Michael Cook, Enculturation. Courtesy: the artist and This Is No Fantasy. 

“Michael Cook’s new series of photographic works, Enculturation, evokes the potential for Indigenous cultures, and their learnings over millennia, to shift the technologies and often surface concerns of white society toward the balance and harmony integral to the sustainability at the heart of First Nations traditions. Photographed on Country with senior women painted up for ceremony, the series traces a journey through the landscape under an opaque and nebulous sky. Children sit amongst the women as they absorb the nuances of Country, and learn to move comfortably within its embrace. Old newspapers lie on the ground, subtle allusions to the historical search for homes in which to place Aboriginal children removed from their families. Babies from a variety of ethnic origins, accompanied by camp dogs, follow Aboriginal women down a dirt track into a flat dry landscape. The stillness, and the babies’ compulsion to crawl after the women as they disappear into the scrub, imbues the elders at the heart of Enculturation with an eerie sense of magnetism. With reverse references to Australia’s Stolen Generations (1910-1970s, and ongoing),  Cook’s Enculturation explores difficult territory with a gentleness drawn from the beauty of its aesthetic.” Louise Martin-Chew