How Tony Albert’s childhood instinct became a radical art practice

Tony Albert has devoted a lifetime to collecting Aboriginalia, the kitsch household and decorative items featuring naive – or downright racist – representations of Indigenous culture that were churned out in the middle of the last century.

Over the years, back from when he was a youngster and the bug first bit, the Girramay/Yidinji/Kuku-Yalanji artist has amassed a vast array of ashtrays, velvet paintings, playing cards, tea towels, rubbish bins, figurines and more.

One isolated object might be seen as ironically kitsch. A few together might get away with being labelled a quirky collection. But seen en masse these objects take on a terrible power all their own. They become an unsettling indictment of colonisation, displacement and erasure.

And also, to contemporary eyes, they are just really, really weird.

“You’ve got to see it to understand it,” Albert says. “You’ve got to see it in large volume … It takes your breath away, the abundance of these objects. Do they have any monetary value? No. But their cultural value in the sense of the way in which we think as a society is very important.”

These objects, arranged, repurposed and interpreted in myriad ways, are the basis of Albert’s major upcoming Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition, Tony Albert: Not A Souvenir.

Guest curator Bruce Johnson McClean, from the Wierdi people of Central Queensland, says the exhibition is a powerful act of re-asserting control.

“[It] is a statement from Tony Albert that his identity – that Indigenous identity – is not something to be fabricated and controlled by external forces but something that belongs in the hands of Indigenous people,” he writes. “It is a refusal to be represented and consumed as a simple, loathsome, one-dimensional creature or an object of mild entertainment. It is a demand to be understood as a complex human with an extraordinarily rich cultural and historical inheritance.”

Albert’s fascination with these objects began way before he had the sophistication to understand their significance.

He was born in Townsville, North Queensland, in 1981. His Indigenous father is from the Rainforest people of Far North Queensland. His mother’s family is English, “maybe Scottish”, says Albert. Being of mixed heritage was a big part of Albert’s identity from a very early age.

“I remember a profound thing that mum once said,” he says. “She went to pick us up on the first day of school and being this white woman picking up two brown kids she was asked if she was the nanny. I look at that story and think, imagine the first thought of someone is that these aren’t your children standing next to you.”

Albert’s father was in the army and they moved around a lot while Albert was young before ultimately settling in Brisbane. The family was large – his father is one of eight, and his mother has six siblings – but money was always tight growing up. Thus, one of his earliest memories was shopping in second hand stores with his family.

“We called them the smelly shops,” he says. “That was the only way we got things as kids. And I never saw it as a negative experience at all. It was so exciting. And you became a good op-shopper. Your eyes scan the periphery, you see things other people don’t see. We would literally buy brand names and cut tags off and resew them on because we had no money.”

And right from those very first forays into Vinnies and other charity shops, the young Albert’s collecting instinct was alive. He felt driven to amass multiple examples of objects and show them off.

“My parents say that even when I was a child I didn’t play with toys,” he says. “I displayed them.”

One of his earliest memories revolves around figurines of Smurfs, the iconic pop culture characters of the early 1980s. At the time, BP was running a hugely popular giveaway promotion at its service stations across Australia.

“There was the excitement of knowing that every time we got petrol I was getting this Smurf,” he says. “They all had their own little identities. It was almost like this security thing – I was creating my own little communities.”

Albert was about six years old when he came across his first piece of Aboriginalia, “a plate or cup or something”, stamped with the clichéd portrait of an Indigenous “hunter”. His nascent curatorial instinct piqued, he began actively searching out other objects to add to his collection.

In those early days, he was a long way from developing the critical distance to understand the deeper significance behind the material – that would come later.

“As an Aboriginal youth, Albert had few heroic images that looked like him that he could collect,” writes Johnson McLean. “There were no Aboriginal Barbies and Aboriginal excellence was rarely celebrated. So, Albert chose to see these maligned objects as a source of empowerment.”

At school, where he was often the only Aboriginal student, Albert was, he says, “very politically active”.

“I noticed very early that the curriculum was not going to feed me what I wanted in my life,” he says. “If we were in English I would go straight to [Wiradjuri author] Kevin Gilbert or [Noonuccal poet] Oodgeroo Noonuccal. With art, I remember Jennifer Isaacs’ book, Aboriginality was the only book in the library that had Aboriginal art in it.”

Then he was introduced to artists including Gordon Bennett and Tracey Moffatt.

“The work they were making was me,” he says. “They were telling my story and that was to change my life forever: the power of art.”

After two years at Griffith University studying contemporary Indigenous art, Albert landed a traineeship at Queensland Art Gallery. It was, he says, intended to be “one year on a shitty wage and then they’d let me go”.

Eight years later, he was still there and facing a crucial career crossroads – should he continue with a comfortable and stable career as a curator or back himself as an artist?

“The decision came down to whether I would be disappointed on my deathbed,” he says. “I thought no, I’m going to go and be an artist. It was the best thing for me to do to just walk away because I knew I could always go back to it. I was going to at least try to just make art.”

When he moved out of home and into his own studio his collection of Aboriginalia came with him, and it was only after a while that the deeper significance of the objects began to assert itself and to make their way into his art practice.

“I finally understood the collection in a much deeper political way,” he says. “I always bring it back to that childhood innocence because that is the foundation of it, and I never want to lose the love I had for these objects and why they were so important to me.”

In one early piece, Albert brought together velvet paintings into a giant love heart, then another, Headhunter, was acquired in 2008 by Hetti Perkins for the Art Gallery of NSW.

“It was like fireworks,” he says of that acquisition.

“It really posed the infinite possibilities of Aboriginalia being a medium for me. When they entered my work, they became an incredible entry point into discussing all kinds of issues.

“I like to think that what I do gives the objects back their own autonomy that was stripped from them. These were objects that didn’t have a voice. And I’d like to think that through my art, they now do have an opportunity to speak for themselves.”

And when the objects “speak” the shocking subtexts most often revealed are damaging stereotypes, nakedly racist tropes and false narratives of all kinds designed to cement the dominant position of the European colonisers.

In this latest show, Albert is more willing to use his own words rather than importing them from other sources as he has done in the past.

“These are my own thoughts, feelings, and representation of what I think Aboriginalia is,” he says. “So it’s my own writing, which is quite unusual for me. I always felt this pressure to pull from other sources. I feel really wonderful to get to a point where I’m utilising my own writing.”

The MCA show also includes works responding to Australian painter and print-maker Margaret Preston, whose own work, reproduced on domestic fabrics such as curtains and tea towels, appropriated many Indigenous motifs, softening them just enough to appeal to – or at least not upset – white sensibilities.

Despite all this, Albert has a complicated relationship with Preston. He has said that, were she still alive, they would likely be friends.

“She’s a fantastic painter, undoubtedly,” he says. “There’s never an intention to pull apart her practice in a negative or unmeaningful way. I look at it almost like this posthumous conversation.”

In person, Albert is open and quite charming, and it’s easy to see why he has been labelled the “nicest guy in Australian contemporary art”.

In the face of myriad indignities and injustices heaped on his people, he prefers to make his arguments using charm and humour over anger and confrontation. He contrasts his approach with that of his good friend and regular collaborator Richard Bell.

“He’s the yeller and screamer and I don’t have to do that because he’s done that for us as people,” he says.

“He’s broken down those doors. My talent is to navigate these spaces in a much gentler way. For me, yelling and screaming and pointing the finger doesn’t work.

“I’m not angry. I’m actually just really sad.”

Tony Albert: Not a Souvenir runs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) from May 21 to October 19.