For Nine Artists, This New First Nations Mural Was Also a Healing Journey for Their Communities

Art is said to have a kind of healing power – both for the artists behind it and the communities they engage with.

It’s proven true for those artists behind Stronger Families, Stronger Communities: Healing the Past for the Future, a grassroots First Nations exhibition now showing at Melbourne Museum.

The exhibition, at Birrarung Gallery in the museum’s Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, gives voice to the individual journeys of nine Naarm-based First Nations men who have jointly painted a 28-metre-long mural while undertaking healing and leadership programs led by support service Dardi Munwurro. The organisation, which has a specialty in Aboriginal family violence, aims to provide safe environments to promote cultural healing and behavioural change while keeping participants accountable.

The large-scale work is a collaboration between artists David Roe, Tyrhys Wilson, Gurrenah Foley, Peter Hammersley, Jade Kennedy, Aron (Rooney) Granbeau, Jerremy Jose, Towah Pearson and Brodie Peters-Godden. And, reflective of how uniquely personal these growth journeys have been, the panels each illustrate individual stories of how reconnecting to culture can have a deep healing power.

Because some of the artists originally hail from Country away from Naarm, patterns and symbols in each panel form a diverse patchwork when viewed from afar. In one panel, an artist pays their respects to the Kulin nation through intricately painted totem animals, which fly under a swirling tree – symbolic of the strength and resistance found through community.

“A majority were artists prior but there were a few who had never picked up a brush before,” says Justice Nelson, the exhibition’s lead and head of First Peoples Experience at Museums Victoria. “They found they were able to go on their healing journey through their artistic expression.”

While Nelson says the artists “didn’t exit this program completely healed”, their contributions to painting the mural played an integral part in finding both their sense of self-identity and connection to community. “At Bunjilaka, we really try to create a space that mob feel a sense of belonging in – we celebrate mobs’ stories, knowledge and cultures.”

For the men involved, the mural is also a way of “paying respects to Dardi’s involvement in their healing,” says Nelson, whose team reached out to the organisation knowing the work it had been doing with men in the Aboriginal community. “The men felt they couldn’t honour their journeys without first honouring the space that Dardi has created for them and, by extension, their families.”

At the centre of the mural is an artistic representation of the campfire the men sat around at the weekly healing ceremonies they attended on the Dardi Munwurro site. The fire is depicted as a space of connection and community-building in multiple mural panels, and a physical manifestation of sand and wooden logs is laid out before the painting. Nelson says the motif acts as the “centrepiece that everything else flows from” in the process of breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma, and building stronger families and communities.

Beyond the artists’ own healing, Nelson believes the exhibition addresses the broader need to discuss men’s mental health and avenues for violence prevention. The redemptive power of creating art is one approach to support men to rebuild their connections to family and the community.

“There’s a lot of stigma when we talk about family violence,” says Nelson. “I know these men came into this space carrying some shame. They didn’t really know what this journey would look like for them.

“The programs are voluntary so the men who join go into it with purpose – with the intention to … reconnect with themselves, their community and their family.”

As such, Stronger Families, Stronger Communities is focused on the healing journey of these nine men, not their pasts, she says. “We’re focused on the work they’re continuing to do, the men they are today and will be in the future.”

Stronger Families, Stronger Communities: Healing the Past for the Future is now showing at Birrarung Gallery in the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum until February 9, 2026.

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