This week on the 5AM StoryTalk Podcast, I'm joined by Australian First Nations artist Blak Douglas — one of the most fearless voices in the contemporary Australian art world. Some have said he’s attempting to “decolonize the canvas”, which is an incredibly poetic way to describe how his art is entirely predicated on social justice in Australia and especially for the Indigenous Australians like him who have only been recognized as citizens of the country for some 60 years now.
The best way to enjoy this free conversation is to tap on the podcast play button right now and listen to an unabridged version of it in all its incredibly intimate detail. If you prefer to read these chats, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered; scroll down to find the article below.
Blak and I are going to cover a lot in this conversation including:
His brutally candid thoughts about Australia’s colonial history and its impact on his identity and artistic journey (I expect a lot of this will be an education for non-Aussies)
His art as protest and education
His early life growing up, the son of an Aboriginal father and white mother, in a white monoculture still reckoning with its White Only Policy
The impact of early Aboriginal artistic mentors and the pivotal role they played in his creative life, but also his desire to embrace his Aboriginal identity
Why he ultimately adopted the name "Blak Douglas"
Australia’s art scene and the challenges that face artists – especially Aboriginal artists – who speak out on issues that a small group of gallery gatekeepers don’t agree with (meaning: the challenges to free speech in the Australian arts today)
A bonus episode with Blak is available here. In it, he and I discuss a seminal piece of art from his life – the 1966 Australian $1 banknote, which featured a design that brazenly stole the bark paintings of Australian First Nations artist David Malangi. This led to the first Aboriginal copyright dispute.
Bonus Episode: Blak Douglas Talks the 1966 Australian $1 Bill
Earlier this week, Australian First Nations artist Blak Douglas — one of the most fearless voices in the contemporary Australian art world – joined me for some 5AM StoryTalk. You can listen to that here if you haven’t already. Today, the painter and rabble rouser returns for a bonus episode exclusive to my paid subscribers whose support keeps the lights on here. We’ll be discussing a seminal piece of art from his life —
Blak Douglas is an Indigenous Australian artist of mixed ancestry, but it wasn’t until his twenties that he set out to reclaim what had largely been lost when his father, a Dhungatti person from what most would call northern New South Wales, had chosen assimilation in European culture over his ancestral past. You see, Blak grew up Adam Douglas Hill — his mother was of British, Irish, and German descent — but at university, he began a cultural journey into the Aboriginal side of his identity that changed everything about his life changed — including his artwork.
In 2014, Blak decided to embrace his “dominant genealogies”, as he describes it, and take the moniker “Blak Douglas”. Eight years later, the artist, who invests all of his work with social justice themes, was awarded the Archibald Prize in portraiture. The Archibald is Australia’s biggest art prize, if you’ve never heard of it. You could say it’s like winning an Oscar for artists here. Here’s Moby Dickens, the portrait of Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens, he won it for:
Moby Dickens is how I discovered Blak’s work, shortly after I moved back to the country in 2021, and I was immediately gobsmacked by what I saw taking place across his canvases. His art is always colorful, informed by his graphic design training, and drowning in satire and cryptic symbolism that makes each piece something to interrogate and find endless meaning in. You’ll also be hard pressed to find one that isn’t culturally and politically charged, as in your face, dangerous, and brutally honest as Black is in the conversation you’re about to read.
You might even say the art and the artist both demonstrate a great deal of “fuck you” moxie. I love what he does, and I hope you do, too.
Now, I want to warn you now — and I hate that I have to warn you about this because once upon a time, most of us could handle hearing and maybe even learning from others’ points of view even if we didn’t necessarily agree with them — but Blak is going to bring up subjects that some of you will find provocative. Others might consider some of what he says inflammatory.
I don’t know what to tell you, except that’s life despite how we’ve been conditioned to think otherwise. I’m not going to tell a colonized man, living on land stolen from his people, to censor himself about how he feels about what has happened and is happening in his country. I’m also not going to silence what a colonized person has to say about the censorship of his speech when it comes to exercising his free speech in support of other groups around the globe he finds commonality with.
One more note for contextual purposes, this conversation took place in May 2025 just after the federal election here that saw the Labour Party absolutely smash the country’s conservative coalition. Blak will refer to the “Liberal Party”, which is, counterintuitively, a Right – some would argue Far Right – political party and Peter Dutton, whose name will also come up, was the dickhead who led them. Well, he did. He was such a great big dickhead, he was voted out of office in the same election.
