Like bloodthirsty mosquitoes
Jack Green & Alana Hunt
Opening: Saturday 31 August at 2pm
Exhibition: 31 August to 28 September 2024
Curated by Watch This Space Collective and The Cross Art Projects
Statement by Central Australian Frack Free Alliance
Reading by Gabriel Curtin, WTS ambassador
VIEW THE PUBLICATION
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Like bloodthirsty mosquitoes presents two acute bodies of work by Jack Green and Alana Hunt, counterpointed to detail the range of slow and constant harms of colonialism and resources extraction in different regions of remote northern Australia: the south-west Gulf Country in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley in Western Australia. A painting by Jack Green gives the exhibition its title. An excerpt from his accompanying statement for Like bloodthirsty mosquitoes explains: “It never stops. From the first time they came on horses with guns shooting and killing our people and now in the mining trucks and drilling rigs one after another, like blood thirsty mosquitoes.”
In their work, Green and Hunt draw on a decade of exhibitions, writing, research and experience to paint a picture of ongoing frontier violence—of conquest and killings, land theft (pastoralists, miners, nation builders and other grifters), racial partition and racist conservation policy. They are attentive to the grit and nuance of the local, set against the abstract workings of power interactions that invisibly shape relationships.
Through their combined Indigenous and non-Indigenous sets of eyes and voices, we understand that theft of minerals, water and wealth is an active continuum of domination that includes knowledge and power from relationships and payment from workers. For example, Jack Green and his family worked in the pastoral industry under slave labour conditions. Green and Hunt’s work upholds the right of First Nations peoples to organise and represent. Both artists often collaborate with equally experienced artist allies.
Senior Garrwa leader Jack Green (working with Seán Kerins and other allies), records damage and regulatory failure in a world where big monsoonal rivers flow from the Barkly Tablelands into the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Australian government is largely absent. Jack Green’s paintings detail the destruction of sacred sites and ecosystems, and longer-range and potentially lethal environmental harm. His statements address the power injustice between Traditional Owners and the state acting in the interests of extractors. In the Gulf Country, as everywhere, sovereignty was never surrendered, and people have fought and died for over a century. The Gulf Country alone has over 50 massacre sites.
Here the Rainbow Serpent is one of the most spiritually powerful ancestral beings and rests under the McArthur River. Green states, “The McArthur River region is a powerful place, it’s full of sacred sites that give us life … they cut the Snake to create the massive open cut pit in our land when they diverted the McArthur River. After they diverted the river a lot of the senior minggirringi (traditional owners) and junggayi (managers or custodians) for that place died.”
Jack Green brings to light the secretive dealings of one of the world’s biggest multinational miners, and the failings of environmental and Aboriginal heritage and sacred sites regulation. Swiss company Glencore Xstrata’s monolithic McArthur River Mine—one of the world’s biggest open cut lead, zinc, and silver mines—is situated 60km south-west of Borroloola/Burrulula: a small town with a 76 percent Aboriginal population. The resistance and representations of the region’s clans—the Gudanji, Garrwa, Marra and Yanyuwa people—have failed to stop the mine’s expansion and toxic impacts. The now contaminated river flows through the town as do trucks hauling minerals to the port. Green sometimes parodies corporate cowboys gleefully riding these massive haulage rigs, each container marked with the number of the millions of dollars in (untaxed) profits.
There is a sordid history of government legislating to enable mining after a court has intervened. After a victory in the Northern Territory Supreme Court (under the Sacred Sites Act) against the mine’s expansion, the Territory government passed an amendment to the mine’s Ratification Act (1992) to override the court’s judgement. In 2008 when Glencore Xstrata became Glencore, the mine changed to open cut and the river was diverted six kilometres to mine the riverbed. When Xstrata took over Mount Isa Mines in 2003, this was a small underground mine beside the McArthur River. In 2023 the Territory government again overturned a court decision and slashed the mine’s environmental security bond.
McArthur River Mine will continue to cause damage for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and the community will be left to foot the bill. The mine continues to operate without a life-of-mine closure plan, and a security bond that is wholly inadequate to deal with the catastrophic impacts. Meanwhile, with breathtaking cynicism the mine doles out miniscule amounts to a compulsory Community Benefit Fund (for the rodeo, not much needed housing)—exposing how tainted funding to communities legitimises mining.
