law. If family stayed overnight with him in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, he was breaking the law. State and federal legislation had established ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘citizen’ as mutually exclusive categories.
Worimi/Biripi man Gordon Syron, after serving 10 years in prison, co-founded and became the first visual arts teacher at EORA Technical College in Redfern: a college (like Batchelor Institute) focused on outcomes for Aboriginal people and taught by Aboriginal people. His painting Judgement by his Peers (1978) shows an all-black court and jury with a white defendant and is now in the National Gallery of Australia collection. In IncarcerNation, Syron’s etching Bury the Living (1993) shows ‘the prison window that I looked at for 10 years … I saw history through these bars that the redcoats brought to us; disease, rum, religion and death and destruction for my culture’.(5)
Ngarrindjeri and Boandik artist Sandra Saunders’ painting Lore vs Law (2004) reverses Syron’s Judgement by his Peers. Her painting shows an all-white High Court bench considering the merits of women’s Lore and refers to the Hindmarsh Island bridge controversy, which began in the 1990s with legislation to remove heritage protection. It ran parallel to the Mabo and Wik land rights cases and was also politicised by some to deny Indigenous rights. Saunders pays tribute to the cultural stewardship of the Ngarrindjeri women who sustained a marathon legal battle and whose Ancestors symbolically preside behind the bench.
IncarcerNation runs concurrently with Behind the Wire (2026)—the welcome return to Fannie Bay Gaol’s annual exhibition of art by prisoners, which began in 1996 as part of a national art in prisons scheme. Under this banner, the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (then 24-Hour Art) hosted an art project led by artist Franck Gohier. The project’s success led to the establishment of art workshops in Berrimah Gaol and Alice Springs Correctional Centre. A juvenile program was soon set up at Don Dale youth prison. The exhibition has returned in its Fannie Bay prison context (1 to 14 August 2026), now including work from prisons in Berrimah and Holtz and sculptures by the celebrated Greenbush Art Group who exhibit annually at the Araluen Centre in Mparntwe.
INCARCERNATION: MAJORITIES V MINORITIES
IncarcerNation is focused on the power of evidence-based advocacy. Australians proudly support the rule of law as a paramount feature of our democracy. We market our national reputation—especially in the region—on this national characteristic. But a national or an international rules-based order is not a given.
The scandal of Australia’s two-tiered justice system sours this posturing, in delivering far worse outcomes for First Nations Australians than for all others. Too many Aboriginal families are affected by mass incarceration. In Australia there is now an ominous view that the rights of minorities are less significant than the privilege of the advantaged; that cultural difference is a hindrance; and hence policy imperatives are those that involve the side-lining of individual rights and freedoms.
Drawing attention to this serious collective issue is a legendary family of artists from Anangu Country who combine art practice with community engagement: Anwar Young, Frank Young and Unrupa Rhonda Dick. Frank Young is a leader in Amata in north-western South Australia and his grandson Anwar works with vulnerable young people. They collaborate on the Kulata Tjuta Project teaching young men the traditional art of making kulata/spears. The artwork Kulata Tjuta—Wati kulunypa tjukurpa (Many spears—Young fella story) installed in this exhibition won the 2017 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award; a profound recognition of the artists’ ambition to heal and care for community.
The four-channel video Code Black/Riot (2025) commissioned by the Sydney Biennale is another expanded collaboration. Kuku, Yalandji Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr artist Vernon Ah Kee, Hoda Afshar and writer Behrouz Boochani developed the work through a series of community visits, relational dialogue and time on Country—helped by First Nations-led advocacy organisation Change the Record with support from YETI (Youth Empowered Towards Independence). The work thoughtfully defines the impact of incarceration on vulnerable kids who are struggling to understand the savage world surrounding them. Bochani’s companion text frames the broader penal context in Australia to include off-shore detention.
From 1987 to 1991, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody investigated the deaths of Aboriginal people held in state and territory gaols. Thirty-five years ago, the Commission handed down its findings and made over 300 recommendations. It concluded that imprisonment must be a last resort and that systemic inequalities caused by colonisation and dispossession—not higher crime rates—drove the disproportionate incarceration of First Nations people. The findings have been largely ignored by governments.
Gaol is a dangerous place. Since the Commission delivered its findings in 1991, there have been a staggering 639 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in custody nationwide. Chips Mackinolty’s Kumanjayi (2020) is a cry for those who have passed away in detention: repeated red stamps of the word ‘Kumanjayi’ are framed against a vast dark prison wall. With the ongoing refusal of all but one jurisdiction in Australia to stop children as young as 10 from being imprisoned, the banner Kids on country, not in custody (2020), is a further, national response to the ongoing cruelty of the jailing of children and consequent deaths in custody.
Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore’s Cairns (2025), is a sculptural work comprising two towering ‘classical’ columns made from old copies of Hansard—one for the House of Representatives and one for the Senate. Each bound volume records elected officials arguing with rhetoric and procedure over lives far from their own, debates which are usually followed by inertia and deafening silence.
JUSTICE FOR FIRST NATIONS PEOPLE
IncarcerNation asks us not to look away from the vast industry dedicated to locking up First Nations people (and writing reports). In New South Wales, while constituting just 3% of the adult population and 8% of the population aged 10 to 17 years old, Aboriginal men and women comprise more than 30% of the adult prison population and Aboriginal boys and girls 50% of the youth detention population.
The Northern Territory is the second-most incarcerated region in the world. Imprisonment rates are more than four times the Australian average. The number of children in prison is nearly five times the national rate. Aboriginal people represent about 85% of the prison population, though they make up only 26% of the Territory’s population. Detained children are almost exclusively Aboriginal. Many are held hundreds of kilometres from their families, community and Country. For most, English is their second or third language. In the Northern Territory since December 2024, an average of 40 Aboriginal people are being taken into custody every day: almost a doubling of the average daily rate of 23 in January 2020.(6)
A small silkscreen work by Mrs M. Boko shows a mob of naughty kids—both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—in acrobatic action, trampolining on top of cars. The image asks who will be arrested: white or black kids?
The title of Jason Wing’s self-portrait Intervention: Criminal (2012), refers to the 2007 ‘Intervention’ into Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. The Northern Territory National Emergency Response stripped the rights of a minority and thus flew in the face of international human rights conventions and Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act. Wing’s black-and-white paste-up proclaims all Aboriginal people were criminalised by the legislation.
By contrast, there is a quiet assertion of cultural resilience by renowned Pertama Maduthara Luritja artist Selma Coulthard in her satirical Community Policing (2024) and Sally M. Mulda’s Policemen (2012). Their eye-witness accounts show police in blue uniforms harassing and upsetting little campsites as conditions and over-crowding in town camps worsen.
Jack Green shows other reasons for the Territory’s high arrest numbers. In his statement sitting beside the painting Unlicensed, Unregistered, Prison (2016), Green says: ‘This painting shows everyday life, how the police stop all us mob in our old motorcars trying to get into town. They stop us and next thing you find yourself in a cage or might even be prison.’ Similarly, Green’s statement for the work Boomerang Story 1 (2016) recalls an incident when a senior Waanyi fella was not allowed to board a Qantas plane with his ceremonial boomerangs used for song. So much for the cultural awareness of the flying kangaroo.
There is an unacceptable and structural imbalance in our justice system, based on race. As was recognised by the authors of the Uluru Statement from the Heart:
“Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are alienated from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future. These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.”(7)
Larrakia artist Gary Lee’s work Sad Buddha (2016)—a photograph of a naked young man protectively crouching as if to ward off an assailant—is a reminder of the constant threat of this structural imbalance. One Monday night in 2016, the image of a young inmate, Dylan Voller, restrained in a chair and wearing a spit hood was aired on ABC TV’s Four Corners. The kids in Don Dale Youth Detention Centre had been held in substandard conditions. Some cells lacked water. None were air-conditioned. The solitary confinement cells were the worst. The episode documented the experience of acute anxiety and depression suffered by individuals locked in the centre’s Behavioural Management Unit (BMU) maximum security cells. A ‘riot’ had erupted in the BMU as a protest by the kids against being held in solitary for weeks at a time.
