As a teenager, I attended a rural high school where Indigenous Australians were seen as an oddity by certain students. Classmates spoke about us as if there couldn’t possibly be anyone who was Aboriginal in the room with them. I can recall one lunch where my friend spoke to me about an argument they had in their previous class where a classmate said, ‘Indigenous people deserved to be colonised because they didn’t do anything with the land, they wouldn’t have built structures and cities like colonisers did’. Racist rhetoric like this was not uncommon. Years later, I moved with my family to a developing suburb where nothing was built, and the land was abounding. However, like all developments in Australia, the land is now inhospitable. Many trees have been cut down, the Earth has been destroyed and the countless native animals that lived here, have lost their only homes. I am left to wonder what could possibly be so great about the colonial developments a racist classmate once spoke about.

Wollert, where this was taken, is the Woiwurrung word meaning ‘where possums abound’, yet I had never seen one the entire time I lived there. The kangaroos, birds, and rabbits I was familiar with, are all now long gone due to the continuous construction. In this self-portrait with my partner (Tarik Ismat), we stand steady but solemnly at the demolition behind us. The white backdrop scarcely concealing the background of destruction represents the ongoing colonisation present under the thinly veiled facade of improvement and societal development, when in reality, they’re just destroying the land; as they have done for hundreds of years.

‘Where Possums Abound’ (2023)

This photograph was commissioned and exhibited as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival: ‘What I Know, How I See’, part of the Deadly Fringe Program 2023.