January 26 is a complicated day in Australia, and the Invasion Day rally in Brisbane is one of the most photographically serious events I attend each year. It requires a different kind of attention from festival photography — the stakes are higher, the emotions are more layered, and the responsibility to represent people accurately rather than dramatically is something I think about throughout the day.
The 2016 rally gathered at Musgrave Park and marched through the Brisbane CBD. The smoking ceremony at the start of the day — eucalyptus and wattle smoke rising through the park, participants moving through it — is one of the most visually distinctive moments in the Brisbane events calendar.
On the smoking ceremony: The smoke in strong backlight or against the dark canopy of the park trees is genuinely difficult to expose for, but when it works the photographs have a quality that is unlike anything else. The man conducting the ceremony, boomerang in hand, smoke billowing around him, is an image that needed nothing from me beyond being present and ready.
On children at protests: Some of the most significant images from Invasion Day are of children — in body paint, raising fists, carrying flags. These children are being brought to something important by their families, and they are participating fully. Photographing children at political events requires care, but omitting them would misrepresent what the day actually is.
On the city as backdrop: The march through Brisbane’s CBD puts protestors against the architecture of colonial governance — the old Town Hall, the heritage buildings of Queen Street — and the contrast is always there to be made. The woman with the Aboriginal flag face covering, fist raised in front of the city buildings, held those two realities in a single frame.
On the crowd portraits: I spent time between the main march moments photographing the crowd — faces, body paint, painted signs, the detail of what people were wearing and carrying. The baby on his father’s shoulder, looking out at the march with wide eyes, was one of the quieter images from the day and one I keep returning to.
Invasion Day is not a comfortable event to photograph. That discomfort is appropriate.
More Invasion Day coverage: Invasion Day 2021 — Meanjin