Tall Ships

Mirning artist and academic Dr Ali Gumillya Baker discusses her ‘Tall Ships’ artworks with Associate Professor Catherine Kevin reflecting on the memorialisation of Captain Cook 250 years since his landing on Dharawal Country, on what is now known as Kurnell on the southern headland of Botany Bay.

Dr Ali Gumillya Baker

Dr Ali Gumillya Baker is Mirning woman from the Nullarbor on the West Coast of South Australia. She is a Senior Lecturer in the College of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences in Indigenous and Australian Studies at Flinders University and a multi-disciplinary artist. Awarded her PhD in Cultural Studies and Creative Arts in 2018, her research interests are in colonial archives, memory and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. Baker is also a member of the Unbound Collective which was formed in 2014 with colleagues Faye Rosas Blanch, Natalie Harkin and Simone Ulalka Tur. Through her work as an independent artist and as part of the Unbound Collective, which has been presented at major Australian institutions and included in The National (2019) and Biennial of Sydney (2020), her practice interrogates and speaks back to the colonial archive. Baker is also a member of the Adelaide City Council Public Art Roundtable, Artlink Board, South Australian Living Artists Advisory Committee.

Associate Professor Catherine Kevin

Associate Professor Catherine Kevin is an historian in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University. She received her PhD in History from Sydney University in 2004 joining Flinders in 2007 after holding positions at SBS Television and the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King's College, University of London. Kevin’s research interests include the histories of pregnancy and miscarriage in Australia, reproductive politics, Australian feminism and postcolonial perspectives on Australian film. She is currently working on the history of domestic violence since 1788 with Zora Simic and Ann Curthoys, and has recently completed the manuscript for a book called Dispossession and the Making of Jedda: Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country. In addition, Kevin is former co-editor of History Australia and on the editorial board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.