Over these years, a Federal “develop the north” policy, has identified the Territory for “advanced stage” exploration for onshore shale gas with large contingent resources in the Beetaloo Sub-basin, Bonaparte Basin, and McArthur Basin. Jack Green states, “Whitefellas come straight into our Country with their trucks, looking for minerals and gas, and when they find em, they come with their drill rigs to start drilling and digging and sucking up our water. They suck the life from us and leave us with poison in our Country.”
Working from Miriwoong Country in the East Kimberley and from Gadigal/Sydney, Alana Hunt deploys a shifting media portfolio across film, photography, artist books and compiled volumes of research. Hunt was an artist in residence with the Kimberley Land Council from 2020-23 as part of SPACED’s Rural Utopias program, producing the body of work A Very Clear Picture, which exposed the failure of the West Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act (1972). Hunt has lived and worked on Gija and Miriwoong Countries for over 12 years and nurtures a continuing connection, recently returning to hold an outdoor film festival in Kununurra, the administrative hub of the Ord River Irrigation Scheme, and actively followed the landmark Timber Creek compensation claim in the High Court (Mr A. Griffiths v Commonwealth, 2019).
The centrepiece of Alana Hunt’s installation is Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023)— a 22-minute film shot in the auteur’s medium of Super 8 and narrated by Hunt in a gentle monologue. The projection sits beside the black and white photographs of A Delicate Balancing Act(2020-23), depicting the further alienation of Country for “your tourist adventure”.
On another wall sits A Very Clear Picture (2021-22), a triptych of scribbled key words such as “infrastructure upgrade, mining, tailing, geotechnical” along with other empty banalities transcribed by the artist as former Rio Tinto chief executive Sam Walsh reads 967 project summaries submitted between 2010-20 under ‘Clause 18’ of the state’s Aboriginal heritage legislation for her video work Nine Hundred and Sixty Seven (2020-21). This graffiti proclaims the Crown’s Sovereignty over stolen land.
Miriwoong people’s Country was stolen by the Ord River Irrigation Scheme, proposed as a messianic “irrigate the desert” intervention using a huge Commonwealth grant to build the Ord River Dam which forged the waters of Lake Argyle. The film’s shock reveal is archival footage of Miriwoong Country being blasted—hills, rocks and dust flying. It is the late 1960s and Traditional Owners were not consulted. Hunt describes the role of the town of Kununurra as the centre of a project that will unfold over differing decades, through constant attempts at expansion.
Ord River Irrigation Area Stage 2 saw 50,000 hectares of black soil plains opened for agriculture in the early 2000s. Ord Stage 3 could potentially see agricultural activity expanded across the border into the Northern Territory. While Traditional Owners are consulted in these more recent developments, the nature of that consultation, and Aboriginal people’s authority in those consultations illustrates an immense disparity of power and spurs internal conflict.
The film could be a satire about failed and inedible sandalwood plantations and other monoculture crops and the implied trajectory of national ascent or progress (for non-Indigenous people) as heralded by nation-building narratives, but Hunt deftly fingers other motives. She identifies colonisation not just as the pioneer myth, murders, displacement, and the transfer of vast intergenerational colonial wealth “to a few privileged white men”, but also as a continuous and present violence operating on many subtle levels. After the film’s introductory upbeat cowboy music, Hunt states, “It is a story about you and me. It is a story about the persistent violence of daily life here.”
The manifestation of non-Indigenous life on Miriwoong Country/Kununurra is one of ease, with its picnic grounds and dams set in glorious landscapes. Here the talk is of “stolen cars not stolen land”. Slow violence is present in our peripheral vision as we watch the deceptively ordinary presence of a solitary jogger in an “empty landscape”, and tourist groups disembarking from buses and boats to float over submerged Country, sacred sites and Dreaming tracks.
Green and Hunt describe an extractive economy that targets First Nations peoples, lands, and waters as terra nullius—existing only for the removal of natural resources, particularly for export with minimal processing. The concept of “extractivismo” was coined in Portuguese to describe the exploitation of forest resources in Brazil. The concept encases an ethos of menace and violence that sustains power structures, destroys communities, and produces injustice.
The Ord River Irrigation Scheme was and is funded and promoted as a “food bowl”. Today Big Cotton is itching to get at the free water. They call this new madness “Stage 3”. The “extractivismo” signature is the same no matter what continent or island. Mining (especially hydrocarbon operations) and industrial agriculture contaminates everything.
