Juno Gemes: PROOF

It’s about Justice for Aboriginal People, if that is possible.
It’s about Land, Law, Culture, Art, Literature, Dance, Music.
It’s about demanding a decent quality of life and opportunity for Aboriginal People.
It’s about educating ourselves about the complexity of Aboriginal Knowledge.
It’s about being open to other value systems.
It’s about the maintenance of those values.
It’s about recognition, respect and responsibility.
It’s about a just basis for us to live together in this Ancient Land.
It’s about relationships, friendships and community.
It’s about living together, learning from each other.
It’s about a hard fight for Justice and a better way.
It’s about solidarity, humour and compassion in times of hardship and danger.
It’s about changing the Law of this Land to recognise Traditional Law.
It’s about winning Justice, but on whose terms?
It’s about the dreams and hopes of our youth and the best time we ever had.
It’s about always being on a steep learning curve and being OK with that.
It’s about photographs responding to this History being lived.
It’s about making the Struggle known and familiar.
It’s about seeing beyond what appears to be.
It’s about understanding the importance and value of cultural difference.
It’s about really knowing each other and being privileged to do so.
It’s about having the courage to own our own Histories.
It’s about the need for a Constitution which acknowledges all our Histories.
It’s about generosity of Spirit.

Art is not for any elite, it is for everyone.
Artists work at the frontiers of experience.
So that we can all know ourselves more fully.
I have eyes that see in a particular way.
My eyes are informed by everything I have experienced, by all that I am.
I saw powerful beauty, strength, resilience, ingenuity, and hope at a time where others mostly saw only despair, their own discomfort and shame.
I saw what had been hidden, kept invisible.
I tried to communicate from within one culture to another.
It was sometimes a lonely place to be.
I had many great teachers who taught me so much along the way.
I understood how important it is never to forget what has been.
For we are also what we have lost.

Portraits from The Movement 1978 – 2003

Afterword

Juno Gemes

What The Movement is about for me

F8 to Infinity