Archives bring with them inherent possibilities for replicating carceral systems of power and control. In this discussion, Debbie Kilroy, Amy McQuire, Raphaela Rosella, and Chelsea Watego unearth creative approaches to confront such regimes in the arts, media, and the criminal legal system.
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Debbie Kilroy OAM is one of Australia’s leading advocates for criminalised women and children. She is the founder and CEO of Sisters Inside, an independent community organisation that advocates for the human rights of women and girls in the criminal legal system. In 2003, Kilroy was awarded the OAM for services to the community for working with women in prison, and in 2004, was awarded the National Human Rights Medal. In 2007, she became the first person with serious convictions to be admitted by the Supreme Court of Queensland to practice law.
Amy McQuire is a Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman from Rockhampton in Central Queensland. She is a Poche Scholar and a PhD candidate within the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. McQuire’s research examines media representations of violence against Aboriginal women, and examines the media’s role in compounding violence in a settler-colonial society. She has 12 years experience working across a range of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal media organisations. Her writing has centred largely around the brutality within the justice system.
Raphaela Rosella is an Italian-Australian artist based in Meanjin/Brisbane. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Art, RMIT University, Naarm Melbourne. Her collaborations have been presented in We Are Family, Photoquai, Paris, 2015; Engaged, Active, Aware: Women’s Perspectives Now, Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018; Regeneration 4: The Challenges of Photography and Its Museum for Tomorrow, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, 2020; Not Standing Still: New Approaches in Documentary Photography, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, 2021; and in We, Us, Them at Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, and Belfast Exposed Photography, 2022.
Chelsea Watego is a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman with over 20 years of experience working within Indigenous health as a health worker and researcher. She is currently Professor of Indigenous Health at QUT’s School of Public Health and Social Work. She is a prolific writer and public intellectual, a founding board member of Inala Wangarra, an Indigenous community development association within her community, a Director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research, was one half of the Wild Black Women radio/podcast show, and is a proud mum to her five children. Her debut book Another Day in the Colony was released in 2021 to critical acclaim, and in 2022, was longlisted for the Stella Prize.
‘You'll Know It When You Feel It’, Institute of Modern Art, 2023. Photo: Louis Lim.