Design and Art Australia Online

Michael Riley, Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi photographer and film maker, was born in Dubbo in 1960 and spent his early childhood on the Talbragar Reserve. Riley was the second of Allen Riley and Dorothy Wright’s four children, the others being his older brother David and his two younger sisters, Carol and Wendy. Talbragar Reserve had been established just east of the town of Dubbo in 1898 on Wiradjuri land, land with which Riley’s father’s family had been affiliated for many generations. The Rileys were one of the last families to leave Talbragar Reserve, and Michael was seven or eight when his family moved into Dubbo. His mother was of Kamilaroi descent, and her parents, Bengalla and Maude Wright, were caretakers at the Moree Aboriginal Reserve. Riley’s childhood in Dubbo was interspersed with regular visits to Moree to spend time with his mother’s extended family.

When Riley was sixteen he moved to Sydney to begin a carpentry course and he was to remain there for the rest of his life. As Brenda L Croft writes:

“In Sydney, Michael initially lived in Granville, meeting people who became not only lifelong friends, but his surrogate family: Linda Burney, brother and sister John and Raelene Delany, Dallas Clayton and David Prosser. Here, too, he created enduring bonds with true family, including cousins Lynette Riley-Mundine, Cathy Craigie, Maria (Polly) Cutmore, Ian 'Yurry’ Craigie, Craig Jamieson and others” (2006 Croft, p26). In 1987 Riley moved in with Burney and his cousins Lynette and Craig in Leichhardt.

In 1982 Riley enrolled in a photography course with Bruce Hart at Tin Sheds Gallery at the University of Sydney. Hart provided vital guidance and encouragement at this early stage, and subsequently employed Riley as a darkroom and studio technician at the Sydney College of the Arts. Riley’s photographic practice preceded this training however: in his early teens he had bought a 'Box Brownie’ camera and a home-developing kit and had developed his own photographs – of family, friends and landscapes – in his bedroom wardrobe.

Riley initially pursued a humanist style of documentary photography, producing stills of Aboriginal people from the Redfern community, playing and watching the local football and participating in street marches. He also took a number of chic black and white portraits of Aboriginal women in the style of fashion photography. In a 2003 conversation with Hetti Perkins, Riley said of his early photographic works:

“At that time I was interested in representing Aboriginal people in a different way to the negative images of Aboriginal people in the media. I’d decided to do portraits of young urban Aboriginal people in the 1980s who were doing their own thing, mixing into society, trying to break the stereotype of who Aboriginal people are.” (in 2008 Jones, p111).

One of Riley’s first group exhibitions was the seminal 'Koori Art '84’, coordinated by Tim and Vivien Johnson at Artspace in Sydney. Two years later he participated in the 'NADOC ’86 group exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers’ at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery, Sydney. The first to be wholly dedicated to Aboriginal photography, this exhibition was co-curated by Tracey Moffatt and Anthony (Ace) Bourke, the latter of whom would later represent Riley at Hogarth Galleries. The work Maria (1986), an image of Michael’s cousin Maria (Polly) Cutmore, was bought by the Australian photographer Max Dupain at the NADOC ’86 exhibition.

In 1987 Riley co-founded the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Chippendale with nine other Sydney-based Indigenous artists. A training position at Film Australia in that year made it possible for him to write and direct the film Boomalli: Five Artists, which documented the emerging practice of five of the Boomalli founders: Bronwyn Bancroft, Fiona Foley, Jeffrey Samuels, Arone Raymond Meeks and Tracey Moffatt. The following year Riley directed another documentary: Dreamings, the art of Aboriginal Australia, which accompanied the landmark Aboriginal art exhibition of the same name which was shown at the Asia Society Galleries in New York in 1988.

