Merrick Fry is a senior artist with works in national and other public collections. For more about Merrick see merrickfry.com.
Dark Matter is an ambitious exhibition of paintings and drawings. It addresses Australia’s ‘great forgetting’, the violent history of colonisation including the massacre of thousands of Indigenous people. This violent history is largely absent from our History Painting – the main painting in this exhibition might be the first large history painting to attempt this subject.
Merrick is not indigenous and has struggled with the ethics of portraying this subject – can an Anglo-Australian reflect on this dark matter? However, he has come to believe that the massacres are also the history of non-Indigenous Australians. Unless we come to own this history, we will never be a cohesive and fully mature nation. As David Marr puts it,
I asked Lyndall Ryan …which Indigenous scholars I should read and [she said] ….”But they don’t work on the frontier wars the topic is whitefella business”. An Indigenous colleague I have known for many years put it this way “You mob wrote down the colonial records, the diaries and newspapers. You do the work. You tell that story. It’s your story” (Marr David Killing for country Collingwood, Vic. : Black Inc., 2023 pp 409)
Join Merrick at the opening on the 5th April or for the artist’s talk on the 12th April, 3pm. Or visit the gallery Tues- Saturday 11-6.
Captions:
Dark Matter pastel, charcoal, acrylic and glass crystals on linen, 87x79cm (detail right side),2025
Night Dispersal pastel, charcoal, acrylic on cotton mix, 56x36cm, 2024
Night Fishing pastel and charcoal on paper, 77x57cm, 2025
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