Billiamook and Shannon
2006; 2023

• Gary Lee

Through decades of practice, Lee has worked to revitalise the legacy of Larrakia peoples, including the nineteenth-century man Billiamook. In 1869, at the age of sixteen, Billiamook witnessed the arrival of G. W. Goyder and his survey party in what is today the Darwin wharf. Billiamook would, over the course of his life, work in collaboration with beraguds (white people) as an informant and interpreter. Most prominently he worked for Paul Foelsche (1831–1914), a police officer and amateur anthropologist known for coordinating violence towards local Indigenous peoples. Over the course of their acquaintance, Foelsche produced a number of photographic portraits of Billiamook. In this work Lee juxtaposes one such image with a portrait of his nephew Shannon. With his photograph of Billiamook, Foelsche imposed a distorted view of the Larrakia people based on racist pseudoscientific theories like social Darwinism. However, by repurposing the image, Lee celebrates ancestral relations, offering a sense of reconciliation to Billiamook and enlivening the archive with energy.