Bad Language 2
Julie GOUGH
2007 | silkscreen print | edition number 1 of 10 | accession number 785
purchased by the Art Board 2007 - Murdoch University Art Collection
© the artist

Julie GOUGH

born 1965 Melbourne, Victoria
lives and works Townsville, Queensland

Julie Gough is a visual artist who works across a range of mediums which include sculpture, print and installation art. Her art and research practice involves uncovering and re-presenting historical stories as part of an ongoing project that questions and re-evaluates the impact of the past on our present lives.

Much of the work refers to her own and her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people and are concerned with developing a visual language to express and engage with conflicting and subsumed histories. A central intention of Gough’s art is to invite a viewer to a closer understanding of our continuing roles in, and proximity to unresolved National stories.

Artist's Statement:

This work is based on and inspired by the date: 25 May 2007 when the Day Bill (advertising poster) for The Australian newspaper that was plastered across Melbourne (where I was then staying) announced: "Aborigines must speak English".

I found this Day Bill extremely disturbing and responded with mixed emotions – firstly, anger and indignation that the media was suggesting as ‘normal’ that an invaded country and its overcome people must, by government enforcement, speak the language of the invaders, even and perhaps especially after more than 200 years since the invasion.

Secondly, and in awkward contrast, the next emotion that the Day Bill gave rise to was wry humour. This came from recall of accounts of Tasmanian Aboriginal people calling out/speaking back and swearing at non Aboriginal people in English, not in 2007, but through the 1820s in VDL (Van Diemen’s Land).

Upon arriving into Perth in July 2007 I decided to make this series about how English HAS been successfully spoken - even better still purposefully deployed – by Aboriginal people in the distant past time to communicate to outsiders with clarity.

In part this early Tasmanian Aboriginal decision to speak out in English is because of the shameful lack of non Aboriginal people who could speak any Aboriginal languages. In order to be understood to be angry at invasion Tasmanian Aborigines became vocal in English, and therefore, an unintended but useful adjunct was that this sentiment was then publishable and became part of western recorded history.

In these silk screened renditions of these encounters, verbal and physical, the geographic locations are provided in red ink, while the archival and newspaper references are at the bottom of each poster – citing cross cultural engagements that raise more questions than answers.

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