Destiny Deacon’s life of political art was a true act of love (2024)

Destiny Deacon, HonFRPS

February 6, 1956 to May 23, 2024

When they named their second child, Eleanor Nain and Warren Deacon may have sensed what the parents of a newborn often do – the infinite possibility of a child’s life.

They cannot have known precisely how prolific, hardworking and driven she would become in her single-minded, almost obsessive approach to image-making in a diverse, wide-ranging and sometimes haphazard 30-year career as a visual artist. Any dreams Eleanor and Warren might have had for this auspiciously named child would be fulfilled over the next 68 years.

An internationally renowned artist, Destiny would exhibit her work at the game-changing Documenta 11 in 2002 at the invitation of the visionary Nigerian curator, the late Okwui Enwezor, who incidentally oversaw the 1996 Johannesburg Biennale, one of Destiny’s first international forays. Before his death in 2019, Enwezor named her a key artist while conceiving the 2023 Sharjah Biennial. In what would become the last major presentation of her work internationally before her death, Destiny was accorded an entire house in the emirate for the installation she titled Bait Blak (Blak House). She was twice included in the Havana Biennale and participated in the Biennale of Sydney on multiple occasions, including the most recent 2024 edition.

Her exhibition history is eye-wateringly extensive, with solos at Rebecca Hossack Gallery in London, Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the Kunstlerhaus in Salzburg, to name a few. At home, she would be the subject of two major career-surveying solo exhibitions in her lifetime – Walk & don’t look blak at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004, curated by Natalie King, and the eponymous DESTINY at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2020, curated by Myles Russell-Cook.

Born in the Queensland town of Maryborough in 1956, Destiny was the second child of Eleanor Nain, whose paternal Aboriginal heritage was centred on Cape York Peninsula and who, on her maternal side, was a member of the extended Pitt family from the Torres Strait islands of Erub and Mer (also known as Darnley and Murray Islands respectively). Destiny was a descendant of Sophie, the daughter of Chief Kahlemu from Joking village on the New Caledonian, or Kanaky, island of Lifou with Douglas Pitt, the Jamaican missionary revered as the man who brought the “light” – Christianity – to the Torres Strait. Destiny’s father – who named her – was Warren Deacon, an English-Irish wharfie with whom Eleanor had her three eldest children, Deborah, Destiny and Kedron. In subsequent years, four more children were born to Eleanor – John, Janina, Clinton and Tom.

Whatever Eleanor did to stoke the imaginative fires that burned in the creative and agile minds of her children isn’t clear but several of them went on to highly successful careers in the arts, where for Indigenous creatives, the personal and the political often coalesce.

Eleanor, a formidable presence herself, moved her family to Fitzroy in inner Melbourne in 1958, where Destiny would spend the rest of her life enmeshed in the city’s vibrant, tight-knit and politically conscious black community.

It was Destiny who first dropped the “c” in black, to derive the word “blak”, an inclusive term meaning diverse and emerging urban Aboriginal identities. It caught on because for urban blackfellas without access to Country, language and unbroken cultural tradition, it validated their lived experiences in a single term. Destiny grew up being called a “black c”, so there was some satisfaction in taking the “c” out, identifying herself and others like her in a decisive rhetorical act of self-definition.

Yet more self-defining was Destiny’s coming out as a lesbian in Melbourne’s Aboriginal community in the 1970s. The moral courage and sheer nerve it took to declare herself and live openly at a time when hom*ophobic violence was rampant cannot be underestimated. It might have been easier to run or to hide, but Destiny held the line and maintained her visibility despite the risk. She never compromised on this – nothing would tempt her to be anything other than what she was.

Like the now widely used term blak, Destiny’s cultural impact as a prolific maker of images was deep and far-reaching, so omnipresent and part of the wallpaper as to become unseen.

Take for instance her highly reproduced image of the smiling face that greets visitors to Melbourne’s Luna Park, the benevolent fun merchant Moon Man. In Whitey’s Watching, Deacon instead saw the wild eyes, bared teeth and gaping mouth in racialised terms, transmogrifying the neon spectacle into a cipher for state surveillance and a voracious white Australia that threatens to subsume the blak.

Deacon was the first Australian Indigenous artist to creatively reuse what she termed “Koori kitsch” or Aboriginalia – mass-produced ephemera such as black dolls, tea towels, crockery and other household items that, discarded in junk shops, were a relatively common sight in the 1980s. At best twee and disposable, these popular representations of First Nations people were simultaneously the detritus of racism and cultural artefacts that Destiny found had “something to say”. As representations of the Other, they ranged from patronisingly romantic to outright racist.

A collecting mania possessed Destiny to acquire these kitsch objects, not for their function or indeed aesthetic beauty. She described “rescuing” the black dolls from op shops and markets – later drafting them as characters in the suburban melodramas and kitchen-sink parables she would plot and stage on the floor of her lounge room in Brunswick. These scenarios often used the mundane and unremarkable to confront and question power, institutional racism and gender-based violence, cut through with her absurdist wit, keen sense of the ridiculous and unstinting humour. As her catalogue of homemade films prove, she was a born comedian. Destiny laughed freely at her own jokes with a hearty, full-throated cackle that was so explosive that it could frighten dogs and small children.