It is expected that those whose lives are upended by these operations will remain unseen and voiceless. In remote areas where compliance, monitoring and enforcement is weak and where there are poor success rates in addressing other environmental and societal challenges (such as Australia’s abysmal failure to “close the gap”), the disrespect and danger equation is exponentially greater.
In 2020, Jack Green submitted copies of a series of his paintings and accompanying stories to the Juukan Gorge Inquiry. The betrayal of Gudanji, Garrwa, Marra and Yanyuwa people by the Northern Territory and Federal Governments became one of six Case Studies for a Senate Inquiry by the Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia into the destruction (by dynamite) of the 46,000 years old sacred rock shelter at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region. In this case, the grief, shock, and outrage at miner Rio Tinto’s wilful yet legal desecration of the site reverberated globally. The Museum of Australian Democracy (or MoAD) in Old Parliament House Canberra had the foresight to turn the submission into the extraordinary exhibition Jack Green, Statement, which continues until mid-2025.
The legislation containing the infamous Section 18 which legitimated the detonation of Juukan Gorge was also documented by Alana Hunt in A Very Clear Picture: A Collection of Work, Words and Sources (2023)—collated over the course of her residency with the KLC to examine the violent banality of language used to legally perpetrate colonial violence. The Juukan Gorge Inquiry’s Final Report (October 2021) makes eight recommendations to address the disparity in power between Indigenous peoples and the mining industry as well as the failings of legislation designed to protect Indigenous heritage.
The Inquiry found that the current Western Australian Aboriginal heritage laws “played a critical role in the destruction of the shelters”. It concluded, “The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 has failed to protect Aboriginal Heritage, making the destruction of Indigenous heritage not only legal but almost inevitable.” Until the destruction, WA boasted that their legislation was the most rigorous in Australia.
After Juukan Gorge, The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 (WA) was reviewed and repealed. It was briefly replaced with the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 (WA) which was abruptly repealed after backlash from extractors. The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 remains the primary source of legislation for the “protection” of Aboriginal cultural heritage in Western Australia. However, there is some “improvement” to the controversial Section 18 approval process by which Ministerial consent is obtained to authorise the damage or destruction of Aboriginal sites. Aboriginal people have appeal rights (to a state tribunal) regarding the Minister’s decision. The broader definition of “Aboriginal cultural heritage” adopted under the 2021 Act, which included “cultural landscapes” and other forms of intangible cultural heritage, have not been carried across to the 1972 Act.
Jack Green’s introduction to his exhibition Statement: Jack Green’s Paintings at the Museum of Australian Democracy reads: “I want to show people what is happening to our country and to Aboriginal people. No one is listening to us. What we want. How we want to live. What we want in the future for our children. It’s for these reasons that I started to paint. I want government to listen to Aboriginal people. I want people in the cities to know what’s happening to us and our country. I want the government and mining companies to know that we are still here. We aren’t going anywhere. We aren’t dead yet. We are still here, feeling the country.”
We need more voices like those of Green and Hunt. We stand at a critical point in the recognition of Indigenous primacy in heritage in this country—lest we are led to a bitter end, shrouded in carbon-dense blackness. Meanwhile, in the gallery, the film fades to darkness.
By Jo Holder
Director, The Cross Art Projects
Footnotes
- Jack Green’s allies in art and exhibition making include: Seán Kerins, Nancy McDinny, Stuart Hoosan, Miriam Charlie, Therese Ritchie, Djon Mundine and The Cross Art Projects team. Alana Hunt’s publications detail her collaborators.
- See Water Grab, ABC 4 Corners, 19 August 2024.
Jack Green, Like bloodthirsty mosquitoes, 60 x 45 cm. Courtesy private collection.
“On the left of the painting on the blue you can see good land. It’s never been touched by miners or frackers. All the sacred sites are there and kept safe. On the orange you can see how they took our land with their guns, riding in on horses and killing our people with their bullets. ‘Clearing the land’, they say for their cattle. We tried to fight back. The river runs through the land. This is McArthur River. It’s given us life for thousands of years. In the river and all around are sacred sites. They are powerful places that give us life and we have to care for them, protect them as our old people have done. The man in the blue trousers is the welfare man. In the past when they pushed us off our land and rounded us up like cattle, government welfare people came in giving out food trying to quieten the people down. The welfare man is just like the government men today who come with the miners and frackers, they got a few bits and pieces to chuck around to the people to quieten them down while they let in the mining and fracking companies who race in with all their equipment clearing the land and pushing us out. In the top right of the painting is what looks like a whole lot of arrows. These represent mosquitoes. There are thousands and thousands of them coming at you to suck your blood. This is what it feels like with all the miners and frackers, government are letting into our country. It never stops. From the first time they came on horses with guns shooting and killing our people and now in the mining trucks and drilling rigs one after another, like bloodthirsty mosquitoes.” – Jack Green
Jack Green, This is how government, miners and frackers undermine our Law, 60 x 40 cm.
