Sweet Damper & Gossip: Colonial Sightings from the Goulburn and North-East

About the exhibition
Sweet Damper and Gossip was a group exhibition that presented contrasting perspectives on Australia’s colonial landscape across time. Organised by Benalla Art Gallery, the exhibition used historical accounts of colonial sightings of Indigenous peoples in the Goulburn Valley region of North East Victoria as a catalyst for addressing the politics of colonisation in the mid-nineteenth century.

Through a diverse array of paintings, works on paper, manuscripts, photographs and objects, the exhibition examined how Victorian-era anthropological and patriarchal frameworks fictionalised and sanitised encounters between European explorers and the Indigenous population. (The term ‘sweet damper’ in the exhibition title notably refers to damper made with flour laced with arsenic that was fed to Aboriginal people by colonial settlers.)

Recent works by contemporary Indigenous artists such as Gordon Bennett and Leah King-Smith were purposefully included to challenge and dissect white Australia’s imaging of the cultural landscape.

As noted in an Eyeline review by Anna Clabburn, the exhibition marked a crucial stage in the deconstruction of the historical myths of colonial Australia.

MUMA Online Exhibition Archive
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^{Image: Yakaduna (also known as Tommy Barnes), Aboriginal Scenes and European People 1862, pen and ink on blue paper, 20.2 x 33.2 cm. La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne}