So, Julie Frager won the $100,000 Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW – her subject, fellow-artist Justene Williams, floating whimsically in the air. And Jude Rae won the Wynne – a first for a non-Indigenous artist in a good while. Oddly, she chose a photo-realist version of the dawn sky above Port Botany, a subject that many an Aboriginal artist has tackled after all those years lying flat on Country looking up into the night and imagining. Even odder, Gene A’Hern also painted the sky to win the Sulman Prize – though his was a fireworks-ridden abstraction, in the fashionable style pioneered by Elizabeth Cummings in landscape.

All, perhaps, a bit disappointing for those thinking that, with 29 of the 139 artworks hung in the three prizes, surely one by a First Nations artist would get up.

Perhaps the Sulman Prize judge, artist Elizabeth Pulie never got to read Zaachariaha Fielding’s text accompanying their work, ‘The scandal – nganalu tjalamilanu (who sold out)?’. For it only appeared this week beside the work (pictured). For, what looks to be basically in the prevalent style of the APY Art Centre Collective, especially those painted in the marketing group’s Adelaide studio, actually turns out to be a meditation on the obloquy that dogged the group from 2023 when The Australian headlined, ‘White hands on Black art’. I speculated last week about the work’s meaning based on that title, but we needed that text. For, on the canvas, most of their thoughts are in Pitjanjatjara. https://

But here’s what this remarkable character, shaped by their childhood in remote Mimili, going on to be a Wynne Prize-winner in 2023 and songster with Electric Fields which represented Australia at a recent Eurovision Song Contest, has to say:

“The work was born from discomfort – painted in the shadow of the APYACC scandal, but shaped by deeper questions. Who controls our stories? Are we selling stories or celebrating them? Why must Black success be regarded with suspicion or framed as cultural betrayal?
“Cultural knowledge, once held in ceremony, now sits on canvas. Does this make us sell-outs, make us survivors, or victors in a game we never designed?
“This work doesn’t offer answers. It lives in the grey (!) areas. It’s a protest. A prayer. A reminder that our stories are alive – and so are we. And no matter how they’re told – on cave walls or canvas – they belong to us”.

Many of the questions that Fielding poses are those that I also asked over twelve stories on Aboriginal Art Directory during what many see as an unresolved saga. Though Fielding presumably saw no wrong-doing by those ‘White hands’. But the questions also refer to the wider ‘Black art is a White thing’ meme posited by Richard Bell. ‘Cultural betrayal’, on the other hand, has not as far as I known been suggested. It’s cultural authenticity that we’re all trying to protect. Actually, only Bell and the proppNOW mob suggest any form of betrayal when they dismiss classic/traditional artworks as mere tourist tat, and their creators as ‘Ooga-Boogas’!

So, more power to Fielding’s thoughtful elbow. At least he’s still asking cultural questions while too many other people seem to hope the whole matter has gone away. And their art – painted or sung – is never grey!