Ceremony

Clay is the ground. We are Country too. We embody it. It’s in us. We are part of it. I’m drawing with clay, and it’s like a language on the wall.

There’d been a massive fire through [Yuraygir National Park in Yaegl] Country in 2015. I spent a lot of time in that place over the following years. There were banksia in the different neighbouring ecologies that I was walking through. There were different species of banksia in different stages of breaking down, and while some were really severely burnt, others were in pockets that weren’t burned. I felt like they were talking to me. [The bushfire aftermath] echoes the different levels and layers of how our people have been impacted by colonisation. People who have been at the brunt of it, the brunt of the massacres, and the complexity of the effects of all the other manifestations of colonisation.

— Penny Evans, 2021