The Wathaurung woman and Melbourne-based artist, Bindi Cole has been awarded the $25,000 Deadly Art Award for her evocative photograph, Ajay.

Bindi Cole is an emerging artist and photographer whose work reveals uncomfortable truths about the fundamental disconnection between who we are and how the prevailing culture attempts to place and define us. Earlier in 2009, Bindi spent a month living with the Sistagirls on the Tiwi Islands. 

Sistagirls is a term used to describe a transgender person in the Tiwi Island culture.  Traditionally the word Yimpininni and the very existence of the word provides some indication of the inclusive attitudes historically extended towards Aboriginal sexual minorities.  Colonisation not only wiped out many indigenous people, it also had an impact on Aboriginal culture and our understanding of its sexual and gender expression.  As Catholicism took hold, this term became a thing of the past.

Yimpininni were once held in high regard as the nurturers within the family unit and tribe.  As the usage of the term vanished, tribes’ attitudes toward queer indigenous people began to resemble that of the western world and religious right. Despite this, today there are around 50 Sistagirls living on the Tiwi Islands in a population of 2500.  The community contains a complex range of dynamics including a hierarchy (a queen Sistagirl!), politics and a significant history of pride and shame.  The Sistagirls are isolated yet thriving today.

Amongst the other Victorian Indigenous Art Awards, the $7,000 Koorie Heritage Trust Acquisition Award went to Peter Waples-Crowe for The End of Innocence. Waples-Crowe is a Melbourne based contemporary artist with both Aboriginal and European heritage. His art is about his identity and living in many worlds. He has been represented in various group shows including the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards in 2005 and 2006, and has been a finalist in the Victorian Indigenous Art awards over the past four years.

The $3000 Boscia Award for Photography and Digital Media was awarded to Nicholas Boseley for his work Shared Ancestry. Boseley is an Eastern Arrernte artist who grew up in Victoria. He began painting at nineteen, working with photography at twenty and writing and directing films at 23. His work is influenced by his rich history, family stories and ongoing spiritual experiences both in his family’s country and his urban Victorian home.

The winners were selected by an independent judging panel including Shaune Lakin, Gallery Director, Monash Gallery of Art and Karen Casey, artist.

The Victorian Indigenous Art Awards is an annual art award program developed for Indigenous artists through Arts Victoria. And The Victorian Indigenous Art Awards exhibition is now on at Boscia Galleries in Flinders Lane, Melbourne.