In a text headed, ‘Capturing History Through the Lens’, Eualeyai Professor Larissa Behrendt hails Juno Gemes’ book as “Bittersweet for Juno – so many pioneers have passed or fallen; but Juno, was always there to portray this pantheon of giants”.

Who are these giants? Well, the quote that gives the book its title comes from one indubitable giant, Mum Shirl, the Wiradjuri matriarch of Redfern: “I am just holding the fort Until Justice Comes”. Which, in the light of recent events, hasn’t happened yet. And that’s despite half a century of battles lost and won. The lost include: the 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games, the redevelopment of Redfern, the Howard Government Intervention, too many funerals and of course the Voice Referendum. And the battles won: the Canberra Tent Embassy, the Uluru Handback, the 2000 Reconciliation march, the creation and survival if NAISDA and the Rudd apology to the Stolen Generation.

And Juno was there for all of them (apart, mysteriously, from Keating’s Redfern Speech) capturing the acknowledged giants of ‘The Movement’ in action, such as lawyer Paul Coe, Chicka Dixon, Charlie Perkins, Roberta Sykes, Maureen Watson, Tiga Bayles, Brian Syron, Bob Maza and Bobby Merritt. Pictured perhaps even more than them is Marcia Langton – from youthful street demonstrator to baleful elder. And definitely seen most frequently is friend and Federal Minister, Linda Burney. Juno’s portraits of them are undoubtedly her strength.

Many are in urban situations. But, actually, she came into her Indigenous involvement via research work on a film called ‘Uluru’, made with Pitjanjatjara elders in 1970. Realising that such people were invisible to the majority of Australians at that time, she went on to study photography and began to put it to use while working with a Lardil dance troupe, the Woomera Cultural Corporation from Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Indeed, the cover picture for her book – ‘Waiting for the Sacred Fish to Come in’ – is an extraordinary achievement for the tyro that she then was; such a calm still life of three Black backs looking expectantly out to sea.

It pre-figures Ricky Maynard’s famous image of a palawa man in the Bass Strait, up to his knees in the water, looking longingly towards the lost mainland of lutruwitja/Tasmania. But Juno’s Lardil figures don’t need a longing; thousands of years of tradition assure this family that ‘The Sacred Fish will Come’ and they will be fed. That confidence along with the Dreaming and their custodial rights to land and sea are somehow all captured in the simplicity of this photo. As Juno explains, her months on MI were used “to learn to listen, thanks to the reciprocity of the Lardil people”. And that experience “made her the photographer for this project”.

A fascinating aspect of this response to Aboriginal invisibility is that it took a woman born in Hungary to notice it. Coincidentally, two other photographers who did notice and respond to our First Nations were also outsiders – the American Elaine Pelot Syron and the Brit Penny Tweedie. I might add my own outsider status when it comes to words (and the odd photo) about the Indigenous – a Pom who also had his eyes and heart opened in the Gulf of Carpentaria at a pan-tribal dance festival on Groote Eyelandt. I still recall sitting at Circular Quay upon my return knowing that my fellow ferry passengers were almost all in blithe ignorance of the complex cultures I had just witnessed.

Juno herself has said, “With no particular notion of Australian history to defend, I was able to ask questions not apparent to others who lived with certainties not available to me”. Larissa Behrendt prefers to call it “White Australian amnesia” in one of many contextual essays.

While Juno undoubtedly has all the big names of The Movement in her book, I wonder whether the community shots around Redfern or out on Bangate Station on Jimmy Little’s (and Larissa Behrendt’s) Eualeyai Country aren’t more effective in achieving Juno’s stated ambition “to make First Nations people more familiar and emotionally connected” to the rest of Australia. As Jimmy Little’s offspring Frances Peters-Little puts it, “The elders had so wanted to share their stories, to know their lives were being recognised and recorded, and that their histories were going to be shared with generations of Aboriginal people in the future”.

Way back in 1978, the Lardil on Mornington Island requested that Juno “show our culture is still strong”. And the suite of photos from MI that includes ‘Waiting for the Sacred Fish to Come in’ certainly does that. But something that also emerges from Juno’s rich multiplicity of images is that the gulf between the North and South of Aboriginal Australia has widened since 1978. The heroic battlers for land rights in the South have barely engaged with their Northern cousins – except at Uluru. And the latter, as I reported over the shocking absence of any tribal thinkers from the new First Nations Board at Creative Australia, are increasingly dissociating from the national political scene. The Yolŋu for instance, just don’t need our validation, having been regularly denied our justice.

Until Justice Comes is beautifully published by Upswell Press at $65