Now, let me introduce you to artist Blak Douglas — one of my favorite Australian contemporary artists…
COLE HADDON: It is great to see you, Blak. I'm a huge fan. I’ve been very excited to talk to you about your art. How are you doing today?
BLAK DOUGLAS: I'm doing great, thank you. I'm enjoying a kind of a fruitful medley of artistic events in Sydney Town in Australia, here on Cadigal Land – acknowledging the First Nations peoples here and First Nations people back home there, as well. And so tonight, I speak on stage at Parliament of New South Wales on Macquarie Street in Sydney, and I'll be interviewed by the former ABC radio show host, Simon Marnie. I'm really looking forward to that. He is a very intelligent individual and recently departed the ABC. And so, we're having a chat about art pretty much pretty similar to what we're going to be talking about today – so, thanks for the rehearsal.
CH: I'm curious what your relationship to art was growing up and when you realized you were going to be an artist, that this was the rest of your life.
BD: Great question. So, I was raised watching my mother's brothers on the white side of my family – and I'll just, do a brief introduction. My genealogy is made up of Irish Scott, English, German, Aboriginal. The most percentage of the genealogy is Scottish. So, I was watching my mother's brothers, the Brown Brothers as they were known – Donald and Douglas Brown.
They were arguably the most famous sign writers or coach painters on the continent in the ’80s back when everybody had a lot of money. I distinctly remember speedboats turning up from California to a little property in Blacktown in Western Sydney at my grandmother's property where they worked out of their workshop.
So, watching their incredible artistry, just about every day as I was babysat by my grandmother when Mum went to work – and I just pestered them and asked too many questions as kids do, continually asking why they're doing that, what they're doing there. And I think at one point they gave me a little can of paint and a brush and said, “Go over and paint on that bit of metal there.”
Perhaps that was the beginning. I certainly know it ran in the family, 'cause very quickly I developed an ability to illustrate.
So, fast forward. It was1996, and I was 26 years old and somewhat despondent not knowing what career path to choose because I certainly didn't want to be a football player…. There was an open day at University of Western Sydney. Mum took me up there on the weekend, and I enrolled in a graphic design. Course, and the rest is history, I guess. I began painting as a hobby after that.
CH: Was the ambition with the course to focus on advertising and secure a more stable life than that of a freelance artist?
BD: You're pretty much on it because when we did the tour on the open day at the University of Western Sydney, we – you know, art is generally a very fashionable pursuit, isn't it? There’s just something so fashionably trendy about being an artist. I guess we can look at the Met Ball for the ultimate example of that.
When we got to the art block at the university and saw the hairy arm-pitted hippies, smoking reefers outside, Dad said to me, “Well, you don't want to end up like them, do you?” The graphic design had a more, you know, bespoke kind of chic vibe to it anyway.
And yes, I did think that I probably had more opportunity in landing a job in graphics than straight off the cuff becoming an artist. Hey, observing this whole landscape, after almost 30 years of practice, it's certainly true. The sad indictment is that if you don't pick your institution of where you study, like an elite school or elite-elite university or a college, then it's going to be a hard climb for you as an artist to get off the ground.
CH: We should probably contextualize your early days as an artist with the personal journey you were on that at that time – given the fact that so much of your heritage shows up as part of the social justice component of your work. Can you talk about your decision to dive into your ancestry as an Aboriginal man and that part of your identity?
BD: Yeah, another great question. To encapsulate that in a nutshell, when I entered university there, we had an Aboriginal education unit, and we were mentored – or embraced – by two female elders. They were there particularly for the other First Nation students who might have traveled some distance to be at that university. That's always an issue for Aboriginal peoples to be away from home.
So, Auntie Jean South, she literally said to me that I was at a fork in the road there. I was in a monoculture, decidedly bigoted demographic post-1980. things were starting to get a little bit better in the 90s through governance and in acceptance of Aboriginal people. And the fork in the road was that I'd grown up in that monoculture society far distant from my own tribal homeland, which is the mid-north coast of New South Wales in a city called Kempsey – the Dhungatti people – as did Dad. He came down to the city to seek work as an Aboriginal man. And then, the fork in the road was – Auntie Jean said – “You need to trust your heart from here because you're now in a place of learning and you're surrounded by egalitarian people,” which was incredible at the time for me. It was like a reverse jail, I think of it now.
