In Profile

There is something abbreviated about Tracey Moffatt’s 1986 series Some lads. This is not one of Moffatt’s epic truncated unmade films, which is how most of her latter-day photographic series might be regarded. With her viewfinder, Moffatt constructs entire fictive worlds that exist in parallel with ours. They are lush evocations of the unseen, hallucinations that pierce some wound in the collective unconscious or glitching confabulations where time warps, breaking with history and public memory. Such is her skilful conjuring of these dreamscapes that you can dwell in them, be haunted by their banal violence or their ineluctable truth. You might even feel a perverse nostalgia for their characters or palettes or mise-en-scene, as I do. As with her most recent body of work, The Burning (2024), some of these dystopic worlds are traumascapes, as writer Maria Tumarkin has labelled sites of mass human suffering. In our ontologies, this belief is expressed in the Aboriginal English term ‘poison country’, where extreme violence or collective suffering scars the Country itself so that it becomes toxic. But by 1986, Moffatt had not yet led us through the wormhole – the dimension where she conjures her wild, disjointed yet utterly plausible existential narratives that spellbind audiences and critics alike.

In the artist’s exhibition history, Some lads is widely recognised as her first major public body of work – after The Movie Star (1985), her iconic portrait of the late David Dalatnghu Gulpilil AM, painted up, holding a can of Fosters while stretched over the bonnet of a car on Bondi Beach, and before her experimental film Nice Coloured Girls (1987). Some lads predates the series which consolidated her position as one of Australia’s most gifted and visionary artists, the suggestively titled Something More (1989), by three years. A mildly erotic kink-out set in the canefields of the tropical north, the iconic suite of images is populated by tropes – from the leering canecutter sweating it out in his slab hut playing knife games, a sexually available woman greeting the viewer at her open door in a silk negligee, foiled by Moffatt herself in a lurid red cheongsam with asymmetrical hem. She is both the expectant Madonna – and the unmade film’s protagonist – waiting for a sign. As she awaits deliverance, the tragic heroine is jeered by a gang of whitebread Vegemite kids and soothed by a Gauguinesque character crosspollinated with Bacchus, the hedonistic god of wine. The anti-trope breaking all the rules in this small town, Moffatt’s conjuring and the series’ alternate reality, is a female motorcycle cop – in high-shine boots, brandishing a whip.

Some lads is a humbler but no less impressive project. At the outset of a very promising career, this series captures the raw human potential of the artist and her subjects. The flex is mutual. The four subjects were dancers from what was then the Aboriginal and Islander Dance Theatre (AIDT), which would transmogrify into the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association, or NAISDA, now one of Australia’s leading performing arts training institutes headquartered on Darkinjung Country north of Sydney. Presciently, four years before Nunukul, Ngugi and Munandjali man Russell Page’s tragic death by suicide in 2002, Moffatt gifted his portrait, one of the five works in the suite, to the National Portrait Gallery. With his brothers, choreographer Stephen and musician David, Russell would form the nucleus of Bangarra Dance Theatre and become renowned as its principal male dancer. His innocence frayed by his hair, braided into locs, Page appears to be caught mid-sentence and half-way through ballet’s fourth position – with one arm gently curved over his head and the other curved in line with his navel.

Moffatt’s other subjects would also go on to distinguished and longstanding careers in contemporary and traditional dance, or a fusion of the two: Larrakia man Gary Lang, a choreographer who has since returned home to Darwin where he is artistic director of the Northern Territory Dance Company; Muruwari man Matthew Doyle, a musician, composer, dancer, choreographer, cultural consultant and educator; and Torres Strait Islander Graham Blanco, a descendant of the people of Mer (or Murray Island) in the eastern Torres Strait, who founded the Jaran Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Dance Company. As an artefact of time and place, the five images that constitute Some lads perform remarkably as portraits of black artists cresting on a wave. It was a moment in Australian history when the performing and visual arts became our voice – the vehicle, the Trojan horse if you like – that could hold within it our collective, subversive dreams of what the nation could be, if it would exchange denialism, amnesia and wilful blindness to see us as we really are.

These are just some lads. Doing what they do, what most lads generally don’t do. They are also ‘some, as the short form of handsome. They express their masculinity and their indeterminate sexualities – which are enmeshed in their blackness – in the assured and uncomplicated way attractive, physically fit people must do. They project it outwardly, assured of their audience. In certain images, we are also witnessing the homosociality of a changing room at the gym or the beach (the subject, with voyeurism and the female gaze, of Moffatt’s 1997 film Heaven in which she videotaped surfers changing into their wetsuits). Nothing sus’, as we might have said in the 80s. Masculinity isn’t always toxic; it exerts a strange power where attraction and threat, sex and violence, are in a constant state of tension. It strikes me that Moffatt’s eye and her camera, whatever direction the auteur was giving, is also prone to the sexual and platonic charms these not-quite men possess. They wrest control in five syncopated, balletic moves – their poses and Moffatt’s orchestration so much part of the visual language that, for me, defines the blak queer aesthetic. Of course, Moffatt herself denies any such categorisation. Yet here, you get the sense that she is both eyewitness and actor. These images speak volubly to a period in history when art was empowered, when our political aspirations could be articulated by a dance posture as much as a chant at an Invasion Day rally or Gumbaynggirr activist Gary Foley’s immortal riffs live onstage with The Clash during their 1982 tour of Australia.

‘I often talk about music when I talk about my work. When you put an image together you are composing,’ Moffatt said recently while presenting her 2024 body of work, The Burning, to an audience at the Sydney headquarters of her gallerist, Roslyn Oxley. ‘And I like to think I break the rules. I like to think I reinvent. And I want to reinvent … that is my goal, it has to be [something] I hadn’t seen before, then I like it. And the thing about instruments and music and fine tuning, tuning it, my way.’ Explaining the digital method she employed to divine this new series’ otherworldly palette of dusky light pinks and pale sky blues, Moffatt went on to quote the Icelandic musician Björk, who – when criticised for using synthetic instruments and electronica in her music – replied: ‘“If there’s no soul in it, it’s because I didn’t put it in.” So, you have to put the soul into it … so I work with digital photography, and it’s about what you put into it and that you don’t blame the instrument.’

It’s hard not to believe that even in Some lads, among Moffatt’s first forays into contemporary art, that the artist’s hand isn’t everywhere. As she has said recently, ‘What the work is, I’ve directed it. I’ve directed it from start to finish.’ For me, the fifth and final work in Some lads is the series’ crowning moment. In #5, dancer Graham Blanco flexes with his muscular back to the camera. He is shirtless, wearing what could be a skirt. His hair is held off his face with a wide bandeau. The pose could be that of a bodybuilder in competition, except everything else about the scene would disagree with that conclusion. Against nothing as remarkable as a painter’s dropsheet, Blanco performs a silent theatre – a simple pose – where the binaries of gender and race are harmonised in a perfect visual arrangement. A tableau vivant, this image takes what might seem problematic in contemporary Australian culture and shapes it into something that is not just resolved, but is unspeakably beautiful. It’s as if Moffatt is saying, ‘I’m not having this argument with you, look at the picture.’ Again and again, I am drawn back to its simplicity and its gender nonconformity, its polymorphous nature. It is much more than a portrait of Graham Blanco, or – by extension – of Tracey Moffatt. Instead, I see a vision of utopia, of utter freedom, where none is challenged by another’s performance of gender, however they construct it – if indeed they do.