Hidden Melbourne — One City, Two Histories

Or how painters John Brack and Ben McKeown paint the same city, but from two different perspectives

Melbourne, Australia, photograph by Steven Groeneveld on Unsplash

In 1956, Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games. It was the first time in Australia, and a groundbreaking chance to showcase the best of what the country and its people had to offer. Melbourne’s first skyscraper had been approved the year before.

For decades throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Melbourne was a white city, a colonial environment. Its white history has remained ingrained as the “only” valid history in the consciousness of thousands of people all over the world, including painter John Brack, until very recently, when Aboriginal artists have begun to uncover the history of their ancestors proudly. In the language of the Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung, the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which the city was established in 1835, it is still known as Narrm.

Inside the Car

Photograph by John Robert McPherson, 1980, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s a happy family. A happy, white Melbourne family. In Brack’s painting The Car (you can see it here), the husband and wife sit in the front. Their two kids — a boy and a girl —…