“At the top of the painting you can see us Aboriginal people. Two men standing on yellow and one man on the ochre, in the middle standing on the blue is a white man. The white man, he goes and talks with Aboriginal people. He represents the government. He says, ‘I come here to tell you what government says’. On the yellow you got Aboriginal people rounded up sitting at a table. It looks like a meeting but they been told by government and miners what’s going to happen. They got no say in the decision. The meeting is made to look like they have a say, but we know that this isn’t what happens. They don’t want to listen to our Law. The government and miners like it when they can pick a few of our people off, give them a bit of paper to wave around, make them look like they are a part of the decision making. Governments likes to make everyone think that it’s Aboriginal people who invited all the planes and busses with the workers into our country. In the painting, below the Aboriginal people waving their bits of papers about, are us Law people, we all got our spears ready and we are not happy with what’s happening. The government man, standing on the blue, like all the government men we see round Borroloola, carries a bit of paper with black lines on it. He tells us ‘this is the government’s law and you gotta follow it’. But we all know that government uses their law to destroy our Aboriginal Law and our land. On the right of the painting standing on the ochre you got the same thing happening, this time it’s the frackers coming in. They got a few people to wave around their papers saying ‘this is what government says. Everything is good to go’. What we see is more and more tricks, dozers and drilling rigs coming into our land pushing us aside, pushing our animals away and drilling into our land to suck out the gas and truck minerals away leaving us poor and our country and sacred sites damaged.” – Jack Green
Jack Green, Red Bank Copper Mine Leaking Shit Into Our Waters, 55 x 55 cm.
“For over 30 years now Red Bank Copper Mine has been leaking copper sulphate into our waters. The NT Govt let the mining company leave of 50,000 tonnes of acid forming waste rock out in the open to be washed into the creeks in the monsoon rains. Over 10 years ago the government made a promise to us to clean it up. The Minister for Mines and Energy Willem Westra van Holthe made the promise, but nothing has happened. Forty kilometres from the mine the water is contaminated. The mine site is a scared site, a Possum Dreaming, and it’s been desecrated, hurting the custodians of the site.” – Jack Green
Jack Green, The Rodeo is not what is once was, 55 x 55 cm.
“Once the Borroloola rodeo was a community thing. Everyone together, black and white worked to make it happen. No one owned it. Lots of people riding, lots of fun, lots of bruises. Today the rodeo has been taken over by Glencore and McArthur River Mine. The company uses the event to make themselves look good. “See what we do for the community,” they say while they pollute our country and leave us with a toxic waste rock pile that will leak acid into our waters for generations. They may be able to pull the wool over people’s eyes, but not the old scrub bullocky, with his head down watching.” – Jack Green
Trailer of Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023, Alana Hunt
Stills from Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023), Alana Hunt
Speaker artist Alana Hunt, opening of Like bloodthirsty mosquitoes, The Cross Art Projects, August 31 2024.
Special guest Dr Tony McAvoy SC, opening of Like bloodthirsty mosquitoes, The Cross Art Projects, August 31 2024.
Watch This Space representative Gabriel Curtin, opening of Like bloodthirsty mosquitoes, The Cross Art Projects, August 31 2024.
About
Jack Green
Jack Green is an artist and conservationist born born Wakaiya Country, Soudan Station, NT, 1953. He is a Mambaliya man, Garrwa on his father’s side and Marra on his mother’s side. He grew up and worked on cattle stations, travelling for ceremonies, and settled in Borroloola in the early 1970s. Jack Green has spent a lifetime fighting to get access to, protect and care for his Country. He has battled for native title and for an Indigenous Protected Area, was the founding coordinator of the Waanyi Garrwa Rangers, under the Northern Land Council, and is now their Senior Cultural Adviser and sat on the Indigenous Protection Authority (which cares for sacred sites). His work has been honoured by several conservation awards.