You look at a penitentiary, and it's a place that houses the miscreants of society, whereas the other miscreants of society get to roam free and cause all sorts of white-collar crime. But at university, you can incarcerate yourself amongst egalitarianism and broad-minded thinking people. I couldn't believe that existed in my hometown because outside of university, my dad would be called a n___r or whatever derogatory terms. But you go inside, and people aren't going to be like that. In fact, there's an Aboriginal education unit that embraces you and welcomes you and offers you that guidance!
[In the university library], I saw my first images of artworks – that were collected by the university – by people become my aboriginal contemporary art mentors and inspirers. And these were highly politicized works hanging in the library. I just couldn't believe this stuff existed or you could have this commentary. At the same time, I saw a map of First Nations countries for the first time, the map of Aboriginal Australia, so called, and there were all these colored splotches representing 300 diverse nations of people on this continent – which I didn't realize existed in that mass.
But why are we calling it Australia? And that's something that I'm banging on about now with the kids when I workshop them in schools about art. My presentations open with that map and reminding them we derive “Australia” from “Terra Australis”, which is a Latin term [meaning Southern Land] given to this continent. It’s one of so many other names that we're left with. Sydney, for example, named after Count Sydney – a podgy, disreputable London parliamentarian. I tell the kids in schools – wouldn't you rather call it Cadigal Country? These are beautiful names for your town that you live in. Don't call it Sydney. We've got to change this – and now we can. We are living in an era where we can do that. So, very quickly, I grappled onto the fact that the least I can do is remind people of the illegal, elicit, historical patriarchy that has determined how we enact in our lives today.
CH: What I find interesting is the systemic ignorance that existed about Aboriginal history here, that you hadn't even seen a map of Aboriginal countries yourself despite being Aboriginal. What I mean is, the education system in Australia was so systemically racist still that you could have Aboriginal history, ancestry and, and only discover the extent of what that means in your twenties.
BD: That's right, and that's a good point because had I not seen that map hanging in the office of the Aboriginal Education Unit, I would not have been completely captivated and enthralled about the beauty and diversity of these cultures. The sad opposition by the likes of Peter Dutton – who's, thankfully, walked away with his tail between his legs and not become almost the 30th Liberal right-wing white prime minister of this continent…. I don't want to bang on and dwell in that past, and I'm fully aware of the outcomes of evolution as we are as sapiens. But where it's preventable, it must be prevented, the genocides and the ill practices that continue, which are largely economic-based on this continent and largely exclude the remaining First Nations people and survivors that are here today.
CH: How did your parents react to your search for identity in your twenties? You know, one side of it was delving into your father's ancestry. Did your mum experience that as a rejection in any way?
BD: not particularly. Mum was just one of those incredibly egalitarian, loving individuals who embraced anyone really – as did her mother. So, I have a very strong maternal connection to my family. Dad was this hard-working blackfella who had to endure all sorts of taunts and things on the building site and wherever he went all his life – from not being permitted to drinking in pubs in licensed venues where he came from, to coming to Sydney and experiencing the same thing. Constantly being challenged for fights because everybody knows a Blak man’s pretty good with his fists and all of that sort of stuff.
So, ultimately, by the time I invented the name Black Douglas, Mum had sadly passed, but she was embracing of what I did. They always supported me. Dad found it difficult to wholly embrace what I did because he pretty much had to – as most Aboriginal people of the era did – had to assimilate very quickly or at least look as though you were assimilating.
Later on, he unfortuitously fell into that right-wing kind of media demographic as most tradies do. And so, when I started painting about social justice and the want for a more leftist view on what has become an ultra-right-wing nation, he would raise his eyebrows and wonder. He said to me, he'd spent his life deflecting these attacks to create a little haven – a nest for myself and my mother in a monoculture community in Western Sydney – so why would I stir the hornet's nest? That was an interesting thing.
But when Auntie Jean South presented that fork in the road to me, it was as though I got nudged forth by my ancestors standing behind me at that meeting and they pretty much said, “Well, it's your turn to carry the fire stick on behalf of the clan.” And so that's what's happened. Once you start the fire in the belly, once you get that nudge from the ancestors, then there's nothing greater thing to pursue. There's nothing greater to step up for.
CH: There is something tragic though about your father being Aboriginal and you embracing that part of your identity, putting that into your art, and him being confused by it.
BD: Yeah.
