I’m The Captain Now

(2016)

I’m The Captain Now is a personal re-authoring of Aboriginal histories, woven with inherited familial archival imagery. This reinterpretation, a blend of fact and fiction, offers an alternative perspective, providing a fresh way to examine the complex conversations around faith, spirituality, and social justice from an Indigenous viewpoint.

Through a layered interplay of real and imagined narratives, the work parades playful yet pointed references to assimilation, forced religious participation, and Western instruction. These constructed visual stories critically examine the multi-layered realities of growing up Aboriginal within a settler-colonial project, shaped by the Policy of Assimilation, the Integration Policy, and the shifting political moment of the 1967 Referendum.

The series imagines what Aboriginal culture might have looked like if even a small part of it had not been restricted, and what South-East Australia might have become if Aboriginal people had led the way in shaping European settlement. It opens space for alternative outcomes, irreverent truths, and cultural resistance through performance and play.

I’m The Captain Now doesn’t erase the colonial structures; it slips through their cracks. It offers a cheeky cultural allowance within the rigid frameworks that tried to contain us, giving shape to a version of history where power is momentarily handed back, even if just for the frame of an image.