To be heard, Jack Green holds exhibitions and talks on the operation and impacts of mining on Country, culture and community. His solo exhibitions and exhibitions with allies (Seán Kerins, Nancy McDinny and Stuart Hoosan and Therese Ritchie), include: Melbourne at Arena Gallery (2013); Sydney at The Cross Art Projects (2014, 2016, 2017) and Darwin (Open Cut at NCCA 2018 and tour to Lismore, The Cross Art Projects and Counihan Gallery in Melbourne). He has twice been a finalist in NATSIA (2017 and 2022.) Recent exhibitions are Heart of Country at Drill Hall Gallery (2022) and The Museum of Australian Democracy (2022-2025) in Canberra and ‘Like blood thirsty mosquitoes’ with Alana Hunt at Watch this Space in Mparntwe/Alice Springs and The Cross Art Projects in Gadigal/Sydney (2024). His work has been acquired by public and private collections.
Alana Hunt
Alana Hunt is a non-Indigenous person who over the last 15 years has lived on Gija and Miriwoong Countries in north-west Australia and is currently based in Redfern on Gadigal Country. This, and her long-standing relationship with South Asia (and Kashmir in particular), shapes her examination of the violence that results from the fragility of nations and the aspirations and failures of colonial dreams. Her work challenges dominant ideas and histories in the public sphere and in the social space between people. Alana studied in Sydney, Halifax and New Delhi.
From 2020-23 Alana was an artist in residence with the Kimberley Land Council producing work about the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act (1972) via SPACED’s Rural Utopias program for socially engaged art. Under the guidance of the KLC’s legal team she learnt about forms of legislation which legalise colonial expansion, materialising this research into video, printed matter, photography, and public events. In late 2023, Hunt completed ‘Surveilling a Crime Scene’ (2023) a film that examines the materialisation of non-indigenous life on Miriwoong Country in the town of Kununurra and its surrounds. The project premiered at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (Darwin) in October 2023.
Alana Hunt is the recipient of a number of awards, including the 2023 STILL: National Still Life Award judged by Max Delany at Yarrila Arts and Museum, Coffs Harbour, the Incinerator Award for Art and Social Change (2017), the Regional Artist Fellowship (2020-22) and a Sheila grant (2023). In April 2024 her work was shown in a group exhibition at Printed Matter (New York) on publishing and resistance in South Asia. Her work has been acquired by public and private collections.
Her writing has been published by Hyperallergic, Artlink, Westerly, Meanjin, Overland, un Magazine, and in exhibition catalogues with the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Tandanya and The Power Institute among others. Writing about her practice has appeared in The Guardian (AU/UK), Third Text, New Left Review, The Wire, The Saturday Paper, Artlink, Hyperallergic, The Caravan, Dawn (PK), and The Times of India among others.
Notes
The exhibition ‘Like blood thirsty mosquitoes’ opened mid-2024 at Watch this Space in Mparntwe /Alice Springs on the sovereign lands of the Arrernte people. Alana Hunt’s exhibition ‘Surveilling a Crime Scene’ premiered at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art in Darwin, in October 2023.
Acknowledgements
Watch this Space and The Cross Art Projects thank all involved in creating this exhibition especially Jack Green, Alana Hunt and Dr Seán Kerins. The Cross Art Projects thanks Watch this Space Collective (Saar Amptmeijer, Meret MacDonald, Gabriel Curtin) and the Central Australian Frack Free Alliance and Katerina Wendl at Waralungku Arts. At The Cross Art Projects thanks Belle Blau, Reiana Aramoane, Ace Bourke, Phillip Boulten and installers Harry Copas and Andrew Haining. Thanks to associate curators Jasmin Stephens and Maurice O’Riordan.
We pay our respect to Gadigal people and all First Nations people globally and stand in solidarity.
Links
Action to protect cultural heritage in the Northern Territory
Arid Lands Environment Centre
Seed Australia’s First Indigenous Youth Climate Network
First Nations Justice Team
Reading
Resources to understand the complex political, demographic and sustainability issues shaping the NT’s future.
