SWAG

“Swag” (n) – Australia, in common usage: A sleeping roll in which personal belongings are bundled; bedding or sleeping bag used in camping.

Take your shoes off and climb in with us… Lie down on our hand-worked understory of backyard textures and recollections under an Australian evening sky and look up into fragments of childhood memory floating above.

Three Australian performing arts schools collaborate to bring you a very personal experience of the ambivalence of the Australian dream. Students of the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and West Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth have pieced together a bittersweet cross-country collaboration exploring aspects of childhood experience – of special places, of delight and belonging, of unbelonging and loss.

Not all childhood memories are happy ones. Our anthem boasts of having “boundless plains to share” and being “girt by sea” – a land of abundance, that has weaponized our geographical isolation. Australia’s abundance serves a colonial narrative; embracing and repelling peoples as it suits us. Young Aboriginal people are routinely forcibly removed from their families as a matter of policy. Aboriginal Australians remain vastly overrepresented in our justice system. Men, women and children who come to our country seeking asylum are detained for years on end with no hope of a resolution to deter others from seeking asylum.

This is our political reality and must also be grappled with as a part of our cultural identity.

We acknowledge the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of our nation and as the traditional custodians of the lands on which we live, learn, and work. We pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge that stories have been told on these lands for hundreds of generations.

Country/Region Australia

Curator Jo Briscoe

Curatorial Team Leaf Watson, Fleur Kingsland, Megan Parker, Stephen Curtis, Jeremy Allen

Artists Rachael Ahtee, Thomas Bevans, Merette Boutros, Tess Burg, Nicola Burns, Danielle Chilton, Gabrielle Clarke, Jordan Denning, Sam Diamond, Jesse Drage, Jemma Eton, Elizabeth Fazey, Vincent Froneman, Rachel Heller-Wagner, Jordan Hopkins, Olivia Hutley, Amalia Lambert, Ashlea Langsford, Karine Larché, Chantal Marks, Olivia McLean, Amelia Millard, Madeline Nibali, Catherine O'Donoghue, Kara Rousseau, Isabella Saltearn, Isabella Sperling, Riley Tapp, Geoffrey Watson, Anna Weir, Maddie Young, Ruru Zhu