Marie McMahon
In 1981 Marie McMahon was on a camping trip with the mob on Tikilaru Country on Bathurst Island when their car came head to head with a four wheel drive on a narrow bush track. Inside were two business men from Darwin. They were on an expedition to investigate opening a tourist resort on a nearby beach. McMahon’s companion and a custodian of the land, Winnie Munkara, leapt out of the car and angrily confronted the pair about their right and claim to the land.1
That event remained in my mind as a demonstration of land ownership from an Aboriginal perspective. The experience of being on Aboriginal Land in the company of Tikilawula (people of Tikilaru) gave me a greateer understanding of the meaning of the Australian landscape.2
This charged encounter became the basis for the now iconic Pay the rent: You are on Aboriginal Land poster. To make it McMahon drew on her archive of photographs, selecting a photo of local woman, Phillipa Pupangamirri, taken on a previous trip to the Island. She borrowed the slogan from a car bumper sticker that had been popular in Townsville at the time and illustrated the composition in her characteristic decorative illustrative style.
McMahon hand screen-printed the first version of these posters in an edition of 30 at the Redback Graphix workshop in Wollongong that year, followed by a second run printed at Lucifoil Collective (operating out of the defunct Tin Sheds workshop facilities) in 1982. A subsequent version with ‘Pay the rent’ omitted were commercially printed in quantities of 1,000 several times over. As the artist explains:
The words Pay the rent didn’t reflect the world view of Aboriginal people living in their own country and on their traditional lands. What did it mean? Wheras “You are on Aboriginal land” was a matter of fact.
Screenprinted poster collectives were a vital part of the ecology of local communities in Australia between the early 1970s and the late 1990s. In that time more than two dozen workshops opened and closed their doors.4 Artists – or art workers as they preferred to be called – often travelled back and forth between these turpentine soaked spaces across state borders and cities as well as remote regional areas connected by activism and a web of social relationships.
These collectives, which sprung up as part of universities and community centres, gave witty, gritty, vibrant graphic expression to urgent causes and social movements of the time such as women’s liberation, gay and lesbian rights, Aboriginal rights, insecure housing, environmentalism and nuclear disarmament.
In an ideological stance poster collectives resisted the commodification of the posters as art objects; the artworld was viewed suspiciously as the domain of the cultural elites. The commitment to collectivism extended to methodology. Posters were printed in multiples, often designed by consensus and as a matter of course, attributed to the workshop rather than individuals.
Furthermore, posters drew on multiple voices, vernacular culture and a shared archive: photos, books, comics, textile patterns, magazines, stickers, newspapers, long conversations over the phone and letters which were then relayed, deployed, repurposed, cut and collaged into four, five, six stencil prints.
It’s now commonly accepted that we are on Aboriginal Land. The acknowledgment made publicly at gatherings may seem commonplace but it’s a relatively recent occurrence. It’s the work of countless pioneers like Marie McMahon who worked to affect social change.
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