The image of young Dylan signified the shocking truth about the treatment of children behind bars. The images spoke of industrial-scale torture and impunity. The drawing Don v. Dale (2017) by children’s writer Nick Bland, subsequently published in Land Rights News, highlights the fact that kids were held by a system that seemed bent on breaking children instead of reforming them. Not surprisingly, a royal commission was called within days. In June 2026 the High Court finally awarded damages to four boys who were tear gassed at Don Dale. This came after a marathon legal battle before Northern Territory Supreme Court judges, the Court of Appeal and two sets of proceedings in the High Court.
Kumanjayi Walker was a 19-year-old Aboriginal man shot dead while being arrested in Yuendumu. Eventually, the coroner upheld the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) submissions that aspects of the NT Police Force’s policing was structurally racist. Images of an annual, disturbingly racist ‘Coon of the Year’ award created by officers in the ‘elite’ Tactical Response Group (TRG) quickly circulated around the world after being produced in court.
Georgie Mattingley, who worked in a high-security prison, offers a frightening insight into this ‘elite’ way of thinking in the video work The New World (2021), also shown as part of a three-artist project called CELLBLOCK at the Women’s Museum of Australia in Alice Springs, alongside photographs of surveillance cameras by co-exhibitor Sara Maiorino and bleak images by Nicholas Gouldhurst pointing to a de-humanised prison system. Matthew Dargan’s painting Brothers Behind Bars (2018) expresses his lived experience as a survivor of this system.
Zac Grieve’s intense pencil and ink drawing Verisimilitude (2017-18) shows a former inmate’s inner struggle for dignity and self-respect. Grieve, who was sentenced for a murder he didn’t commit under controversial mandatory sentencing laws, says: ‘When you’re drawing you have those creative moments that could be the difference between someone getting out angry and bitter versus someone who walks out with a gentle and soft perspective.’ He is now a published writer.
Two brilliant silkscreen prints in IncarcerNation were created by Anon, a young offender held in Don Dale in the early 2000s who participated in Corrections’ A Safer Community Project under the banner ‘Ending Offending—Our Message’. Teacher and co-printer Franck Gohier says the young person used these prints successfully in their parole hearings.
CONCLUSION
Artists have the imaginative power to remind us that the pinnacle of human activity is the dignity of all people. They help us imagine a future where crime and imprisonment rates are low; a society where people of every social and economic background have an equal opportunity to flourish as dignified human beings in thriving communities.
Despite four decades of clear and unambiguous recommendations made in royal commissions and by coroners, there has been no improvement for First Nations people caught up in the criminal justice system. Policy makers and legislators continue to ignore the evidence and reject the findings. It is still happening now throughout Australia.
In the Northern Territory, there is a chronic shortage of programs that reduce criminal behaviour, particularly in remote Aboriginal communities. There is also a real need to increase spending on Aboriginal community controlled services that specifically target offending (for example family violence, sexual assault, alcohol and drug abuse), as well as preventative programs, such as early childhood intervention, school attendance and youth programs. The North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency (NAAJA) is one of many NGOs calling for urgent reform to address systemic inequalities in the criminal justice system and a greater emphasis on diversionary, rehabilitation and education programs as an alternative to incarceration. The money saved by holding fewer people in prison could be invested in cultural and artistic programs that celebrate the rich and diverse people of these lands and waters.
Essay by Jo Holder
With Djon Mundine OAM, Don Christophersen & Petrit Abazi, July 2026
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Notes
1. Donald J. Christophersen, A little bit of justice: the story of Charlie Flannigan – the first man to be executed in the Northern Territory of South Australia, UniPrint, Darwin, 2023.
2. For example, People We Know Places We’ve Been—Goulburn Art Class 2-0-1- 1. Curated by Djon Mundine OAM, Goulburn Art Gallery, 2011.
3. The drawings collected by Knight are held in the South Australian Museum. The exception is an original framed panel held by Museum Victoria. Some copies are on display on an interpretation panel in the old gaol.
4. Palmerston Gaol and Labour Prison at Fannie Bay, Darwin operated from 1883 to 1979. Prisoners worked as day labour. In 2011, the name Palmerston was changed to Garramilla/Darwin. Today the former prison is managed by the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory as a historic site.
