Queerness, Aboriginality and the closet

All marginalised communities have one thing in common, and that is the experience of being marginalised. In Australia, oppression based on race and sexuality is only as old as colonisation. I recently saw a tweet that said, ‘Just remember, if you are homophobic, you have been successfully colonised’. In Australia, oppression based on homophobia and racism is fundamentally a settler construct. Recognising that there is an interlocking matrix of oppression, and therefore that there are connections and differences between the shared experiences of oppressed communities, is the first step towards confronting inequality.

As a curator working at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), I recognise that this is an ongoing project in terms of how we as an institution continue to build the people’s collection. It is impossible to pinpoint the earliest work by a queer Indigenous artist in the NGV collection. There are a small number of works by artists who identify as queer, and others by artists who lived in times when such identification was either not possible or not necessary. There are also many works where an artist’s sexuality is simply unknown and can only be speculated on.