Richard Dunn

The Artist

Richard Dunn: Thinking Pictures, Charles Nodrum Gallery, 22 July - 12 August 2023, no. 55

Christina Davidson, Richard Dunn, Anne Marie Freyboug, Pamela Hansford, Murdo Macdonald, Ingrid Mossinger, Richard Dunn: Thinking Pictures, Kerber Verlag, Berlin, 2023, illus p 336

This painting references Godfrey Charles Mundy’s 1852 lithograph Mounted Police and Blacks (a copy of which is in the Australian War Memorial collection) depicting the massacre near Moree, also known as the Slaughterhouse Creek massacre and the Australia Day Massacre, which occurred on 26 January 1838. The NSW Mounted Police, under the command of Major James Nunn, killed an estimated 40-50 Kamilaroi people. The painting also references an image of Rio Tinto’s Argyle mine in the East Kimberley, one of the largest producers of diamonds in the world and famed for its pink diamonds.
The painting springs from the artist’s many years of reading Australian history (as well as the histories of other nations which suppressed segments of their populations, including Scotland - the country of the artist’s heritage - and the USA).
The events at Lambing Flats, and the Red Flag Riots in Brisbane, are relevant - and the artist's own 1988 series of painting Surveillance and Punishment is also related to this work.
Events like the Waterloo Creek Massacre are not widely known in Australia but are being increasingly addressed, as evident in the Nine Newspaper’s apology for their coverage of the Myall Creek Massacre of 1838 which occurred about 100km west of Waterloo Creek and also involved Major Nunn. Readers of biography will be aware of David Marr's recent work Killing for Country (2023) in which he lays bare the activities of his great-great grandfather who served in the Native Police and had been "a professional killer of Aborigines [and that] his brother was also in the massacre business."