Artwork title: batshit bushrangers/missing quolls

An icon of early Australian television, beloved television personality 'Barry the Bushranger' captivated households around the Nation for decades with his weekly program - 'The Adventures of Barry the Bushranger'. Join us in viewing a fan favourite episode, in which Barry the Bushranger takes us into the Australian Bush to introduce us to the once numerous, now extinct Eastern Quoll. In the present day, in between the firing lines of encroaching development and the old suburbia of south-west Sydney, something is missing. There's an absence; empty spaces in neglected reserves and fibro attics that something small once called home. A young man searches for what has been lost/exterminated. The bushranger stands as a potent image within White Australia. It can be remodelled and reassigned as needed; a symbol of colonial oppression, of pioneering freedom, or of a (manufactured) care for the land on which we reside. batshit bushrangers / missing quolls interrogates White Australia's obsession with the bushranger. It satirises the image of the nature-loving larrikin while exposing the malicious and widespread environmental destruction that is the reality of White Australia's presence on this land. The artist acknowledges the Gadigal, Bidjigal, and Dharawhal people as the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this work was filmed and created.

Harrison Mäe is an emerging artist living and creating on unceded Dharawhal land. My practice is preoccupied with dead bandicoots, scraggly bush floors, and the complex histories found within the wreckage of Australian colonialism. Charting a diverse practice across printmaking, drawing, moving image, writing, and performance, my work seeks to understand and critique my own experience living as a white settler on stolen land.

Acknowledgement of Country

UNSW School of Art & Design stands on an important place of learning and exchange first occupied by the Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples.

We acknowledge the Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land that our students and staff share, create and operate on. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and extend this respect to all First Nations peoples across Australia. Sovereignty has never been ceded.