Julie Gough

Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough is a descendant of Aboriginal leaders in Tasmania including Woretemoeteyenner (c.1790–1847), a Trawlwoolway woman from Tebrikunna in north east Lutruwita (Tasmania), and Mannalargenna (c.1775–1835), leader of the Plangermaireener. Gough creates works of art that often draw on the histories of her ancestors. She does not shy away from speaking the truth. Her works of art explore and expose forgotten histories and challenge the established colonial narrative perpetuated in Australia’s national story.

Gough’s studies of pre-history archaeology equip her with the foundational skills of working with the archive – investigating, gathering, trawling through and analysing historical records. Working with the colonial archive, Gough likens herself to a detective; her forensic approach has sustained her art practice for the past twenty-five years. Working closely with historic texts and material collections Gough creates installations, site-specific works, sound and video, and is a leading academic. Her work challenges the one-sidedness of the colonial archive as a national story and considers the ways in which the past continues to shape the present.

For Psychoscape (2021), Gough has delved into the Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection of Tasmanian colonial paintings and furniture. In reconfiguring a selection of objects – a chair, sewing table, couch, wooden box, console, sideboard and card table, as well as watercolours, oil paintings, sketches and prints – Gough is working with the residue of history; “we are what we use, it defines us.”[1]

Psychoscape recasts these historic representations of Tasmania, no longer inert relics of a previous time but as testimonial evidence:

Visiting places depicted in colonial art, our lands accrued by outsiders, is like walking through a crime scene. Country is a victim, pummeled, bled dry, infested with cattle and sheep, crops and weeds from another hemisphere. These are psychoscapes, shadows of Country.[2]

Central to Psychoscape is the standalone installation Promise II (2019-2021). A haunting shadow play, its silhouette figures – cut in kangaroo skin and cast onto the wall through the frame of an inverted chair – reference the nearby imagery of Governor Davey’s 1816 ‘Proclamation to the Aborigines’ (c. 1878). This sketch was modelled on the proclamation boards commissioned by Governor George Arthur between 1828 and 1830, when frontier violence between Tasmanian Aboriginal people and colonists was at a peak and British martial law and the Black Line was introduced. At the time, the boards were considered conciliatory. They attempted to describe the concept of equal justice for Tasmania’s First Peoples under British law. However, as its first sequence of pictograms portrays, “Aboriginal people were offered protection through the rule of law but only in exchange for a radical transformation to European ways.”[3]

In The Promise II, Gough has turned the domestic dangerous, the familiar uncanny. As the chair and kangaroo skin cast their spectres onto the wall, they are transformed into objects of truth-telling:

I’m painfully aware of… the politics of now. It is more dangerous to work with the topic of now than it is, in a sense, working with then. But the then that I’m working with has been left behind too soon.[4]

[1]Julie Gough, “In the Making: Julie Gough”, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 13 July, 2021, 9:38mins,

[2]Julie Gough, Tarnanthi 2021, Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 2021, p60.

[3]Desmond Manderson quoted in “Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines (1816)”, Australian War Memorial, accessed 7 September, 2021,

[4]Julie Gough, “In the Making: Julie Gough.”

Malahide is large-scale sculpture by Julie Gough and is made from 108 pieces of coal, strung together over found antlers. The work takes its name from a colonial property, Malahide, in Fingal, Tasmania, a place that, like the sculpture’s materials, has born witness to Australia’s early contact history.

Gough is innately drawn to coal as a material, with both sides of her family involved in its mining, in Tasmania but also in Scotland. Extracted from cavernous places, the coal exposes truths that have been buried deeply under the earth. The deer antlers become representative of hunt trophies adorned on walls in houses and the forced removal of Aboriginal people from their Country by colonists.

In this work, Gough translates the usually intimate scale of the Tasmanian shell necklace making tradition to create a heavy sculpture, that carries the weight and burden of Australia’s shared histories. Steeped in multiple meanings, the work serves to memorialise, remember, and uncover the forgotten.

Written by Associate Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait, Gloria Strzelecki