Before the death of African American George Floyd in May 2020 from suffocation by white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests, and before the coronavirus and all its variants were released on the world placing an unprecedented demand on oxygen, in late 2019 through to early 2020 the east coast of Australia experienced devastating bushfires. These fires evoked a strong sense of the apocalypse. Smoke blew over half the country, into my studio and as far away as South America and the availability of smoke-resistant N95 masks across the eastern states varied widely with many people left to make do and make their own. Power and the phase “I can’t breathe” were tacked together in varied and unexpected ways.

In Melbourne during the earlier days of the coronavirus there was a ‘snap’ lockdown of some public housing flats, home to many recent immigrants who do not speak English as a first language. Police were used to enforce the lockdown which meant that without warning over three thousand citizens were forced to stay at home without appropriate communication or provisions. And as I write this now in 2023 the sociological, biological, ecological, economic and political landscape feels both vastly different and devastatingly similar to what it was when I began in 2017. Chauvin has been sentenced to an historical twenty-two years in jail but Black lives in the United States and Australia continue to be lost as a result of discrimination and irrational fear at the hands of police. The Guardian newspaper’s database holding statistics on Indigenous Australian deaths in custody tells me that over one hundred and twenty Indigenous Australians have unnecessarily lost their lives in this way since I began working on this project in 2017.¹

These are events we could never have imagined in 2017 but they all originate from social, political and economic conditions that have been present in the world for centuries and highlight the various advantages and disadvantages that come from living under these conditions.² Acknowledging the impact of those conditions was already a part of my thinking but these events made the research suddenly more urgent. There is no doubt that this sense of urgency has kept me writing but at the same time, the direction of the research has led me to think that there is also merit in moving slowly. While there is a need for urgent action on all these issues, it feels as though it is only through slow, considered actions and re-actions that these urgencies can be addressed in a way that is less likely to replicate them.

My thinking about the paradox in the need for urgent change and the simultaneous need for slow action began in 2015 when I started reading the work of Australian First Nation writer and historian Bruce Pascoe. I was curious about his proposition that in pre-colonial time First Peoples lived on this land in a very different way than I was taught at school. Reading Dark Emu lead me to his earlier book Convincing Ground and to Australian historian Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth and to the work of many other Australian historians.³ I was fascinated by what I was learning and dismayed by my society which, through my primary and secondary school education, had projected the First Peoples as largely nomadic hunter gatherers with a merely utilitarian connection to the land. I was distressed to so candidly learn that the stories of colonisation I had been told since childhood erased the violent dispossession of land, languages and beliefs from hundreds of unique local communities. I could see that although they are no longer being taught in primary schools, these stories continue to perpetuate myths about the colonial experience.

For example, during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison commented on the history of slavery in Australia on a breakfast radio program.⁴ His words, “there was no slavery in Australia” are in conflict with narrative accounts by, and scholarly accounts of, the descendants of the tens of thousands of South Sea Islanders who were brought to Australia to work in sugar cane fields in Queensland between 1863 and 1904.⁵ It is also in conflict with narrative and scholarly accounts of First Nation men chained around the ankles and neck as they were shepherded from one worksite to another “not because they had committed a crime but because they ‘are slippery customers’ and might abscond from their slavery.”⁶ And it is in conflict with the stories of women sent to work as nannies and house maids for promised wages they never received. And it is also in conflict with accounts of anti-slavery protests held in New South Wales in the 1920s such as those organised by First Nation man Tom Lacey.⁷ As Australian historian Henry Reynolds asks, why were we never told?⁸ Not just about the brutality of Australia’s colonial history which both he and Pascoe refer to and that is often disregarded by public officials, but also about the resistance to it, and furthermore, the immense richness and value in the varied First Peoples’ cultures. It seemed an opaque white veil had been thrown over the country’s colonial and pre-colonial history and that this erasure is held in Australia’s settler-colonial language and actions.

I have read several books and dissertations by artists and researchers that start with this kind of story—one where a white Australian comes face to face with the truth of the history of their country and perhaps their family’s or their own complicity in colonisation. It seems to me there is a trend toward wanting to find a way of dealing with this knowledge and this history. While doing this kind of research project in a university, particularly at the PhD level and on a scholarship, demonstrates and performs the ongoing privilege bestowed to settler-colonial academics, it is clear having a more truthful understanding of Australia’s history matters to artist-researchers like myself. Paradoxically, what also matters is understanding how to exist as an artist-researcher so that those privileges are not constantly reproduced, sustaining the colonial conditions of oppression. Although this is where I started, the Black Lives Matter protests in Australia and around the world in 2020 have made these kinds of research projects more necessary. It matters that settler-colonials in colonised countries and white people in general understand the privilege of their position and recognise the ways in which the stories of the past that provide the foundation for their own dreams and actions is skewed and prejudiced to benefit them to the detriment of the First Peoples of the lands on which they live and of the people whose families were forced to work for them.

Writing in the early 1970s the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir noted that it is “the whole system that is at issue and our claim cannot be otherwise than radical.”⁹ She urges us to “change life itself.”¹⁰ But how? Writing in March 2020 and commenting specifically on the effect of the coronavirus, the Italian economist and poet Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi said he thought one of two politico-economic worlds might emerge out of the coronavirus event, “either a techno-totalitarian system that will relaunch the capitalist economy by means of violence, or the liberation of human activity from capitalist abstraction and the creation of a molecular society based on usefulness.”¹¹ Speaking in the broadest possible strokes, Berardi said that along with the immediate requirements necessary to overcome the virus, the world needs “a new culture of tenderness, solidarity and frugality.”¹² Berardi doesn’t offer any suggestions on what to do to reach this new culture but his words hint at a way it might be done. Not a ‘what’ but a ‘how’—that is, by being more tender, more united, more frugal. The ‘how’ matters. This book attends to that ‘how’. It proposes a tacktical methodology for building that culture of tenderness, solidarity, frugality and ultimately good relation through art practice specifically, but this methodology can also apply to any other field. It offers a different way of moving through the world so connections with difference can carefully be made and unmade.