[At this point, Blak and I pivot to discussing the extent of the bigotry in Australia’s past that is, to this day, still stirred up for political gain by media outlets such as the Daily Terrograph – as he refers to the Daily Telegraph. He takes umbrage with white Australians complaining about Aboriginal Australians received more assistance when their land and culture was stolen from them.]
BD: Look, it's a cultural amnesia. Perhaps it's a result of what developed as a rum colony in Australia. Payment was made in rum. So, we didn't get off to a good start considering that the first eleven ships dumped the absolute filth and bottom of the pile of London on the shores to create what is essentially most largely the population of Australia today. So, it's taken me quite a long time in my arts career, some 20 years of painting what began as quite edgy, fuck-you political paintings to now, and I do owe [a lot of that] to having read Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, which has given me a refreshing take on where we are as humanity and as a species that dominate the planet. If I hadn't have read that and read some dark yet eloquent reminders and quotes, i.e. “genocide is the dark side of evolution,” I wouldn't have an understanding and appreciation for why Liberals think the way they do – to seek to immediately extract all of the resources from Aboriginal lands without paying much in return to society as a whole, via taxes or to the Aboriginal peoples of the land that we're stealing the resources from and sending offshore to China.
There's a reason why they were sent here to colonize this land. You have to understand: well, okay, there's a reason why the Royal Family has become one of the most dominant sapien families on the planet. Because they had that prerogative to extract resources and capitalize in a monetary fashion. So, it's sad being caught in this banana republic, as Paul Keating put it down here in Australia – which not many people take too seriously, save for the investors in our offshore supplies.
But, other than that, particularly when it comes to art and speaking about these things, what we find is that there are too many gatekeepers that now prevent such commentary from making its way off this continent – particularly in visual form, visual art. I’ve got to say, it is exciting to be speaking to you today about this subject because you are a voice that allows, you know, an unquarantined, unscrutinized passage to the world.
CH: I’m trying. So, I've read you advise kids to vent their frustrations on the canvas, and there's power in that, because it engages and provokes, but what does it do for your mental health and is there ever a negative blowback for you from so much “fuck you”. I experience that, where I realize I'm spending so much time saying, “Fuck you!” that I get lost in it a little bit.
BD: That's a great question. And ultimately, what I try to impress on particularly young Aboriginal youth who might be headed down that despondent pathway is that we have every opportunity today to exhibit…or within reason…perhaps not in the…
[Blak restarts here, as what he’s about to say is very important to him and he clearly wants to get it right.]
BD (cont’d): Let me put this into a nutshell. There are institutions here that are governed by old money – or influential money. And I'll get to that one a little in a moment. So, outside of that, though, there are so many opportunities to exhibit your commentary on a wall and be celebrated for that and receive a pat on the back for your commitment to social justice or your political statement in society. I’m very thankful that we can do that here in what is called Australia as opposed to Ai Weiwei trying to do that in China and getting beaten up for it and other artists from other right-wing countries where you are not permitted to make those comments So, we can do that here and thank goodness that we can do that – but I wish that more of these celebrated contemporary Aboriginal artists could have an unabated passage to the rest of the world that isn't quarantined or scrutinized by certain gatekeepers to other people who make the decisions about where things go.
And I guess the worst case, the hot topic here right now is what transpired with the main artistic funding body in Australia versus the Lebanese artist, Khaled Sabsabi, who, has a career of 30 years – an internationally celebrated artist who, like a few other artists, made the fateful error of commenting on Palestine.
Right now, in Australia, I can make any untoward comment about the Commonwealth and the governments of Australia. But make one comment about Palestine and you can potentially end your artistic career. That's because of the influence that peoples have on the way arts operate here in Australia.
And that's a pretty daunting prospect.
Many of us artists who are known for our political comments, and many of us who have voiced our support for Palestinians are wondering: will we have a job to go to, or will we find a dealer that is willing to represent us next week?
CH: So, I'm a screenwriter and novelist. I don't understand enough about the gatekeepers you're describing and their role in essentially shutting down a career, locally as you're describing it, but also their role in preventing work from traveling around the world. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
BD: So, there are only about five commercial galleries on this continent that have significant international authority. There is probably one who is the greatest known of those galleries, which is the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, in an uptown suburb in Sydney called Paddington.
