I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we know as Sydney today, and recognize them as the traditional custodians of this land.  I pay respect to their elders, past and present, and emerging. 

My painting, “The Vessels” depicts a fluid portrayal of Australia’s history since its colonization by the British Empire, from the arrival of colonizer’s ships and their systematic genocide of the original owners of this land, to their current practices of building and operating offshore concentration camps on remote islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Ocean faring ships were critical to European exploration and colonialism during the last 500 years, and especially important for the establishment of colonial Australia. From Captain Cook, the vanguard of white Australia in 1770, marking the start of the systematic genocide of the indigenous peoples of this ancient land, to the settler-colonialists who have violently occupied Palestine since 1947, ships have been the essential vessels that exported ethnic cleansing and genocide across the globe.

I am not the only one who sees the Sydney Opera House as resembling a ship. Although the design was inspired by leaves or birds, I view it as an architectural representation of Captain Cook’s vessel. The white sails dancing in the wind celebrate the white glory and expansion on that corner of the continent where the first invaders landed.

But ocean vessels are not always so glorious. A small number of them sometimes carry the victims of colonialism, war, famine and genocide from foreign non-white lands, these vessels can be a major threat and, according to successive Australian Governments must be dealt with as swiftly and arbitrarily as possible. They label all the asylum seekers who arrive by boat to Australia as undesirables, imprison them, select a random few to send to its prison island of Nauru for indefinite time to serve as an threat to other refugees, use them to score political points domestically, and to enrich a set of corrupt politicians and business people by money-laundering via foreign registered companies that are contracted to run these offshore prisons.

Nauru prison was a city of white tents surrounded by tall fences in extreme tropical heat, gated and controlled by military-style security guards. While refugees and asylum seekers were enduring physical and mental torture under inhuman conditions in the Nauru detention center, then-Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison awarded himself a trophy. The trophy was a shiny boat with the words “I stopped this” inscribed on it. He received A Companion of the Order of Australia (AC), the highest award of the Order of Australia, awarded on king Charles III birthday, in keeping with the legacy of the original British colonizers, supporting genocide, occupation and concentration camps until today.