Dark Mofo has commissioned an artwork that interferes in Indigenous truth-telling in Lutruwita/Tasmania. Dark Mofo has given Santiago Sierra funding and a platform to attempt to act out a violent fantasy on stolen land, one that reinforces the harmful notion that Indigenous bodies, histories and stories are sites of exploitation and extraction. A fantasy of blood-soaked silence to be hung on a wall.

OCCURRENT AFFAIR has been conceived as a ‘collaborative activist gesture, … [addressing] current socio-political, economic and environmental issues, while celebrating the strength, resilience and continuity of Aboriginal culture’. It’s the first exhibition by the proppaNOW Aboriginal artists collective in the last five years.

If settlers are to see a treaty substantively address injustice, power, and inequality, we need to listen to Aboriginal people, especially to Aboriginal women, whose views, anger and pain are routinely silenced by nationalist discourses. We need to ensure that the state moves beyond the symbolic politics of recognition.

Dyirbal is now spoken by just twenty-nine speakers. Languages in decline have their own complexities. In their book Vanishing Voices: The extinction of the world’s languages, Daniel Nettle and Susan Domain explain how Dyirbal previously contained very specific terms which are now lost. Many terms for ‘big’ existed, depending on what was being described. A big eel required a different term to a big turkey, different again was a big tree.

The 1967 referendum remains a watershed moment in Australia’s civil rights history. On the 50th anniversary of the result, that saw over ninety per cent of Australians vote in favour of including First Nations people in the Commonwealth constitution, a special performance will pay homage to the era and its activists at the Sydney Festival.