O'Possum-skin cloak

In her work O’Possum-skin cloak, Lorraine Connelly-Northey reinterprets the cloaks worn by her Waradgerie (Wiradjuri) ancestors from southeastern Australia. The artist, born in 1962 in Swan Hill, Victoria, has gathered debris from her immediate surrounds and interwoven found rusted barbed wire, referencing traditional techniques, to create an object of cultural significance. Possum-skin cloaks had multiple in their uses, including as a covering to provide warmth and protection from the elements, but Connelly-Northey’s cloak is paradoxically made from a sharp, hostile and introduced material, one that ultimately communicates the complexity of intercultural contact in Australia. Woollen blankets, which were less effective as protection, were distributed to Aboriginal people in the 1800s, ultimately causing illness and death. Possum-skin cloaks were also important cultural records, inscribed with the place and stories of the owner’s ancestral heritage. A response to Connelly-Northey’s mixed cultural background, of Waradgerie and Irish heritage, O’Possum-skin cloak not only tells an environmental message – of the rubbish littering Country – but also makes a statement about the effects of colonisation on Aboriginal people and their way of life.

Gloria Strzelecki, Associate Curator of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art