National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | National Indigenous Art Triennial 07

The customary greeting between male relations and family members in Thompson’s The Sixth Mile and Desert Slippers both created 2006 are profoundly moving in the intensely personal rituals revealed to an unaware public audience. Thompson inhabits many bodies – young, male, urban, Blak, androgynous, playful, mimic, and performative – always Bidjara.1 [The video work] presents the viewer with a very intimate, family ritual. We see the artist and his father involved in what could be interpreted as a greeting ceremony. Speaking in Bidjara, their bodies turned towards each other, the men are engrossed in acting out the same gestures repetitively. The non-Bidjara viewer, who can’t understand what is being said, is nonetheless invited into this private space of communication and learning between father and son. The artist explains that this work follows on from earlier videos that similarly focused on Bidjara rituals, made visible by means of a Western visual language. It forms a response to the increasingly conser