Marie McMahon

The political poster You are on Aboriginal land was designed by Marie McMahon and produced in support of Mimi Aboriginal Arts and Crafts, Katherine, in the Northern Territory. McMahon made the poster after visiting the Tiwi Islands in 1980. She was travelling through Tikilaru country, on Bathurst Island, with one of its custodians Piparo (Winnie Munkara), when they encountered a four-wheel drive on a narrow bush track. In the car were two businessmen from Darwin who had been driving through Tikilaru with a view to developing a tourist resort near a beach. McMahon recalls: ‘Our vehicles came head-to-head on the narrow bush track and Winnie confronted the Darwin businessmen in theatrical Tiwi style, with dramatic stick waving and cracking on the ground and shouting “Tikilaru is not your country”. That event remained in my mind as a demonstration of land ownership from an Aboriginal perspective.’ The resolute figure in You are on Aboriginal land is based on a Tiwi woman, Phillipa Pupangamirri, who was photographed by McMahon as she stood on a beach at Cape Fourcroy on the south-west coast of Bathurst Island in 1980. The slogan ‘You are on Aboriginal land’ was borrowed from ‘Pay the rent – you are on Aboriginal land’ bumper stickers McMahon saw in Townsville, Queensland. An initial version of the poster, handprinted at Redback Graphix in Wollongong in 1981, and again at the Tin Sheds Art Workshop at the University of Sydney in 1982, carried the ‘Pay the rent’ line, which was dropped from the 1984 version shown here. The line was deleted because McMahon felt it ‘didn’t mean much to the people I’d had in mind when I created the work … The people I’d had in mind still spoke their own language … The slogan didn’t reflect their world view while the statement “You are on Aboriginal land” was a matter of fact.’ In a quintessentially Australian scene, the woman in the poster, based on the image of Phillipa and the memory of Piparo, stands on a beach, where land, sea and sky intersect. As another Tiwi, Valerian Munkara remarked, the poster image ‘gives me memories, it reminds us of our mothers’.