Notes on Flora and Fauna iii by Christopher Pease

In the first half of the 20th century, settler policies applied to Nyoongar people included preventing them from entering the city boundary of Perth and prohibiting them from applying for citizenship.

Flora and Fauna III parodies the notion of the ‘Noble Savage’ and the legal classification and rights of Nyoongar people. This young Nyoongar man, adorned in Minang body paint, poses with a native spotted quoll, a stylised European version of a Kangaroo (after George Stubbs) and rabbits.

Influenced by mid-century kitsch paintings and imagery, it takes aim at the destructive nature of introduced pests. A Western Australian native plant is depicted as a wallpaper design, much like Victorian wallpaper depicted European plants and was common in settler homes in the 1900s.

Christopher Pease is a Minang/Wardandi/Bibbulmun man from South Western Australia, whose visual language is at once deeply embedded within the western history of figurative oil painting and traditional Indigenous storytelling. Western notions of home and land ownership and the consequent loss of Aboriginal culture are referenced throughout Pease’s vocabulary of visual metaphor. His paintings often comprise references to western culture superimposed over scenes of traditional Indigenous ways of living and interacting with nature. His recent works include cross-sections of native flora which have metamorphosed into repetitive motifs and regimented decorative pattern such as those used in contemporary wallpaper designs, through which he reveals the problematic relationship between contemporary notions of living and the loss of Aboriginal traditional land and culture.