The Australia Institute: Subsidising fracking in the Beetaloo Basin: Submission to Senate Environment and Communications References Committee
Pepper Inquiry (NT): Scientific Inquiry into Hydraulic Fracturing, Summary of the Final Report, March 2018
NT Government: Resourcing the Territory Oil and Gas
Jack Green
Jack Green: Exhibition History
2024: https://www.wts.org.au/like-blood-thirsty-mosquitoes
like blood thirsty mosquitoes: Jack Green and Alana Hunt at Watch This Space, Mparntwe/Alice Springs
2020–2025: Statement: Jack Green’s Paintings at The Museum of Australian Democracy and at https://www.moadoph.gov.au/visit/whats-on/exhibitions/statement-jack-greens-paintings
2017-2018: Open Cut was first shown at NCCA in Darwin (2017), The Cross Art Projects (2018), Counihan Gallery in Brunswick, Melbourne (June 2018).
2018: Open Cut: Jacky Green, Seán Kerins, Therese Ritchie
2014-2016: Flow of Voices set of exhibitions at The Cross Art Projects on contemporary art, settler colonialism and mining and social justice in the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the first and second iterations Jack Green, Stewart Hoosan and Nancy McDinny, compared the brutality of the colonial frontier with ongoing settler colonialism and large-scale developments such as mining. In the process the artists’ voices have been aggressively censored and an international art publication threatened with a “take down” order. (August 2017.)
2014: Flow of Voices 1 : Frontier History. Flow of Voices 2: Jacky Green, Stewart Hoosan and Nancy McDinny
2014: Flow of Voices 2 : https://www.crossart.com.au/exhibition-archive/frontier-history-flow-of-voices-2-jacky-green-stewart-hoosan-and-nancy-mcdinny-22-may-to-5-july-2014
2016: Flow of Voices 3: Social Licence. Flow of Voices 3: Jack Green, Stuart Hoosan, Nancy McDinny with Miriam Charlie
Jack Green: Submissions and Talks
2020: Inquiry into the destruction of 46,000 year old caves at the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, 2020
2020: Mr Jack Green, with Dr Seán Kerins, Inquiry into the destruction of 46,000 year old caves at the Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara region of Western Australia: – https://antar.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Glencores-McArthur-River-Mine-Submission.pdf
2022: A Way Forward, Final Report of the Senate Inquiry into the Destruction of Juukan Gorge, 2022
Australian Government response to the destruction of Juukan Gorge, 2022
2022: Mr Jack Green with Seán Kerins, https://antar.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Glencores-McArthur-River-Mine-Submission.pdf
2023: ABC Audio, Jack Green, https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/storystream/juukan-gorge-artwork/13860612
Jack Green and Gulf Country: Articles and Publications
Tony Roberts, Frontier Justice, A History of the Gulf Country to 1900, UQP, 2005. > Download pdf
Tony Roberts, ‘The Brutal Truth. What happened in the Gulf Country’, The Monthly, 2009. http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/november/1330478364/tony-roberts/brutal-truth
John Bradley with Yanyuwa families, Singing Saltwater Country. Journey to the Songlines of Carpenteria, Alen & Unwin, 2010.
Kirsty Howey, ‘The Northern Territory and the McArthur River Mine’. In Mills, Mines and Other Controversies: The Environmental Assessment of Major Projects. Federation Press Sydney, 2010.
Jack Green, ‘Flow of Voices’, Arena Magazine, 2012. > Download pdf
Jack Green, J. Morrison, and Seán Kerins, ‘No more yardin’ us up like cattle’, in Jon Altman and Seán Kerins (eds.), People on Country Vital Landscapes Indigenous Futures, The Federation Press, Sydney, 2012.
Seán Kerins, ‘Challenging Conspiracies of Silence with Art’, Art Monthly, Summer 2013-14. > Download pdf
Jack Green, Biography and Statement on Work, 2014. > Download pdf
Gina Fairley on Jacky Green’s Flow of Voices for Arts Hub, week of 21 April 2014. > Download as pdf
Seán Kerins, ‘Challenging Conspiracies of Silence with Art’, Art Monthly, Summer 2013/14. > Download pdf
Crystal Wu, ‘Indigenous Australian Corporation Accused of Censoring Aboriginal Artists’, Art AsiaPacific, 2014. Note this article was subject to a “take-down” notice and removed. > Download as pdf
McArthur River Mine’s pyrite iron sulphide dump starts burning in 2014, Glencore covera it with clay and other materials “to keep it stable”.
Paul Daley, 2015, “Jacky Green: ‘Nothing has really changed since whitefellas came. First it was horses now bulldozers'”. The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077.
ABC, 2015, ‘EDO NT points finger at McArthur River Mine over potential contamination of more than 400 cattle’.
