L We Can Be Heroes, Tony Albert R Tony Albert. Photo: The Guardian
Tony Albert: the first Aboriginal Australian appointed as an official war artist
Growing up in Brisbane's western suburbs, he haunted secondhand shops for objects printed with naive depictions of Aboriginal people (teacups, ashtrays, tea towels), collecting them out of love before he understood what they meant. He would later coin the term "Aboriginalia" for this category of material, and it became the foundation of one of the most politically engaged practices in contemporary Australian art. Tony Albert was born in 1981 in Townsville, Queensland, a descendant of the Girramay, Yidinji and Kuku Yalanji peoples of Far North Queensland, whose family is from Cardwell.
Albert graduated from the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University in 2004 with a degree in Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art, studying under artists including Jennifer Herd and Vernon Ah Kee, who is his cousin. The degree grounded his practice in cultural safety and Indigenous ways of knowing. That same year he co-founded proppaNOW alongside Ah Kee, Richard Bell, Fiona Foley, Jennifer Herd, Bianca Beetson and Andrea Fisher, an urban-based Indigenous art collective that became a significant force in contemporary Australian art.
Working across photography, painting, installation and found objects, Albert's practice centres on the ways Aboriginal people have been represented, misrepresented and erased in Australian popular culture and history. His series We Can Be Heroes rephotographs historical images of Aboriginal Australians, reclaiming their dignity and individuality against a culture of caricature. His use of Aboriginalia transforms objects that encoded racism into vehicles for examining it. ASH on Me (2008), held in the NGA collection, suspends found objects in resin to explore themes of destruction, memory and renewal.
Projecting our future, Tony Albert, 2013
In 2012 Albert became the first Aboriginal Australian to be appointed as an official war artist by the Australian War Memorial, attached to NORFORCE in the Northern Territory. The appointment drew on a deep family history of military service. His grandfather Eddie Albert enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in 1940, served in the Middle East, was captured as a prisoner of war in Libya, and survived the execution of three fellow prisoners in Italy before being held in German camps until the war's end. Eddie returned to Australia to find his service unacknowledged and himself unwelcome at his local RSL until his death in 1979. In 2015 Albert unveiled Yininmadyemi — Thou didst let fall in Hyde Park, Sydney, a permanent public memorial consisting of four seven-metre aluminium and steel bullets standing beside three fallen shell casings, commissioned by the City of Sydney as part of its Eora Journey program. The title is taken from the language notebooks of Second Lieutenant William Dawes, who recorded the Sydney Aboriginal language in the late 18th century. The work honours all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander service men and women and addresses the disparity between land grants given to white veterans and the continued dispossession of Aboriginal soldiers on their return.
Albert has been an Archibald Prize finalist (2016 and 2017), won the Basil Sellers Art Prize and the Fleurieu Art Prize (2016), and is a member of the Art Gallery of NSW Trust. He is Artistic Director of the 5th National Indigenous Art Triennial, After the Rain, at the National Gallery of Australia. His work is held in the NGA, AGNSW, AGSA and other major public collections, and has been exhibited internationally across more than fifty group exhibitions and nine solo shows.
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