^{Cover Image: Kinjarling Landscapes, Albany. Image by Ann Tom photography, provided by the State Library of Western Australia.}

The notion of celebrating 200 years of Albany history is admirable but ironic for those whose histories have barely registered in the official records. Or never appeared at all. 

This invisibility is poignantly captured in Kinjarling Djinnang Ngalak | Country Sees Us, an exhibition at the State Library of WA commemorating Albany’s bicentenary year. The very title, ‘Country Sees Us’, reflects the seen/unseen nature of what actually occurred over two centuries, beginning with the colonists’ erasure of the traditional Menang place name Kinjarling and naming the city Albany. 

So how do you restore the voices and presence of people left out of unreliable memoirs? State Library curator and Partnerships Officer Denien Toomath, a Menang Noongar woman, has fashioned imaginative and lateral-thinking ways of filling in the blank pages.  

Firstly, the exhibition’s main feature is a six-metre-wide listening dome whose shape is inspired by a kornt or traditional shelter. Stepping inside, visitors find themselves sitting companionably with a group of Menang Elders — Carol Pettersen, Lester Coyne, Mark Colbung, Vernice Gillies, Doreen Hancox, Sharralyn Maddren and young Menang ranger Cleve Humphries — who appear on screens and talk about their lived experience of Albany and their ancestral link to Country. 

It’s striking that they do not give an Ancestry.com-style genealogy of their forebears’ names, the official roles they performed, or the fortunes they won or lost. Instead, they speak about Country and their kinship with the natural world. “Our language is not told through written word, it’s told through stories,” explains Carol Pettersen. “It’s every day, it’s the animals, the birds, the clouds and the weather.” 

Says curator Toomath: “The voices of the elders within this exhibition remind us that history is not only found in documents or photographs. It lives in people, in story, in language, in memory, in the passing down of knowledge across generations.” 

Yet even fixed-in-time photos can be reimagined. Stepping out of the story dome, you encounter six large-scale photographs from the early 1900s that can literally be viewed in two ways. Viewed from one angle, the rocky landscape of Albany is populated by European figures and built landmarks; from another, the landscape has mysteriously reverted to its natural wild form. 

These are called lenticular prints, historic images from the early 1900s turned into optical prisms and digitally reconfigured to restore the coastline, rocks, water and vegetation to pre-colonial times. The colonial imprint is erased momentarily, in a delicious reversal of time that alone is worth an exhibition visit.  

Even formal documents and maps, the blueprints of colonial domination over land, can be imaginatively subverted. Western Australian media artist Steven Alyian and First Nations artist Shandell Cumming were supplied with historical materials from State Library collections. Their colourful animation is both a history lesson and a reassertion of First Nations presence. Sailing ships — first Dutch, then French and finally British — bob up and down on a dot-painted harbour scene while black footprints track the coastal outline and cultural motifs pulsate with life as they spread across black and white cartography. 

Another slice of southwest history is less successfully captured in a wall display – a daunting list of missions which many of the elders’ parents and grandparents were forced by Native Welfare to live in. 

“My own connection to Kinjarling and the Great Southern region is shaped by disruption,” says Toomath. “My grandmother Alma was taken from her home in Mount Barker and removed to Carrolup Mission, and then later to Roelands Mission. Watching my grandmother return to Country, and seeing the peace, strength and familiarity it gave her, changed the way that I understood Kinjarling and changed the way I understood myself,” she says. 

“Archives are powerful places, but we know that they are not neutral.” Many gaps in the record reflect an official position of disregard for Albany’s original inhabitants, Toomath argues. “And yet, even within those gaps, our people are still here. Sometimes in fragments, sometimes unnamed, sometimes seen only through the eyes of others.” 

^{(Top L-R) Dog Rock; The Gap, Albany, 1954; Balancing rock 1934 Gary McNeill; (bottom) Mount Clarence overlooking Albany, circa 1905. Image provided by the State Library of Western Australia.}

It’s worth noting that this exhibition is no trivial or tokenistic one-off attempt by the State Library to mark Western Australia’s bicentenary dates – from Albany’s founding in 1826 to Perth’s proclamation in 1829. 

‘Dialogues 2029’ is the library’s four-year program, in partnership with Community Arts Network, to prompt public dialogue about what is — however you look at it — an awkward ‘celebration’ of colonial milestones. This year’s theme of Menang Memories, based around Kinjarling/Albany, will be followed by Words and Voices next year, Untold Stories in 2028 and Sense of Place in 2029. 

Says Toomath: “It’s not about replacing history, but expanding it, deepening it, allowing people to encounter Kinjarling not only through colonial records and landscapes, but through Aboriginal ways of knowing, being, remembering, and belonging.” 

Kinjarling Djinnang Ngalak is on till Sun 4 Apr 2027 at the State Library of WA. It is a free exhibition, no tickets required.