Tracey Moffatt - Up in the Sky

[Picture from www.roslynoxley9.com.au - go here to see the entire series]

Tracey Moffatt’s ‘Up in the Sky’ addresses the traumatic experience of the Stolen Generation, a dark piece of Australian colonial history which still has consequences to the present day. As a victim of the systematic dispossession of Aboriginal children – the artist grew up in a white foster home in Queensland – much of Moffatt’s works contain an autobiographical element which provokes the kind of affective response that only comes from lived experience. ‘Up in the Sky’ is no different. Here, Moffatt’s filmographic sequence depicts the psychological trauma of Australia’s assimilation policy with what Felicity Fenner describes as “irony, wit and a wry intellectual approach to negotiating the conflicted intersection between black and white social territory in Australia today.”

In ‘Up in the Sky’, Moffatt engages with the imagery derived from witnessing a traumatic event through her use of art as a visual language that expresses what is felt, rather than recounting a linear narrative . In doing so, Moffatt activates the physical and visceral sensations of her memory to connect the audience (who are not part of the Stolen Generation) to the experience in a way that simple narrative cannot. In this way, Moffat is able to keep the traumatic event in the present, instead of relegating it to the conveniently forgettable past.

Yet, while it addresses one of the most controversial and embarrassing aspects of Australia’s past, ‘Up in the Sky’ evades the kind of direct high-ground political didacticism that can so easily be adopted by a work of this subject matter, or an artist of Moffatt’s cultural background. Instead, the work conveys the relationships between the black and white people of this decrepit outback community ambiguously, in a way that is not so black and white. As the only maternal figure in the work, the audience empathises with the white woman who seems to show genuine love and affection towards her black baby. With the exception of the nuns, who possess the position of authority, all the inhabitants of this dilapidated town – black and white – appear to be sociological victims of some kind, who perhaps were not entirely responsible for the depressing and inescapable conditions in which they find themselves. Here, Moffatt simultaneously subverts and pertains to conventional and colonial definitions of ‘otherness’ By circumventing the clichéd position of Aboriginal victimhood, Moffatt reveals the far reaches of traumatic histories and how the impact of these resonate across race, time and space.

Moffatt’s artistic approach to traumatic memory is atypical of the accusatory, yet understandable, anger that pervades so much work of this kind. Such an approach is refreshing and perhaps more conducive to understanding the events of the past, from a more balanced, but no less poignant, perspective. ‘Up in the Sky’ recognises the sociological ignorance of white Australia’s early colonial arrogance without simply playing the blame game. Instead, what occurs is a journey into the memory of the artist which invites the audience to engage with, and experience for themselves the trauma of the past and its psychological imprint in her present. From here, we are able to actively forge our own opinions and conclusions about the (im)morality of our national history.