^{Cover Image: Christopher Pease, Target, 2005, oil on linen, 100 x 180 cm. Nelson Family Collection. Courtesy of the artist and Gallerysmith. Photography by Sharon Baker.}

In the Australian colony’s self-portrait, the land was a tabula rasa on which history was waiting to be written. Even among the earliest settler lithographs and aquatints, the new Eden’s topography is depicted with barely concealed avarice, the original inhabitants for the most part reduced to mere ornamental staffage – handy for indicating scale but hardly signifiers of a complex, sovereign civilisation. Born in Perth in 1969, Minang/Wardandi/Bibbulmun man Christopher Pease has spent decades painting his way out of this “land belonging to nobody” (“terra nullius”) fiction. Terra Nullius, his major survey exhibition at John Curtin Gallery, is the most concentrated and forceful reckoning with that project to date. 

Pease’s route into art wasn’t linear. His mother, the artist Sandra Hill, was a member of the Stolen Generations – cut from family and cultural inheritance before their reconnection when Pease was a teenager. The encounter reoriented his life. He trained as a graphic designer, spent years in museum archives and with family oral history, and eventually committed full-time to the studio. 

His first major canvas, Noongar Dreaming (1999), placed his kinsman Peter Farmer on a Perth freeway named after the football legend Graham “Polly” Farmer: a compressed statement of Noongar presence in a landscape that carried Noongar names while denying Noongar people. It’s interesting to note that Pease has acknowledged the influence of Jeffrey Smart’s work on this painting, which can be seen in the ongoing exhibition I Am at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. 

Pease’s search for a distinctive visual language that eschewed Western Desert traditions found early inspiration in the work of Revel Cooper, the mission-trained Noongar artist whose drawings, like those of other children detained at the Carrolup Native Settlement in the late 1940s, are represented in the small but powerful exhibition Once Known. 

Terra Nullius is the inheritor of what those Carrolup children began: Noongar art on its own terms, both reclamation and reconciliation in the sense of existential contradictions. After significant earlier series – Minang Boodjar (2018–19), Lost in Translation (2022), Hegemony and Empire (2024) – this survey, superbly curated by JCG’s Lia McKnight – to whose excellent didactics for the show this review owes a great debt – gathers loans from major public and private collections alongside new large-scale works. The effect is cumulative, an intellectual and emotional tsunami that leaves in its wake not wreckage but wisdom. 

One of Pease’s chief organisational principles is the idea of the palimpsest – originally, a page of parchment or vellum whose original writing had been scraped away ready for reuse, but whose previous markings were always visible beneath the new content. Pease paints a painterly copy of a colonial image – perhaps a lithograph after Louis Auguste de Sainson, an aquatint derived from Robert Dale or an engraving by Cruikshank – then paints over it. 

Just as colonial history and power structures persist beneath the surface of contemporary Australia, the source material persists beneath superimposed targets, floor plans and topographical lines. This dissonant dialectic, this cacophonic counterpoint between the European utopia below and the Noongar commentary above, is the engine driving the whirring gears of the whole exhibition. 

Target (2005) makes such tensions explicit. De Sainson’s 1833 image of King George Sound offers a tranquil scene of apparent cultural exchange, French officers and Minang people cohabiting an idyllic landscape, the harbour’s placid waters dominating the background. Pease drives a concentric red circle through it – bullseye! – and the mirage dissolves. The target’s concentric circles reference Indigenous iconography, Jasper Johns’ Target series and a weapon’s sight. Such layering forces old perceptions to collapse beneath the weight of truth. 

Land Release 3 (2008) works through a different instrument. An 1801 French image of Geographe Bay is overlaid with a contemporary residential subdivision plan, its sterile grid of roads and lot boundaries settling across the landscape like a second act of dispossession in bureaucratic form. These grids call to mind the canvas boards of Imants Tillers – assembled in their hundreds to build composite images, each unit a registered portion of a larger system – except that in Pease’s hands the grid is not compositional method but political charge: the conversion of living Country into parcelled, purchasable property, depicted in the visual language used to execute that conversion. 

There’s yet another form of superimposition in Seasons (2006). Employing grass tree resin and ochre on hessian, this is the exhibition’s most formally spare yet texturally rich work. Dots arranged vertically mark the four Western seasons; horizontally, the six Noongar seasons; 24 in all, the Earth’s rotation implicit in their count. The austerity brings Rothko’s late works to mind in the way both artists use the most reduced means to produce something approaching the devotional. 

The material here is as active as the form. The ochre and Balga resin were drawn from a pit at Wilsons Inlet worked by Pease’s family across generations. This isn’t pigment sourced from an art supplier. It’s Country made materially present on the gallery wall. Two chronological systems – one imposed, one traditional – occupy the same plane while denying convergence. It’s not reconciliation the work depicts. It’s incompatibility, held steady. Despite its abstract nature, Seasons is one of the show’s most beautiful, visceral and profound works. It demands considered, meditative contemplation. 

Kartwarra (2019) returns to Dale’s King George’s Sound panorama and overlays it with three repeated abstract forms derived from an 1834 Cruikshank engraving of Yagan’s decapitated head. Dale himself transported the skull to London, where it was exhibited as a curio; its repatriation to Wadjuk elders took until 1997. 

The forms Pease derives from it are faceted, compressed, almost jewel-like – precious, as the artist observes, to those who sought repatriation and to those who once displayed the object over dinner alike, though in entirely different ways. Not a little ironically, you might be reminded of that anamorphic skull, a distorted memento mori, in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, in London’s National Gallery. 

In Reaper (2015), Death surveys the Dale panorama from high ground; far below, a Noongar woman sits by a campfire, oblivious to the coming catastrophe. The composition retains the force of a medieval woodcut depicting the coming of the plague while evoking the terrifying sublimity of Goya’s The Colossus – that vast, indifferent figure brooding over a Spanish plain while the population below it flees in panic. 

Some of the more recent works in the exhibition extend the colonial narrative beyond Country. Whalers 2 (2024) draws on an 1837 engraving of a sperm whale hunt; the central target is painted in the colours of the Palestinian flag. The Sealers (2023), derived from an 1884 image of sailors clubbing seals, applies the same grammar to another form of oceanic exploitation. Whalers 4, made for this exhibition, completes the group.  

Here, Pease isn’t proposing a crude moral equivalence – he’s too subtle a thinker for that. What he identifies is structural: colonialism operates through recognisable instruments wherever it lands, and the same visual logic that parcels up Noongar Country can be read in the body of a harpooned whale – the whale, or mamang, is sacred to the Minang people – or a brutal seal hunt. The target does its share of heavy lifting. 

The Noble Savage series – Wardandi men posed in Neo-classical grandeur as a direct rebuttal of the 1944 Native Citizenship Rights Act, which required Aboriginal Australians to legally repudiate their culture as the price of recognition – is conceptually acute. But the argument perhaps cedes too much to rhetoric. The works thus feel less resolved than others in the show. 

Shown alongside Reko Rennie’s video installation OA_RR – in which a Kamilaroi-patterned Rolls-Royce and a metallic Holden Monaro enact Indigenous sovereignty through the idiom of the Australian car culture Rennie grew up in – Terra Nullius comprises an important retrospective far greater than the sum of its parts. 

Terra Nullius is on at John Curtin Gallery until 23 August 2026. Entry is free. For more information, visit the website.