5. Cited on artists website:https://gordonsyron.com/art/catalogue/ 27 July 2026 6. See: Australian Institute of Criminology, Deaths in Custody in Australia Real time Dashboard: https://www.aic.gov.au/statistics/deaths-custody-australia
7. See: https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/view-the-statement/
Chips Mackinolty, Kids on Country, Not in Custody, digital print on vinyl banner, 94 x 300 cm. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Archie Moore, Cairns, 2025, Hansard Volumes House of Representatives, and Hansard Volumes Senate found hardcover books, installation dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist / The Commercial.
Forground: Archie Moore, Cairns, 2025, Hansard Volumes House of Representatives, and Hansard Volumes Senate found hardcover books, installation dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial. Background: Vincent Namatjira, Albert selling artefacts to the Police, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 101 x 76 cm. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Forground: Archie Moore, Cairns, 2025, Hansard Volumes House of Representatives, and Hansard Volumes Senate found hardcover books, installation dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and The Commercial. Background: Sandra Saunders, Lore vs Law, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 122 cm. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Sandra Saunders, Lore vs Law, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 122 cm. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Frank Young, Unripe Rhonda Dick, Anwar Young, Kulata Tjuta — Wati Kulunypa Tjukurpa (Many Spears — Young Fella Story), 2017, digital print, wood, kangaroo tendon, kiti (natural glue), size variable. Courtesy of the artist,Tjala Arts, South Australia and APYCC. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Hoda Afshar, Vernon Ah Kee, Behrouz Boochani, Code Black/Riot, 2025, Four-channel digital video, 33 mins. Courtesy of the artists, Buxton Contemporary and Milani Gallery. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Gary Lee, Sad Buddha, digital print, 42 x 50 cm. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Gary Lee, Gapal, gold foil on digital print on Ilford cotton rag paper, 31.4 x 25 cm (framed). Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Gordon Syron, Bury the Living, 1993, lithograph, 58 x 76 cm. Courtesy of Adrian Newstead. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Georgie Mattingley, Once Upon a Time, 2024, oil on silver gelatin print, epoxy resin frame. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Georgie Mattingley, The New World, 2021, 3 channel film, 23 minutes, installation dimensions variable. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Georgie Mattingley, The New World, 2021, 3 channel film, 23 minutes, installation dimensions variable. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Sara Maiorino, Selected work from Observations on Surveillance, Untitled I-V, 2024. silver gelatin print. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Sara Maiorino, Selected works from Observations on Surveillance, Untitled I-V, 2024. silver gelatin prints. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Jack Green, Unlicensed, Unregistered, Prison, 2016. acrylic on linen, 46 x 56 cm. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
“Our motorcars take a hammering on the dirt roads and getting them fixed-up costs a big mob of money. Its big mob of money to get the motorcar registered too; money us Aboriginal people just don’t have. On top of this a lot of people don’t have a licence, it’s just too hard to get a licence in remote places. But we gotta travel for work, ceremony, for funerals, health and visiting family. This painting shows everyday life, how the police stop all us mob in our old motorcars trying to get in to town. They stop us and next thing you find yourself in a cage or might even be prison.”
M. Boko, Tjitji Jumparin Gunji Mutuka Katu, 2015. screenprint on paper. 58 x 50 cm. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Anon, A Safer Community, 2000, Printed by Franck Gohier with Tom Redston and David Molloy, screenprint on archival-system card, printer’s proof, edition of 130, 65 h x 91 w cm. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Nicholas Gouldhurst, (Top) Missing Persons, 2026 (Bottom) Political Prisoner, 2025. Both digital prints on Ilford Galerie paper.
Zak Grieve, Verisimilitude, 2017-2018, primsacolor pencils on paper, 42 x 28.5 cm
IncarcerNation, 2026, installation view. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
IncarcerNation, 2026, installation view. Photo: Nicholas Gouldhurst.
Welcome to Larrakia Country: Gary Lee. Opening talks, IncarcerNation at NCCA, 2026. Images courtesy of Jack Bullen / NCCA.
Ben Grimes, CEO, Northern Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency. Opening talks, IncarcerNation at NCCA, 2026. Images courtesy of Jack Bullen / NCCA.
Opening talks, IncarcerNation at NCCA, 2026. Images courtesy of Jack Bullen / NCCA.
Rocket Bretherton, Justice Reform Initiative. Opening talks, IncarcerNation at NCCA, 2026. Images courtesy of Jack Bullen / NCCA.