Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese People in Australia at the National Museum of Australia, is an exhibition I’ve been aiming to write about for six months. So why has it taken so long? One answer is that there was always something urgent and short-term, whereas this event continues until the end of January. Another is that it is presented as a social history show with an art component, and this column is mostly art-focussed. A final, less excusable reason may be that the story of Aboriginal-Chinese people feels like a small part of the vast, sweeping, hotly contested history of this country.
Guest curator, Zhou Xiaoping, has set out to overturn that preconception, bringing together a team of artists and historians who reveal a much larger, more complex picture of Aboriginal-Chinese interaction than we might ever have suspected.
Zhou is a Chinese émigré artist with a longterm relationship with Aboriginal people and their art, who has lived and worked with artists such as Jimmy Pike and Johnny Bulun Bulun. He says he first became aware of the Chinese connection in 1989, when he met Jimmy Chi, the Aboriginal songwriter behind the musical, Bran Nue Dae. This was the start of a project that has gone on for decades, but intensified over the past couple of years, incorporating oral histories, archival research, and the contributions of visual artists.