Croft's personal archive describes the grief that lies at the heart of Australia today. Michael Riley's film Empire depicts a seemingly post-apocalyptic Australia, ravaged by clearing and cultivation. For Aboriginal people the desecration of land is also a desacralisaton, yet for the artist a beauty remains in a landscape that suggests ways of measuring time closer to the ancient inhabitation of the indigenous people than the 211 years of European settlement. Riley's family, like almost all Aboriginal people on missions, was forbidden to speak their language, and the only words spoken in Empire are those of a missionary. For Riley, who grew up on Talbragar Mission in Dubbo, the crucifix represents an ideology of oppression, a weapon of colonisation.
Empire is an elegiac film, but one limned with anger, with outrage.
While white Australia hungrily appropriates and rewrites indigenous culture by translating it into its own terms, whether those of new ageism or of modernism, or by denying history or refusing to apologise for the stolen children, contemporary indigenous artists deploy strategies which create the possibility of a sediment of meaning or selfhood that cannot be mediated or disturbed. Hannah Fink is the former editor of Art and Australia and Art AsiaPacific magazines. She is currently writing a monograph on Bronwyn Oliver and guest editing an edition of the contemporary art magazine Artlink on Food and Consumption. Oltre Il Mito selected for the A Latere special events section of the 1999 Venice Biennale. It was written with an audience unfamiliar with contemporary Aboriginal art in mind.