- My work is quite intimately relational in the way that it is pretty influenced by place and people and my relationships with both those things. My name's Alana Hunt. I'm an artist and writer. I live about half an hour outside of the town of Kununurra in the Northwest of Australia on Miriwoong country.

At the National Art Carriageworks, I'm presenting images and writing from two bodies of work. One is called In The National Interest and the other body of work is called All The Violence Within This. I'm quite interested in the less obvious ways that colonisation unfolds and how we are players in that process. So the first body of work that I've presented images from is called All The Violence Within This. And it's been shot at a spring about an hour outside of Kununurra where a lot of non-indigenous people go to. And that's a result of the development of the town there which brought in a larger non-indigenous population in the 1960s, which has continued to expand.

And one of the longer historical things that I think about too is that the only reason we can sit in spaces like these springs now and not feel threatened is simply because of the violence that took place. At least where I live in the early part of the 20th century and the late part of the 19th century. You know, what I'm referring to there is the massacres, the policing, the intense violence of that, that enabled the displacement of indigenous people and the taking of their land. It's because of that violence that we can sit in places like these springs. When viewers first enter they see these quite rich, enticing images of a spring and people kind of enjoying that spring which I hope are a bit seductive in the way that they pull people to almost want that place.

But I also think there's something haunting and awkward and uncomfortable about those figures in that space. They're also photographed without an awareness of being photographed. There's an objectification and observation thing at play going on there.

When you come to the other side, it's a much more dystopian desolate scene like this kind of lifestyle of the springs, has been enabled by this kind of violence. And that side of the image, that side of the coin is called In The National Interest. When developments take place, if they need to say destroy an Aboriginal site you need to articulate how that destruction is in the national interest. My partner is Miriwoong, a person and he's often perpetually consulted, perpetually anxious and trying to navigate a huge bureaucratic system to be able to control what kind of developments are happening on his land. And that's almost a lifetime's work that kind of weight and pressure that's perpetually kind of burrowing against him.

And so he's often quite upset when we see gravel pits that are continuing that he thought they'd been ordered to stop operations because of the particular place that they were in. I sort of came to see these gravel pits as like cigarette burns, like on a tortured body but they're just these small little burns piercing the whole landscape everywhere. And then not the huge Juukan Gorge. They're not the big Rio Tinto mines that blow up entire mountains, but they're small, persistent little pits that nonetheless invade and desecrate people's places. And we do this In The National Interest. I'm also doing a written component of the work throughout the course of the exhibition.

So there's six images presented in the show. And over the course of the exhibition I'm engaging in kind of conversations and correspondence with six different people. We're sort of taking the photographs as a starting point. So I'll extend that conversation beginning with home and bring it out to a broader Australian context and then internationally. And through the work, I hope people like me can see themselves in that and start to reflect a bit and feel a bit uncertain, a bit challenged and kind of recognise some of the more obscure ways that we continue the violence of colonisation.