Ngaya (I am)

Peter Waples-Crowe is a Ngarigo/Ngarigu visual and performance-based artist living and working in Melbourne. His work is known for exploring the intersections of an Indigenous queer identity, spirituality, and Australia’s ongoing colonisation. He takes influence from his adoption and later reconnection with his Ngarigo/Ngarigu heritage, which grounds the work in a first-person perspective to explore myriad possible identities. Waples-Crowe works across moving image, collage, painting, mixed media, fashion and ceramics.

The artist’s documentation for this work states:
“Ngaya is a cut-and-paste, collage, punked-up look at my Country. It’s a Country with conflicting narratives which this film explores through found footage and animation. It looks at Country from [my] insider-outsider perspective: [from] someone who at once belongs to this Country but who has never lived on Country for any extended time, and [who] has viewed it from Naarm/Melbourne for the past twenty years.

My connection to Ngarigo Country has healed me with its Ancestral power, but Country also holds the trauma of colonisation like scars on the landscape and introduced species. They threaten its very existence, and the threat is real and ongoing. Country isn’t something to own, and this film explores the colonial gaze and then the blakfulla disruption of this gaze.

This film uses humour to disarm the viewer about the true nature of the invasion. The film asks: Whose mountain is it anyway? Where are the snow Mob in the mainstream depictions of the snowy mountains? Why our continual erasure in this playground for the colonisers?

The film also captures my fractured relationship to Country through its collaged approach. The range of images represent all the elements that pull me in separate directions. Sometimes I feel I have nowhere to land.

The found footage is taken from YouTube and speaks to the degradation of Country through tourism, including projects like the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the romantic notions of the high country with brumbies, and recent bushfires. … The Ancestors and Country is still here pulsating with life and is continually trying to renew its ancient power in the face of adversity.

I want people to think about the snow Country, away from it being a holiday destination to be exploited. I want you to think about the First People of the snow and fragility of Country.”
Peter Waples-Crowe 2022