Flinders academic and creative artist Dr Ali Gumillya Baker, a Mirning woman from the Nullarbor in western South Australia, is reaching out to a broad online audience about her art that reflects on memorialising 250 years since Captain Cook landed on Dharawal Country, now known as Kurnell on the southern headland of Botany Bay.

Dr Baker has discussed her Tall Ships artworks that address this matter in an interview with Associate Professor Catherine Kevin, an historian in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

Posted online by FUMA on 29 April, the interview has already been accessed by a large online audience and can be viewed here.

The interview is timely, drawing attention to the next FUMA Online exhibition – In the Hold: Decolonising Captain Cook in contemporary Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander art – which is being presented via the FUMA website from 27 May.

Curated by Dr Baker and FUMA director Fiona Salmon, In the Hold engages in a dialogue of symbolism and space, and the enduring grip of Cook in the public imagination.

“The exhibition will ask what it means to be held in uncomfortable states; to be held within colonised spaces; and to exist simultaneously within sovereignty of sea, sky and earth,” explains Ms Salmon. “In the Hold considers our collective responsibility to our histories and the present vulnerabilities of the living earth.”