Feature March/April edition 2025

Fresh from his historic Federal Court case win against the Western Australian Government on behalf of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were not paid all their wages or money between 1936 and 1972, Mervyn Street’s exhibition Stolen Wages at Fremantle Arts Centre as part of Perth Festival is poignant indeed. A settlement of the Western Australia Stolen Wages Class Action was approved by the Federal Court of Australia in December last year, with $180.4 million to be distributed to those who apply. Curator Emilia Galatis says Street has worked his entire life as a passionate activist and documenter of unwritten history through his art. “The exhibition traces this important story through his own eyes and his personal life as an unpaid stockman.”  

A senior Gooniyandi man, born at Louisa Downs Station, Street is a former Chairman of Mangkaja Arts and speaks fluent Gooniyandi as well as English, teaching traditional language to school children. He was making art before he knew it was art, using whatever support and mediums were available – charcoal from a fire or using a water tank as an artwork support. “I paint about history to make a difference between Dreamtime and modern history,” he says. 

Galatis says Stolen Wages is Street’s first institutional solo over his 40 year-long practice. “He has a photographic memory of the history of slavery in the Western Australian top end,” she says. “For me, it was not just about him as an activist, it’s also him as an artist. You look at the movement of cattle, the movement of cowboys, the way his brain as a self-taught artist has remembered. Every tiny nuanced moment across such an expansive period of time is quite uncanny.”

Complementing Stolen Wages is The Beach by Ballardong artist Dianne Jones, comprising of a suite of photographic images also representing a righting of past errors for Indigenous people. Centred on the site and history of Manjaree (Bathers Beach) in Walyalup(Fremantle), Jones brings a touch of humour to the absence of images of Aboriginal people at leisure at the site, by inserting herself into them. “The power of seeing oneself represented culturally can have a positive effect or a negative one,” she notes. Jones is seen in 1950s and 1960s black and white photographs waving cheerfully at a crowded beach, lying on the sand and generally enjoying the beach along with other beachgoers, a sight which shamefully would have been unseen at the time. Known for her playful subversion of historic colonial photographs, Jones rewrites Western recorded history by including First Nations people in historic images, when in reality they were relegated to separate areas, far from the new world of colonists. 

Kate Mitchell’s Idea Induction was born from preparing for her exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre when she realised the very essence of where ideas come from could be the basis for the show. “Ideas, both physically and energetically, emerge from the alpha and beta brainwave states – places of deep relation and heightened creativity,” she says. In an aim to capture this state, or “an induction into the realm of your own ideas,” as Mitchell describes it, she has created an interactive singing chair, its sound reverberating through your body to shift the mind into a deep brainwave state where ideas can apparently be born.

Though no bookings are required, the chair and artist are available at limited times during the exhibition. Those wishing to experience it should check the Fremantle Arts Centre for dates and times.

Perth Festival Director Anna Reece says the Festival represents a finite moment where extraordinary artists and ideas, places and spaces come together in a way they don’t otherwise. “So much of the program this year has been free and outside. We’ve gone into the neighborhoods or the East Perth Power Station with the music program for instance, and we have this stunning visual arts program. I think people should really approach the festival with a sense of curiosity and discovery, reminding themselves that it is a moment in time, so absorb as much as you can.”

Stolen Wages by Mervyn Street, Idea Induction by Kate Mitchell and The Beach by Dianne Jones are on show at Fremantle Arts Centre until 20 April.