The poor old Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney – prime site beside the cruise ships at Circular Quay – has recently had to start charging patrons an entry fee. Tickets as much as $35, which seems counter-intuitive in what everyone agrees are straightened times. Not helping matters, their big show of the summer goes under the audience-grabbing title of ‘Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory’.

Now I managed to report earlier that the Ethiopian-born American Mehretu is rated at 26 in ArtReview‘s ‘Power 100 list’. Not that you’d know it from the recent works she’s knocked off for the MCA. As a far better critic of non-Indigenous art than me, John McDonald commented: “The incomprehensible title is only the first disincentive. Mehretu may be one of the world’s most successful living artists, but she is a blank to most of the people the MCA needs to attract. If those who see the show are unimpressed by Mehretu’s relentless, repetitive abstractions, they are unlikely to encourage friends and family to pay a visit. A Mehretu show may confer status within the niche world of contemporary art, but it was never going to bring in the crowds”.

So I was cheered to attend their post-Mehretu selections, which have discovered that First Nations art is as contemporary as anything. Oddly, no Indigenous curators seem to have been involved! But from the seriously conceptual Queenslander Warraba Weatherall getting his first solo show to a delicate Mina-Mina painting by Julie Nangala Robinson and broader focuses on a mob of Tiwi, Gordon Bennett and Timo Hogan, there seems to be interest wherever you wander.

Weatherall is intriguing. He gets a whole salle to himself for a variety of thought-provoking works that, I discovered, link him to the Venice Biennale Golden Lion-winner Archie Moore via their mutual birth in Toowoomba of all places. What’s in the water in that Darling Downs city that drives Aboriginal men to art? Could it be just a drop of racism?

Certainly the Kamilaroi-ancestry Weatherall isn’t mightily impressed by the ways in which institutions collect and portray their understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and culture. Whether it’s the archive cards that dispassionately record the acquisition of everything from fighting clubs to anonymous skulls – here memorialised in brass; or the 19th Century systems for anthropologically recording the colour of a person’s skin, the artist wants us to think about the impact on his people. And he finds interesting ways to challenge our minds to the eugenics involved. A massive top decorated with Kamilaroi designs stands before the colour charts that would be placed on it to Trace a result as it revolved. And the distant plunking sound of a Dirge comes from a machine Weatherall has constructed utilising the Braille patterns he has translated from a document discovered in a museum describing Aboriginal land rights, creating ‘music’ as it revolves.

Yes, it must have been intrusive to be ‘studied’ by passing anthropologists, and worse to be surveilled by endless lines of government officials, medical officers and pastoralists who could refuse you permission to marry at whim, deport you to a distant prison community, dig up your ancestors’ remains, or run off with your precious cultural artefacts. However, I have always argued that an anthropologist like Norman Tindale may have used his authority to intrude, but his recording of languages and relationships, his establishment of tribal boundaries and his collection of genetic material has done much to archive information that’s proved vital to subsequent generations. Why, his accurately recorded hair samples have been used to establish how the First People took control of Australia millennia ago, travelling around the east and west coasts before heading inland.

But as the MCA says, “Shadow and Substance features installation, sculpture and video works which draw attention to the ethics of how Indigenous property, cultural information and materials have been acquired and displayed. By foregrounding individual and community histories, including his own family’s experience, Weatherall highlights the gaps and biases of the colonial record, as well as its ongoing influence”.

As well as featuring in Sydney, Warraba Weatherall appears in the TarraWarra Museum’s imminent Biennale, showcasing a large-scale light installation, and drawing once again on scientific and anthropological records of Gamilaroi cultural sites. A busy young man.

Another busy older man, Blak Douglas (ne Adam Douglas Hill) also has a solo survey show that’s just opened. But his is in the crowded circumstance of the Penrith Regional Gallery, way out west on the banks of the Nepean River. It’s a home-coming for Dunghatti-man Blak, who was raised and art-trained in Penrith. But while Weatherall conforms to the MCA’s intellectual parameters, Blak is emotional, angry that no major institution is offering him and urban artists like him the big spaces that his abrasive Pop caricature art critiquing colonial gate-keeping deserves. He might win the Archibald Prize for his grumpy portrait of fellow artist Karla Dickens, cut off at the knees by the 2022 Lismore floods, but there’s challenging politics in almost everything he paints – and his double-entendre titles.

Despite his urbanity, Blak pays tribute to more traditional Aboriginal culture – sometimes referencing the Seven Sisters Songline, or via his ‘Clayton’s’ dotting on ochre works, at others through his mastery of the yidaki. But a major element in his selection of subjects is the honouring of Aboriginal heroes. Four huge heads are currently on show in NSW Parliament House; the former Senator, Aden Ridgeway features in Penrith; Pemulwuy’s 13 year stand against the 1788 colonists gets a complex portrait; and so does his Dhungatti grand-mother who went through so much stolen confusion, starting with the Cootamundra Girls Home, working as a domestic in western NSW, and ending, aged only 36, polishing a Kempsey bank floor with Picaninny Floor Wax!

Curatorial Advisor, Djon Mundine tells me that there will be a catalogue.

Warraba Weatherall‘s Shadow and Substance runs at the MCA until September while Blak Douglas’s The Halfway Line survives only until 20 July.