Pictures 1950
Catalogue / Memoir
Introduction
Pictures
Objects
Animations
PICTURES are both finished and ephemeral works made for animations.
1949---- 1950---- 1951---- 1952---- 1953---- 1954---- 1955---- 1956---- 1957---- 1958---- 1959---- 1960---- 1961---- 1962---- 1963---- 1964---- 1965---- 1966---- 1967---- 1968---- 1969---- 1970---- 1971---- 1972---- 1973---- 1974---- 1975---- 1976---- 1977---- 1978---- 1979---- 1980---- 1981---- 1982---- 1983---- 1984---- 1985---- 1986---- 1987---- 1988---- 1989---- 1990---- 1991---- 1992---- 1993---- 1994---- 1995---- 1996---- 1997---- 1998---- 1999---- 2000---- 2001---- 2002---- 2003---- 2004---- 2005---- 2006---- 2007---- 2008---- 2009---- 2010---- 2011---- 2012---- 2013---- 2014---- 2015---- 2016---- 2017---- 2018---- 2019---- 2020---- 2021---- 2022---- 2023---- 2024---- 2025---- 2026----
My father calls me after his wartime lover.
Don't talk about our Aboriginal ancestry.
You'll get your head kicked in.
My parents met at a party after the war. My father said Mum reminded him of his war-time lover, a French-Tahitian woman called Elyse. They met in Tahiti where he stayed when he worked as a radio operator on ships carrying munitions between Australia and Tahiti. There's a tiny photo of her dressed in a sarong sitting on a beach. In the photo she is smiling and holding a coconut like an offering to my father, the photographer.
Page 7 of Flying with my Sister Picture book (2022) Co-authored with scientist and artist Claire Sives.
CLICK on the Bird to download Flying with my Sister:
Screen shot from Roget's Circular
Interactive CDROM (2001)
Co-authored with Melissa Smith
Nanna Ralston told me and my cousins not to talk about our Aboriginal ancestry. "You'd get your head kicked in", she said. She told us her mother was Maori.
However there's a story Mum told me that her grandmother Hannah Brown was an Aboriginal woman. I got the same story from one of Mum's brothers and their kids.
So when I came to live in Sydney and became a student at Eora Aboriginal College (2004-2007) and was asked to write about my ancestry, I wrote this story with as much information as I had at that time, and published it online.
In 2010, grandsons of one of Mum's cousins I never knew, found my story online and emailed me. Their family had always identified as Aboriginal, they said, and they wanted to meet up.
We first met up in a coffee shop in Melbourne. Later I was invited to bring my partner to their family home in West Melbourne, to meet their mum Noreen. Noreen had cooked a delicious meat loaf, just like the ones Mum used to cook. Noreen showed me walls in their house that she'd painted with plants and animals, like pictures I'd done since I was a child, on walls of houses I'd lived in. The living room walls were covered in family photos. Being welcomed so easily into their family felt uncanny, easy and familiar.
After lunch we looked at more photos in albums and shared documents and stories. We agreed it was likely Hannah's children were brought up by different mothers, and that there was a falling out between cousins in our grandparents' generation over how differently they chose to identify - as black or white. The Higgins family seemed easy about themselves in a way that Mum's family never did. Mum used to say her mother Phoebe cut out certain faces from family photos. There were no photos on our walls, no dark faces. Cousin Tony reckons Phoebe just wanted to protect her children.
EVENTS
1950: Women under federal awards granted 75 per cent of the male wage.
Myxomatosis successfully introduced to combat the rabbit plague.
Ref: The Australian Almanac, Pub. Angus & Robertson 1985
The Korean War begins as North Korea invades the South;
the Annexation of Tibet by China brings Tibet under Chinese control;
the 1950 FIFA World Cup ends with Uruguay's Maracanazo upset over Brazil;
McCarthyism drives anti-communist hysteria in the U.S.;
the 1950 Assam-Tibet earthquake causes massive destruction;
the Treaty of Zgorzelec confirms the Oder-Neisse border;
the Jayuya Uprising challenges U.S. rule in Puerto Rico;
Typhoon Jane devastates Japan;
King Bhumibol Adulyadej is crowned.
2004 Pteropod (winged foot)
Sea butterfly
Animation
Written by me, Lisa Roberts/Euphausia superba (Antarctic krill), on
17/04/2026
