Destiny Deacon

We are very sad to say goodbye to one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists, G'ua G'ua/Erub/Mer woman Destiny Deacon. Destiny was part of a generation of First Nations artists who used photography and the moving image to rework the ways that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been positioned by and through visual culture in Australia – a ground-breaking generation that includes Brenda L. Croft, Tracey Moffatt, Fiona Foley, Ricky Maynard, and the late Michael Riley and Lisa Bellear.

Destiny was born in Maryborough, Queensland, in 1957 and two years later moved with her family to Naarm/Melbourne, settling in Port Melbourne and then Fitzroy. Destiny was raised by her mother Eleanor Harding, who in the 1960s became an active member of Naarm’s First Nations Communities, especially as they centred around the inner-northern suburbs of Fitzroy and Collingwood. Destiny’s life was, like her mother’s, always political, and as her friend Brenda L. Croft has written, it is impossible to separate her creativity and her activism.¹ After studying at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University, Destiny taught in high and community schools, before moving to Kamberri/Canberra to work as a staff trainer with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs under Charles Perkins. Her activism and artistic practice were widespread, and – with her sense of humour and laconic mode – she was always a highly entertaining and at the same time sharp-witted speaker. During the 1980s and ‘90s, she was a regular presence on Naarm’s airwaves, as a presenter alongside Bellear of 3CR’s weekly ‘Not another Koorie show’ radio program.

Destiny began making artwork in the late 1980s, initially using video and then rudimentary photographic equipment, including a Polaroid camera. Her work was almost immediately recognised for its significance. She first exhibited her work in 1991, including her series Blak lik mi in the exhibition Kudgeris, curated by Fiona Foley with work by Croft and Bellear for the First Nations-run cooperative gallery Boomalli in Gadigal Nura/Sydney. That same year, Hetti Perkins included her work in Aboriginal women’s exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which then toured to Tarntanya/Adelaide. Since then, Destiny’s work has been regularly included in major biennales and curated projects in Australia and internationally, including the 1994 and 2009 Havana Bienals, Documenta 11 (2002), the Adelaide Biennales of 2000 and 2004, and the 2000, 2008 and 2024 Biennales of Sydney. Her work was featured in the National Gallery’s inaugural 2007 National Indigenous Art Triennial, Culture Warriors, curated by Brenda L. Croft, which travelled to Washington DC following its presentation in Kamberri/Canberra.

Destiny’s use of the term ‘blak’, removing the ‘c’ from a label applied to First Nations people by colonists, was typical of her highly intelligent and incisive relationship to language and images. She often reused existing, racist images and terms, flipping them to reclaim power that the term or image sought to withhold. She also reused dolls and domestic objects carrying stereotypes of Aboriginal identity, ‘rescued’ from trash and second-hand stores. These would form the basis of humorous and at the same time discomforting tableaux that were videoed, photographed and included in installations that restaged the artist’s home or reanimated biographical and fictional stories. Her work was also capable of tremendous pathos. In 1998, she brought together archival material with photographs she had taken in far north Queensland to commemorate her beloved mother Eleanor, who passed away in 1996. The work Postcards from Mummy was included in curator Okwui Enwezor’s famous Documenta 11, in Kassel, Germany, and later acquired for the national collection.

Reflecting her character, Destiny’s work was always social. She often collaborated with her many close friends, such as Bellear, Croft, curator Hetti Perkins and, most significantly, her late partner, the artist and writer Virgina Fraser. Destiny called herself a ‘shy photographer’, meaning that she was never going to point a camera in the face of someone she didn’t know, and so her family and friends were usually her actors. Photographs were also usually taken in her Brunswick home, or else at a site nearby – such as at the feet of the Westgate Bridge, or the banks of Birrarung/the Yarra River. The work’s low-fi aesthetic and laconic charm often belied tremendous rigor and a sting in the tail. As Virginia once wrote of Destiny’s work: it ‘visualises ideas and feelings about power relations, history and daily life; about harm done, resistances met, energy applied: in images that are humorous, ironic and surprising. It expresses a personality engaged with culture.’²

Our thoughts are with Destiny’s many friends, who will miss her wit and charm, and to the many Communities of First Nations people whose lives were touched by her work and activism. We are especially thinking of Destiny’s large family – her siblings, nephews and nieces, many of whom we have come to know through her work.