Rural Utopias Residency: Alana Hunt in Kununurra #6
Alana Hunt is currently working with the community of Kununurra. This residency forms part of one of Spaced’s current programs, Rural Utopias.
Alana Hunt is an artist and writer who lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia. This and her long-standing relationship with South Asia—and with Kashmir in particular—shapes her engagement with the violence that results from the fragility of nations and the aspirations and failures of colonial dreams.
Here, Alana shares an update from Kununurra.
A recap: in 1972 the Western Australian Aboriginal Heritage Act made it illegal to destroy, damage or alter an Aboriginal site. However, Section 18 of that legislation allows people to seek legal permission to do just that. In essence it is a process making it legal to do something otherwise illegal. And since the 1970s until today, almost every application submitted has been granted the permission they sought.
Imagine seeking legal permission to steal someone’s car, because you needed it for work and arguing that this would be in the national interest because you would then pay taxes, and the person you stole the car from would ultimately benefit from their access to healthcare and education and public transport and further employment opportunities in the business you were involved with.
Imagine seeking legal permission to rape. And it being granted, nearly every single time.
I wanted to see the language that was employed by my culture to legally destroy, damage or alter Aboriginal sites. I wanted not only to witness this language, to try to understand its impact, but to also make its banality and violence more legible to others.
What I am really trying to do is hold a mirror up to my own non-indigenous culture. It is an attempt to look more closely at who we are. At what we are. And at the things we do with words to ensure our lives continue to materialise on this stolen Country.
It took a very long time, much longer than Freedom of Information processes are meant to take. But eventually, via the WA Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage, I gained access to 9 completed Section 18 application forms, and much of their related support material. What I received was an overwhelmingly large amount of pdfs. But through this forest of digital files, like an unearthing of sorts, one starts to glimpse how individuals and organisations express their perceived entitlement to do whatever they wish to do on someone else’s land.
Mining is the most dominant use of the Section 18 process. Mining is also commonly derided as an extractive, capitalist, colonial and environmentally damaging practice. I have become increasingly interested in the less obvious, though no less violent fact—of our homes, always on someone else’s land.
Interestingly one of the longest completed Section 18 applications I accessed came from an individual seeking legal permission to “build a residence and access to residence”. I pulled each word from this pdf form and arranged it in alphabetical order. Seeking to make legible, the frequency, repetition and banality of words that appear clean on paper but wreak havoc in the world.
This is how colonisation unfolds. Word by word. Place by place.
These alphabetised words were manually traced by hand, creating a debossed effect, onto 67 pieces of A4 paper, which became the work In Plain Sight. From a distance, as a grid installed on the wall, this collection of white A4 pages look empty, but up close the material becomes clearer. To me, this reflects the opacity of this legislation, and of our own lives here, of how hard it really is to understand these systems (and ourselves) even when they’re operating in plain sight.
A collective effort, the labour intensive nature of the debossing came to emphasis the role of the individual in the repetitive violence of this profoundly consequential bureaucratic process. Feeling the fragility of these pages, I also scanned each page and eventually made a video of the words—a medium which enables another form of circulation. The hand debossed pages were first shown as part of the Ramsay Art Prize, Art Gallery of South Australia between 27 May — 27 August 2023. Ironically this exhibition lasted longer than the implementation of the revised Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 (WA) which was introduced on 1 July 2023 and announced for repeal on 8 August that same year. This work will soon be shown at the Art Gallery of Western Australia from 24 November 2023—18 February 2024 (once again staying a longer duration than the life of the new legislation).
Curiously, the notifications of ministerial decisions made for Section 18 applications under the 1972 Act—which were previously in the public domain and which I accessed on the WA Government’s website in order to make the video Nine Hundred and Sixty Seven (narrated by Sam Walsh AO)—are now all removed. An informational vanishing act as the introduction of the new legislation became heated.
Thinking still about language, I leave here two media statements from 2023. The first published on 8 August by the WA Government. View here. The second on 9 August by the Kimberley Land Council. View here.
What I find most telling in these texts is the government’s emphasis on terms like “listening”, on “community”, on “common sense”, and on “land owners”. Words rendered empty of meaning when you read it in relation to the KLC’s statement, which is firmly grounded in the frustration of repeatedly not being heard.
It is worth noting the WA Alliance of Native Title Representative Bodies and Service Providers (of which the KLC is a member) have, since 2021, conveyed that the new legislation was not adequate due to many issues including the fact First Nations people had not been properly consulted; the new legislation did not meet the basic standards of informed consent; nor did First Nations people have final decision making power over their Country.
Absurdly, the new legislation was rushed through parliament without heed of these concerns from First Nations people, and was only repealed due to the “stress, confusion and division” it caused non-Indigenous landowners.
The WA Government's response to the "community concerns" has now been to reintroduce a barely modified version of the 1972 Heritage Act and to permit destruction on essentially the same terms as it has for the past 50 years.
Shrouded in weasel words and double speak the colony is alive and well.
November 2023
Image credit: Stills from the video In Plain Sight (2023) by Alana Hunt
