Annabel Milera - Summer time

Annabel Milera

Summer time

acrylic on canvas

36 x 28 cm

Two frames. Mother and child, kept apart. Australian child removal policies have fractured the psychosocial and cultural development of generations of Aboriginal children. While national investigations have acknowledged the atrocities of the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal children continue to be placed in out-ofhome care at disproportionate rates. The dense fields of pattern are knowledge; symbols accumulating over thousands of years, encoding the human truth of connection: the breast that feeds, the body that creates, the bond that sustains. Purple exists throughout Country in the Mulla Mulla blanketing the inland, the iridescent wings of the Jewel Beetle, the bruised tones of desert dusk. It is ancient and often misread. Like the culture it carries. Characters sit on top, replacing cultural stories. Born from this Country, distributed by hands from elsewhere while the story stays and the profit leaves. Beneath them, the pattern continues, indifferent, waiting. The child’s silhouette offers the same gesture as breath pushing ochre onto rock. Reflecting the marks that have lasted thousands of years. Presence across time. Proof of continuity and survival. A barefoot child who belongs to Country so completely that the boundary between body and earth dissolves. The absence of a barrier is not a failure of care. It is the oldest form of it. The woman does not conform to the archetype projected onto Aboriginal womanhood. Aboriginal identity is not a skin tone or a face that matches someone's expectation. Between the two frames is everything that was taken, and everything that cannot be erased.