Destiny characterised herself as an “old-fashioned political artist”, but the reflex self-deprecation and natural modesty couldn’t mask her extraordinary talent, originality and razor-sharp intellect. Her undergraduate degree at the University of Melbourne – tellingly – was in politics. In 1975, she was elected the first Aboriginal student liaison officer, a constructive, hands-on role that she was not only passionate about, but which also had demonstrable impact. Her advocacy in the role led to higher Indigenous participation and retention rates at the university and, ultimately, more blackfellas in academia. After a stint inducting Indigenous trainees in the equal opportunity unit of the Commonwealth Public Service Board, she returned to higher education. In 1982, she gained a diploma in education from La Trobe University and worked as a teacher in Melbourne’s northern suburbs before joining the Commonwealth public service herself, taking up a position at the now-defunct Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra. Her boss was the former activist and senior bureaucrat, the late Charles Perkins. Such was her loyalty to Perkins that she and a select number of her colleagues were known as “Charlie’s angels”.

Destiny was informal in her approach to art and managed her career as one of Australia’s leading contemporary practitioners without ever resorting to what she termed “artspeak”. For that, she had her partner – collaborator and fellow artist the late Virginia Fraser, who not only was the great love of her life but who was also deeply embedded in Destiny’s process. Sometimes, Virginia was even more knowledgeable about recalling certain aspects of the making of an artwork than the artist herself. Their collaboration ended with Virginia’s sudden death three years ago, on Invasion Day.

The other great love of her life was the late Lisa Bellear, a community radio broadcaster, poet, avid photographer and documentarian of urban blak Melbourne. Along with Destiny and her younger sister Janina, Lisa presented Raspberryade Brigade and Not Another Koori Show on Melbourne community radio station 3CR. Kim Kruger later joined the on-air crew as a trainee. Lisa and Kim were fully integrated to become part of the family along with former sister-in-law actor Kylie Belling. Lisa’s life was cut tragically short during NAIDOC Week in 2006 when her heart stopped beating as she slept.

Invariably, the cast and crew of Destiny’s productions were her family and friends, those closest to her. Her nieces and nephews would eventually become muses for Destiny’s work, along with many other Koori community members. In one of her most recognisable images, 1995’s Last laughs, you get a sense of the anarchy – the controlled chaos – that Destiny orchestrated behind the scenes. Dressed for a night out, Kim and Janina – in character – tease a white friend, pulling her hair. Is she in on their joke or the butt of it? Accomplice or hostage? Is she about to explode with laughter or burst into tears? It’s impossible to say. The friction, or the innocence, is still unresolved.

What feels like a snapshot and appears “beguilingly simple” – to quote Kim, a close observer of Destiny’s practice – is more complex than at first glance. Yet, it also makes visible something we rarely see – unadulterated blak joy – as well as the familial love and the sisterhood that bound the artist and her subjects together. Curator and friend Tess Allas remembers how, with Virginia and Lisa, Destiny “lifted other black women in the arts”.

While she dreamt up scenarios that ranged from the banal to the surreal, Destiny was also a clear-eyed witness. Her satire was political and astute, and her parody never missed its mark. She lived the racism, misogyny and hom*ophobia, the intergenerational poverty and trauma, the want and the utter lack of privilege that she described. Through her images, she exposed those manufactured social diseases and structural inequalities to blinding light. She also trained her eye on hypocrisy, the abuse of power and interpersonal violence – and human frailty.

Despite the paralysing loss of her two great loves, Destiny couldn’t stop making images, even over the course of a long illness. In a suite of photographs from 2017, Lips, Destiny zoomed in on the perfectly formed mouths of some of her collection of dolls. The way she cropped the images below the eye is brutal. Her focus is solely on the lips, where words are formed. The dolls she spent much of her career trying to animate are stilled, frozen. There is no plot or storyline, no context – just lips. The images aren’t suggestive or even mildly erotic. The sense is, at last, of an artist who can breathe and isn’t suffocated by outrage. An artist who isn’t compelled to fix the world’s problems or heal the open, freshly salted wound that was the Australia of her lived experience. Finally, Destiny gets to luxuriate in the aesthetics of her subject.

Among the accolades she received towards the end of her life were an honorary doctorate in education (honoris causa) from La Trobe University in 2019 and the inaugural Yalingwa Fellowship for mid-career and senior First Nations visual artists in 2018. In 2022, she was co-recipient with Bangarra choreographer Stephen Page of the Red Ochre Award for lifetime achievement in Indigenous arts. Last year, with fellow recipients Monica Alcazar-Duarte and Jaisingh Nageswaran, she received the Prix pour la photographie awarded by the Musee du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris. But perhaps Destiny’s greatest plaudit was the Royal Photographic Society’s prestigious Centenary Medal, which she also received in 2022. It was awarded “in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography”, and other recipients include Annie Leibovitz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Nan Goldin and Sophie Calle. The medal also bestowed on her honorary fellowship of one of the world’s oldest photographic societies.

As James Baldwin wrote in his 1962 essay The Creative Process: “The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

It is possible to recast her entire body of work as an act of love. And if there is one thing that her work declares it is that there is beauty in simplicity, in the unvarnished truth, in the discarded and unwanted, the apparently mundane, the banal and the unremarkable.