Reclaiming Country: The Natsiaa Artists Using Photography To Reconnect With Ancestry and Culture

“It’s about ownership,” says artist Naomi Hobson as she sits beneath her artwork Present & Beyond at the Museum and Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin. “It’s about owning your own image: it’s your image, it’s my image, and it’s a response to the history of photography in our community.”

Present & Beyond shows a 16-year-old Southern Kaantju boy, Dallas Peter, lying on a log in the Coen River on the Cape York Peninsula, playing with a toy boat in the water. It’s a dazzling composition, in which the water ripples with reflections and colour against the horizontal lines of Peter’s body and the wood, as he’s engrossed in the old-fashioned plaything. The photographic work was named the winner of the Work on Paper Award at the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (Natsiaa), which took place on Larrakia Country in early-August. Hobson, of Southern Kaantju and Umpila descent, won $15,000 for the award.

A total of 71 finalists were chosen from 216 entries. A walk through the showcase of finalists proves that, as every year, Natsiaa is a statement of the diversity of style, technique, message and vision in the world of Indigenous art. But certain shared themes can be found across the exhibition – and indeed the winners.

As well as speaking of “ownership”, Hobson describes the piece as a gesture of “reclamation”. Her work is in part a gentle response to historical photographic representation of her community by non-Indigenous people – in particular figures like Donald Thomson, the anthropologist and Indigenous rights advocate who photographed First Nations communities in Far North Queensland and Arnhem Land in the 1920s and ’30s.

“[Our community] has a history of photography making us feel uncomfortable,” Hobson tells Broadsheet. “We’ve heard or seen stories about photos of our elders, which were taken out of our environment.

“So I wanted to show what’s real, and I wanted to show love and I wanted to show humanity and care within my people back home, because that’s what I grew up with – respect and love and care, and just being proud of being Indigenous.”

The image for Present & Beyond emerged from a day on the river for family and community, with Hobson’s eye drawn to the scene of the boy and his boat. Peter was home for school holidays. He attends a boarding school, a nine-hour drive away. The occasion was a homecoming, of sorts, for the teenager. These are experiences Hobson could relate to, having herself gone to school far away from her riverside home.

“When you go away for boarding school, you’re faced with people who don’t understand your lifestyle, your culture, so there’s interaction with racism and bullying,” she says. “Why I take photographs is that I see myself in the young people, and because I’m from community they are my nieces or nephews or my cousins. We know that story.”

Ownership and reclamation are also ideas at the heart of the work of Jahkarli Felicitas Romanis. The Naarm-based artist won the Telstra Multimedia Award at Natsiaa with a diptych made up of Pitta Pitta (Extracted) and Pitta Pitta (Google’s Gaze). These prints, presented in aluminium-framed light boxes, are adapted images taken from Google Earth of the artist’s ancestral Pitta Pitta Country (in north-west Queensland). The idea formed during 2020 Covid lockdowns as Romanis, unable to visit her Country, sought to connect with it online. Out of this arose an interest in subverting colonial frameworks of mapping and presenting landscape – five years later and Romanis has a PhD in the topic.

“I’m interested in how Western systems of mapping depict place and Country,” she says. “There’s been lots of writing done since the 1940s that’s critical about mapping technologies and portrayal of place. My practice centres around photography, so I’m interested in how photography and cartography come together, and challenging the idea that these maps are neutral and objective, when really there are biases and agendas woven through them.”

The images are, she says, a “transition” between Google’s Street View and satellite view, with the rich colours of Pitta Pitta land positively jumping off the museum walls. These works are part of a lifelong art project Romanis has embarked on, titled (Dis)connected to Country – what began as a personal need to engage with Country has evolved into a technically inventive and multi-layered critique of colonisation’s narratives surrounding land and sovereignty.

“My practice as a way of connecting to Country and my ancestors – that is a lifelong thing. I feel very lucky that I can come back to my practice as a way of doing that.”

The Telstra Natsiaa exhibition is on until January 26, 2026 at Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory, Darwin. Works are also displayed in an online gallery.

www.magnt.net.au/2025-telstra-natsiaa-winners
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