The spirit and subject of Riley’s projects of the 1980s and early 1990s are a reflection of his involvement in the vibrant Indigenous activist movements of the time. In the years immediately prior to Australia’s bicentenary in 1988 Riley was one of several Indigenous and non-Indigenous photographers who worked to create a wide ranging photo-essay documenting Indigenous Australian life across the country. The project, coordinated by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, culminated in the publication After 200 years: photographs of Aboriginal and Islander Australia today (1988). A number of works that Riley had created among communities in Leeton, New South Wales, and Robinvale, Victoria – communities he visited with fellow Indigenous photographer Alana Harris – were included in the publication. In their affirmation of the resilience of Indigenous Australians, these works contributed a counter-narrative to the national celebration of 200 years of white settlement.

Closely connected to the Indigenous political movements of the 1980s was the emergence of a dynamic and ambitious artistic fraternity of urban-based Indigenous artists, playwrights, actors, dancers, poets and curators. The Boomalli Aboriginal Artist’s Cooperative was one manifestation of the networks and collectives that came into being at this time, and another was the Black Playwrights Conference. In 1989 the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust commissioned Riley to document the conference; for this he was assisted by fellow Boomalli founder Brenda L. Croft. The footage created became part of the collection of the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust, and later the collection of the State Library of NSW. His 1990 series Portraits by a window, which was his first solo exhibition at Hogarth Galleries, included portraits of established political figures Charles Perkins and Joseph Croft, and captured in the early stages of the careers of Indigenous artists and curators such as Tracey Moffatt, Brenda L. Croft (daughter of Joseph Croft), Hetti Perkins (daughter of Charlie Perkins) and Djon Mundine. Mundine had just conceived the Aboriginal Memorial installation of hollow log coffins made by artists from Ramingining in Arnhem Land, a response to the Bicentennary celebrations of 1988 (collection of the National Gallery of Australia). Riley’s sensitivity to the disadvantage and social justice issues that marked the lives of members of the Redfern Aboriginal community informed the creation of the experimental film Poison in 1991. According to Croft, Riley had read a Rolling Stone magazine article titled 'Seven little Australians’ which told the story of a cluster of heroin overdoses amongst teenage Aboriginal girls in Redfern, many of whom Riley knew (2006 National Gallery of Australia website). Among the actors in the film were Lydia Miller, Rhoda Roberts, Lillian Crombie and the late Russell Page, all of who went on to establish careers in the arts.

From the early 1990s Riley’s work became preoccupied with revisiting and reappraising the spaces of his early childhood; the landscapes of rural New South Wales, the family body of which he was a part, and the way both had been shaped by the forces of colonisation. A common place: portraits of Moree Murries (1991) was the first of a series of projects in which Riley reflected upon his family’s experiences on missions and reserves. This series consisted of understated, subtly emotive black and white shots of family members set against a worn cloth backdrop. It was exhibited at Hogarth Galleries in 1991, the Rebecca Hossack Gallery in London in 1993, and some works from the series were included in the landmark 'Aratjara: Art of the First Australians’ exhibition which toured to galleries in Europe in 1993 and 1994. In 1998 Riley created portraits of members of the Dubbo community in the sister series Yarns from Talbragar Reserve (1998), which was exhibited at Dubbo Regional Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1999. Both series evoke the pathos of rural mission and reserve life by honouring the hardiness, humour and familial solidarity of the subjects, portraying as worthy of empathy and recognition people whose stories have been marginal to those conventionally celebrated as characteristic of the national ethos and character.

