Once Upon a Midden, 2021
Acrylic and graphite on board
120 x 120cm
BKE007
Copyright The Artist
Surely The Sydney Opera House makes some people want to scream. It’s built on an ancient shell midden, a sacred place to the Eora people. Here we see Bennelong (with...
Surely The Sydney Opera House makes some people want to scream. It’s built on an ancient shell midden, a sacred place to the Eora people.
Here we see Bennelong (with his front right incisor tooth knocked out meaning that he was an initiated warrior) screaming in frustration on the very ground where he stayed on occasion in a brick hut built for him by Governor Arthur Phillip after his initial capture.
An incident took place where the Opera House stands today, where Bennelong threatened to cut off a girl’s head as payback for a previous wrong doing on her part, and quite a number of Eora people were there to witness it.
Governor Phillip, along with armed military officers, said they’d hang him if he went through with killing her, but Bennelong wasn’t the least intimidated and said he’d spear them first. It was a standoff with the girls’ life in the balance.
Personally, from the primary source accounts I’ve read, I think that Bennelong was using this incident, as extreme as it may seem, to make it clear that British and Eora law were two very different things, and that he and the Eora people weren’t about to defer to the British. This was their country, governed by their law and they weren’t about to be told otherwise.
The girl wasn’t killed. I think he was making a point
Here we see Bennelong (with his front right incisor tooth knocked out meaning that he was an initiated warrior) screaming in frustration on the very ground where he stayed on occasion in a brick hut built for him by Governor Arthur Phillip after his initial capture.
An incident took place where the Opera House stands today, where Bennelong threatened to cut off a girl’s head as payback for a previous wrong doing on her part, and quite a number of Eora people were there to witness it.
Governor Phillip, along with armed military officers, said they’d hang him if he went through with killing her, but Bennelong wasn’t the least intimidated and said he’d spear them first. It was a standoff with the girls’ life in the balance.
Personally, from the primary source accounts I’ve read, I think that Bennelong was using this incident, as extreme as it may seem, to make it clear that British and Eora law were two very different things, and that he and the Eora people weren’t about to defer to the British. This was their country, governed by their law and they weren’t about to be told otherwise.
The girl wasn’t killed. I think he was making a point