2025 NATSIAAs

There’s a fair bit wrong with this year’s Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. But the really important thing is that there is a clear progression occurring in the Big Picture that the NATSIAAs represent. A majority of works now lack clear cultural symbolism or story-telling. More and more artists are using their skills at abstracting to simply look good aesthetically.

That’s what artists do. It’s an inevitable development as remote Aboriginal life emerges completely from its First Contact era. My only caveat is that you can’t put all of the cultural context on to the wall label – it has to show on the canvas, bark, the board, the metal roadsign, the woven grasses, the glass, the ceramic, etc.

So my mind leaps to the canvas by Aileen Napaljarri Long, the Warlpiri/Tennant Creek artist who’s won nothing in the Telstras, but who’s bush tomato work appears on the cover of the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair magazine, and who’s art has been snapped up by Alcaston Gallery in Melbourne, where it’s described as “abstract modernist”. She may well be the future.

Meanwhile, the Big Telstra has gone to the Very Big, multi-panel engraved work by Gaypalani Wanambi, eldest daughter of the late innovator, Mr Wanambi from Buku Larrnggay art centre in NE Arnhemland. It was actually a 3D entry as the reverse is a 3 metre squared construction of recycled road signs. But it creeps in culturally by reference to the blossoms and the bees that go to create sugarbag honey – currently in season oop north. I fear its really impressive size and construction distracted the judges – two academics from the south and artist Gail Mabo from Meriam Mer in the Torres Strait – from other possibilities.

For instance, Daniel Walbidi’s Kirriwirri canvas is in my eyes the finest painting on show; Johnathon World Peace Bush’s Tiwi Multimedia work involving his painting and his mother’s accompanying song is a complex delight; and another Buku engraved work by Binygurr Wirrpanda had me transfixed by the sheer noise and movement of an Arnhem flood-plain evoked by his Gudurrku.

But the judges’ Best Painting was Iluwanti Ken’s very familiar Eagle Story. And the Multi-media Award went to the academic work by Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis, who pictured her ancestral Pitta Pitta Country in photographs from Melbourne. Incidentally, there were only two Multi-Media entries selected.

In the 3D category, I was pretty happy with Owen Yalandja’s mighty Yawk-Yawk, which he revealed had been “guided by my knowledge, down to its ear canals and intestines”! Many years of carving were needed to take his sculpture into that detail. But it must have been awfully hard for the judges not to recognise previous winner Jennifer Kemarre Martinello’s evocative glass shapes imagined from her father’s stories of the Painted Desert and presented as Rainbow Serpent eggs. Oddly, George Cooley’s canvas covered the same geographical phenomenon.

And Cooley might well have been the Emerging Artist winner – though that went to the beautifully constructed woven mat by Dhondji woman Sonia Gurrpulan Guyula. It was “an explanation from our Old People”, justified the artist – a perfect reason for its creation.

For Works on Paper, the judges preferred a familiar Naomi Hobson photograph in which she undoubtedly takes control of Indigenous imagery, far too often seized by non-Indigenous hands in the past. But was that comparable to Dulcie Sharp’s great progression from her familiar stuffed blanket creatures to re-creating them on paper? Such development should be rewarded.

Lastly, I have few quibbles about Lucy Yarawanga’s Best Bark Award for Bawaliba and Ngalyod. A sad story in black and white, for the good spirits who danced late at night and overslept in the morning were all but one consumed by the Rainbow Serpent! I felt her sorrow.

Of course, I have to admit that I may be getting old and jaded after 34 years of Telstra’s excellent promotion of the NATSIAAs. But I do think I sometimes have a history and context that the annually changing roster of judges may lack. On the positive side, the pre-selectors have offered a fine panoply of 71 artworks revealing an art world in flux. And curator Kate ten Buuren has laid the works out splendidly, given MAGNT’s somewhat awkward separation of the two galleries needed.

Which leads me to conclude that MAGNT definitely needs to come up with a scintillating Expression of Interest in what was once their new gallery in the Darwin CBD. For that’s just one of the newish CLP government’s challenges to the NT cultural (and lifestyle) scene to be faced down.

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