So, an example, from the stats came out a few years ago. The biggest art exhibition on the planet is the Venice Biennale. Seven of the last ten represented Australian artists at the Venice Biennale were Rosalyn Oxley artists. So, that means that pretty much because of her, her wealth and status, not only in art, but also as a society member, she has made those international contacts. This is why I say to the students who might study at a reputable art college in Sydney, “If you are lucky enough to get picked up straight out of art school by Roslyn Oxley, well, you can pretty much just mortgage yourself to the hilt because you'll have a fruitful career from there on.”
It's different for the rest of us who might have made one too many political comments in their artistic career to appear as to be too hard to sell because it's become known that the institutions do not want angry, urban Aboriginal art hanging on their walls. As we've seen recently, at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra – the mothership, if you will – an artwork featuring a tapestry artwork featuring a Palestinian flag was censored. It was simply taped over by the curators of the gallery because it's too…you just can't go there.
And so, I learned that the hard way myself and by creating a very edgy graphic, which featured the Israeli flag with a photoshopped image of Netanyahu. I was berated vehemently by several influential peoples, of institutions here, and lost 200 followers on Instagram overnight. It's like the worst wildfire that gets out of control you could ignite. I'm still hearing backlash about that today.
CH: Has there been any other even in the past 25 years that has similarly silenced artists in this country?
BD: No, I don't believe so. I don't believe so. It's certainly the worst in my lifetime, in relations to the hostilities of an other. I might not be up to date on that, but it's never been as abrasive as what we've seen in recent times.
CH: Hmm.
BD: It's a pretty daunting thing, and it's not right. I had to remind one of those people that did berate me on social media that I don't believe that technically or culturally you have the authority to put me in my place on my own Country, on my own land.
[Note to readers: Country, in this context, does not refer to the common usage of the term – but instead the land that Aboriginal peoples have a deep and spiritual relationship to.]
CH: Even now, saying these things in a podcast conversation like this, you seem committed to the risk.
BD: Bro, I have no nowhere to go.
CH: You came for a serious conversation and I appreciate that. Wow. Thank you for all of that.
CH (cont’d): At this point, how do you feel about your future as an artist in Australia and your potential for success outside of Australia given everything you've described? But also, I suppose given the state of the arts in general in 2025 and going forward? Everything feels so dire.
BD: Yeah, I don't sit before you with a lot of faith about my personal artistic future here because I've still to this day not found the absolute home representative/entity in a commercial gallery. I could colloquially say that realistically this place is still a cottage lane industry art market, and that's what my hometown was back in the 80s. Cottage-lane means those nice little paintings of a brook running through a field of poppies and a little farmhouse over yonder with maybe a horse and a nobleman and so forth in the landscape.
It still feels like that's what this place realistically is, and particularly after what we've just discussed, it doesn't seem that you can't walk into a major institution here and – we'll take it off me and my political views for a moment. You won't walk into an institution here and see a famous Jeff Koons photographic spread, a feature of him and Ilona Staller. If people don't remember that famous series that he took when he was partnered with the porn star/actress who wanted to run for government in Italy – famous, beautiful, these two frolicking naked and copulating. You won't see that kind of imagery in an institution here, this place.
It's a nation of teenagers searching for an identity after 236 years. It still hasn't grown up. This kind of man-child landscape where we trip so much over our religious beliefs even today we can’t walk into a gallery that openly displays nudity.
Or, you know, nobody yet as an artist has painted a gigantic massacre scene of what happened only 180 years ago on this continent.
So, my faith isn't fruitful about the immediate future of arts in particular given that our funding bodies are the Australian government, and we've seen what has just happened with, as I mentioned, Khaled Sabsabi. The murmurs on the ground here are quite dire for artists.
But if you're a cottage lane industry artist and you paint still-life arrangement of flowers on a table, then you've got every reason to expect a fruitful future as an artist here. Sadly, that's not me. It aches me that, that we have to exist within such a conservative environment here.
CH: Thank you, Blak, for giving me so much to think about. It's been a really exciting…yeah…it was a very powerful conversation. Thank you.
BD: Thank you for having me.
CH: And as for you wonderful people reading today, I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation with Blak Douglas as much as I did. Don’t go just yet, though. Over at my 5AM StoryTalk Podcast, Blak returns to discuss a seminal piece of art from his life — the 1966 Australian $1 banknote, which featured a design that brazenly stole the bark paintings of Australian First Nations artist David Malangi. This led to the first Aboriginal copyright dispute.
Learn more about Blak and his work by visiting his website.