Other projects from the 1990s were similarly reflective, with Riley using images and scenes that were evocative of childhood memories as a backdrop for the exploration of themes of loss, ruin and death. At this stage, Riley sought to bring an enigmatic quality to his works by using abstract symbolism, creating strange atmospheres and generating emotional resonances that were often ambivalent. The 1993 autobiographical film Quest for country, made in the year that he established Blackfella Films with Rachel Perkins (daughter of Charles Perkins and sister of Hetti Perkins), narrated his return to his ancestral country in the regions of Dubbo and Moree and his impressions of how that country has been marked by the massacres of Aboriginal people and the ruinous environmental impact of farming. The photographic series Sacrifice (1992) consisted of a constellation of metaphorical and allegorical images that expressed a critical and interrogative engagement with the impact of mission life and questioned the nature of the sacrifice Aboriginal people had made in order to be accepted into colonial society. Stylistically, Sacrifice marked a departure from studio-style or real life settings and a movement towards a more conceptual approach to the form. As he says of the series in an interview with David Burnett, it reflects “on that period of time when people did sort of start to lose things, you know, because of the assimilation process and … the government [was] trying to put people on reserves to be good Christian Aboriginal people” (2002 National Gallery of Australia website). Sacrifice was his third solo exhibition at Hogarth Galleries in Sydney; it was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia. The 1997 film Empire, which was commissioned by Rhoda Roberts for the Festival of the Dreaming, and the photographic series flyblown (1998) drew on landscape and Christian imagery to further explore the degradation of Aboriginal land and society by white settlement and the Christian faith, but also to affirm the endurance of Aboriginal spirituality. flyblown was toured to the 1999 Venice Biennale by Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi as part of an al latere exhibition at the Palazzo Papadopoli of Indigenous photomedia artists titled 'Beyond Myth – Oltre Il Mito’. The other artists in this exhibition were Brook Andrew, Brenda L. Croft, Destiny Deacon and Leah King-Smith.

The 1990s also saw Riley make a number of documentary films for the ABC. Among these were Blacktracker (1996), a biographical film about his grandfather, Alexander Riley, who had been a highly regarded tracker in the NSW Police Force between 1911 and 1950. Alexander Riley was the first Aboriginal person in NSW to be made a Sergeant and in 1943 he was awarded the King’s Medal. Tent Boxers (1998) was another documentary made for the ABC. This film related the experiences of Indigenous men who had toured with country fairs and circuses as amateur boxers in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. In 1995 Riley was commissioned to create a permanent video installation, Eora, for the Museum of Sydney, which was dedicated to the original owners of the Sydney region.

In 1998, Riley was diagnosed with renal failure: his immune system had never quite recovered from a case of rheumatic fever he’d suffered as a child. He continued to produce work, however his art practice was often interrupted by periods of time spent in hospital. In 1999 the Art Gallery of NSW commissioned the film I don’t wanna be a bludger for the 'Living here now: Art and Politics’ Australian Perspecta. The film, which Riley made with fellow Indigenous photographer and film-maker Destiny Deacon, was a satirical take on prevailing stereotypes of Aboriginal people. Riley’s last series of works, Cloud (2000), was the first in which he made use of digital manipulation. The recurring preoccupations with Christianity and Aboriginal spirituality, childhood memory, the spaces and animals of rural New South Wales, and the resilience of Indigenous Australia found expression in these minimalist images of lone, symbolic figures – including a boomerang, feather, locust and bible – suspended in an expansive blue sky feathered with cloud. This series marked a turning point for Riley’s international reputation: it was shown at the 2002 Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery and was awarded the grand prize in the 11th Asian Art Biennial in Bangladesh. In 2003 Cloud was also selected for 'Poetic Justice: 8th International Istanbul Biennale’ along with the film Empire. In 2004 Riley was one of eight Indigenous Australian artists selected to be part of the Australian Indigenous Art Commission, which coordinated the permanent installation of their artworks and designs within the interior and exterior architectural spaces of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, opened in 2006. Besides Riley, the other artists included in the commission were Judy Watson, Paddy Bedford, John Mawurndjul, Ningura Naparrula, Lena Nyadbi, Tommy Watson and Gulumbu Yunupingu. These artist’s works were all enlarged and adapted to different media appropriate for the space. In Riley’s case, scaled up, laminated glass images from the Cloud series are now situated behind windows in one of the Museum’s buildings at street level.

Riley passed away in 2004. The National Gallery of Australia’s retrospective Michael Riley: sights unseen toured nationally between 2006 and 2008.

Writers:

Fisher, LauraNote:

Date written:

2011

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed