Kinjarling Djinnang Ngalak Country Sees Us

Kinjarling Djinnang Ngalak | Country Sees Us, is an immersive exhibition centred around newly recorded video oral histories of Menang Elders and a large-scale visual meditation on the Kinjarling/Albany landscape.

This exhibition marks 200 years since colonisation began on Menang Country and asks visitors to encounter Kinjarling not as a backdrop to history, but as a living landscape with its own voice and memory.

The stories within this exhibition have been recorded to add important new layers of meaning to the largely colonial maps, photographs and illustrations in the State Library’s collection. 

Visitors will step into a quiet 6-metre-wide dome inspired by a kornt (a traditional shelter) to hear the Elders’ stories. These include reflections by Carol Pettersen, Lester Coyne, Mark Colbung, Vernice Gillies, Doreen Hancox, Sharrlyn Maddren and a young Menang ranger, Cleve Humphries.

This immersive experience also features a specially commissioned animation that reinterprets the State Library’s collections through a Menang lens, weaving Menang artist and academic Shandell Cumming’s artworks with centuries-old maps, photographs and illustrations to reveal new ways of seeing and understanding these materials. The exhibition gives new voices and stories to evocative landscape photographs taken by government and commercial photographers over many decades.

This exhibition is curated by Denien Toomath, a Menang Noongar woman and Senior Partnerships Officer at the State Library. 

Produced by the State Library of Western Australia in partnership with the Community Arts Network.

Kinjarling Djinnang Ngalak| Country Sees Us is the first State Library exhibition to be launched as part of the Dialogues 2029 project. Dialogues 2029 is a four-year program stimulating public dialogue and contemporary perspectives on the commemoration of 200 years since the colonisation of Western Australia.