By Candida Baker
ACTIVISM
Until Justice Comes
Juno Gemes
Upswell Publishing, $65
Does it take dispossession to understand the dispossessed? Reading Juno Gemes’ powerful book Until Justice Comes, I think my answer would be an unequivocal yes.
Gemes was only five and didn’t speak a word of English when she and her family arrived in Australia in 1949, Hungarian refugees displaced by the Second World War. Her father was a furniture designer, and her family was rich with actors, writers and artists, so it was perhaps not surprising that Gemes was drawn to the theatre. She graduated from NIDA as a producer and director, already drawn to the cultural and political revolutions under way in traditional communities at that time.
After her graduation, Gemes travelled the world, her camera in hand, exploring one of the key tenets of her life’s work – that of being simultaneously an insider and outsider. In 1969, she was camped at Avebury’s Bronze Age stone circle, when she had a dream of an Aboriginal elder appearing out of the Central Australian Desert, wearing a red bandana and carrying a sugar bag. A year later, researching the film Uluru, Gemes was camping with Pitjantjatjara elders at Eben Downs when her dream became reality – beckoned in to join the elders, Gemes later recognised that this was an invitation to her calling.
Until Justice Comes represents the culmination of 50 years’ work spent photographing Indigenous communities and leaders, as well as momentous events of that half-century, from the Tent Embassy in Canberra, the fight for land rights, the Uluru Handback in 1985, the national apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008 and the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017.
There are photographs from the most intimate – of small family gatherings on riverbanks, with fishing and fires, and children slung on hips – to studied portraits of those important to the black rights movements, including politician Linda Burney (with whom Gemes travelled during the referendum), writer activists Larissa Behrendt and Eva Cox, and activist Charlie Perkins. There are photographs of powerful ceremonial meetings and dances, and perhaps most poignant of all, the individual portraits of elders in their landscapes, on Country.
Marcia Langton in 1982.Credit: Juno Gemes
The book’s 226 photographs show us everything – division and unity, hope and despair, protest and peace, the collective and the individual – all of them representing Gemes’ passion to present to the world the extraordinary cultural diversity of her second home.
The book takes its title from early Redfern activist Mum Shirl, and the words resonate through the book. The photographs are supported by various essays and poems from writers and activists such as Djon Mundine, Burney, Behrendt, Fred Myers, Frances Peters-Little, John Maynard, Catherine De Lorenzo, Ali Cobby Eckermann and Julianne Schultz.
Until Justice Comes is book-ended by two powerful, very different pieces. It begins with Rhonda Davis, senior curator at Macquarie University, on Transformations. Close to the end is Schultz, currently a professor at Griffith University’s Centre for Social and Cultural Research, writing about the defeat of the 2023 referendum.
Davis speaks to the photographic content, with particular reference to some of the book’s most powerful images, including that of Uncle Percy Mumbler, Yuin medicine man, with his back turned to the camera as he strolls up the wide country road to Wreck Bay. Davis brings her discerning eye to Gemes’ oeuvre, allowing the reader/viewer a way into the layers of complexity in Gemes’ work, and the thought behind each photograph.
In Schultz’s piece, we meet full-on the fact that before polls had even closed in Western Australia, the referendum to provide recognition of the First Peoples of this continent with a voice was defeated. And in Schultz’s opinion, one of the reasons for the failure of the referendum is that many Australians remain uneducated or ignorant about the shared history of this continent.
This collaborative book – and full credit to Upswell for committing to publish such a large and complex manuscript – constantly stresses through its visual and written narratives the importance of unity over division. If it is placed where it should be, in every educational space in the country, Until Justice Comes will go a long way towards helping bridge the gap between the First Nations people of this continent and those that have followed.
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