Pippa Milne, CCP Declares: On the Social Contract, exhibition catalogue, (with Miriam Charlie) Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2016. > Download as pdf
Amy Quire, ‘Jack Green, Beyond Dot Paintings’, illustrated feature, New Matilda print and on line, 25 Feb 2015. https://newmatilda.com/2015/02/25/beyond-dot-paintings
Miriam Charlie, ‘My Country No Home’, documenting living conditions in Borooloola, 2015-2016 for exhibition ‘CCP Declares: On the Social Contract’, Melbourne 2016: https://vimeo.com/158590440
Miriam Charlie, ‘Gulf to Gallery’, 2016 – http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-26/indigenous-photographer-miriam-charlie-opens-borroloola-exhibit/7444802
Seán Kerins and Jacky Green, ‘Indigenous country in the southwest Gulf of Carpentaria: Territories of difference or indifference?’ In Jon Altman ed., Engaging Indigenous Economies, 2016. > Download as pdf
Glencore mine’s ‘deal’ with Indigenous owners called into question, documents reveal, The Guardian 2017 –https://www.theguardian.com/global/2017/jun/16/glencore-mines-deal-with-indigenous-owners-called-into-question-documents-reveal
ABC News, 2020, Jesse Thompson: ‘NT Government shaves $120 million of McArthur River Mine environmental security bond’.
ABC News, 2021, Jano Gibson: Sacred Sites, ‘Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority says sacred sites could be damaged at McArthur River Mine’, 24 Oct 2021: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-26/mcarthur-river-mine-aboriginal-custodians-glencore-negotiation/100566352?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=mail&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web
ABC News, 2023, Jane Bardon: ‘ Traditional owners form new negotiating body to speed up sacred site protection talks at NT’s McArthur River Mine’: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-05/mcarthur-river-mine-nt-traditional-owners-want-expedited-talks/103184124
Roxanne Fitzgerald, ‘Traditional owners, environment group lodge legal challenge over McArthur River Mine Supreme Court decision’, The Guardian, 22 May 2023. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-22/appeal-lodged-over-mcarthur-river-mine-supreme-court-decision/102376986
Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority v McArthur River Mine, July 2024: https://www.aapant.org.au/news/aboriginal-areas-protection-authority-v-mcarthur-river-mine
Alana Hunt
Alana Hunt: Exhibition history
2024: Surveilling a Crime Scene short film in competition at Revelation: Perth International Film Festival
2024: https://www.wts.org.au/like-blood-thirsty-mosquitoes
like blood thirsty mosquitoes: Jack Green and Alana Hunt at Watch This Space, Mparntwe/Alice Springs
2023: Alana Hunt, Surveilling a Crime Scene solo exhibition, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin. The exhibition drew on several bodies of work: Faith in a pile of stones (2018); Violent Dreams of Development: A Food Bowl in the north-west of Australia (Artlink, 2019); All the violence within / In the national interest (2019-21); and A Very Clear Picture (2021-23).
2022: Alana Hunt, All the violence within this, Courthouse Gallery and Studio, Port Hedland, WA.
2022: Every Inch: the bureaucratic effect in colonisation. Artists: Kush Badhwar, Alana Hunt, Sohrab Hura and Mabel Juli with Mr R Peters. Curated by Jasmin Stephens. With contributions from James Nguyen and Veeranganasolanki Kumari.
Alana Hunt: : Articles on work and Publications
Alana Hunt, Interview with Dilpreet Bhullar, ‘Alana Hunt excavates the slivers of colonisation and cultures to develop her art’ for Stir World 2024.
Alana Hunt, interview with Regine Debatty 2024, for We Make Money Not Art
Surveilling a Crime Scene, 2023, printed with midnight blue ink on a risograph by Matthew Van Roden at Split/Shift Press, Larrakia Country, 186pp. Essay by Fiona Kelly McGregor. Published in October 2023 by Borderline Books, the self-publishing imprint of Alana Hunt.
Surveilling a Crime Scene exhibition review by Maurice O’Riordan, Artlink, November 2023.
Tristen Harwood, exhibition review, ‘Alana Hunt: All the violence within this’, Seven myths you should know. https://thejunctionco.com.au/2022/02/25/alana-hunt/
Nun Chai Stories by Ratik Asokan, New Left Review, 2022.
Alana Hunt, ‘Violent dreams of development: A food bowl in the north‑west of Australia?’, Artlink, 2019.
Artist websites