Travis De Vries
Culture
November 27, 2025
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The idea didn’t arrive fully formed. It rarely does. It started, instead, with an invitation.
The Senior Curator, Western Sydney Creative: Margaret Hancock reached out to me last year and asked me to join a group show marking the anniversary of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s dismissal—one of those hinge points of Australian political mythology that still hangs in the air like a storm that never quite breaks. The show would sit inside the Whitlam Institute, surrounded by archives and artefacts that hold the tension between Australian political fantasy and Australian political reality.
We were invited to visit the permanent collection as a group. I remember walking through the space with the other artists, looking at the documents, the furniture, the objects that had shaped an entire political era. Pieces of a nation-state pinned behind glass.
The weird thing is—none of it felt unfamiliar. Growing up, we had an unframed print of Mervyn Bishop’s photograph of Whitlam pouring sand into Vincent Lingiari’s hand hanging on our wall. It was the only “political art” in the house. Everything else was archives of my mother's and father's work, Gamilaroi and Darug art or Australian punk music culture. That photo stayed. It anchored the room. We didn’t always talk about it, but we did talk about it.
I learned the meaning of that image twice: once visually, and once through Kev Carmody’s “From Little Things Big Things Grow.” famously performed by Paul Kelly. That song was the oral footnote to the photograph. Between Bishop’s lens and Carmody’s voice, I absorbed the idea that stories—good stories—can move people. They can shift the foundations of a nation.
And when you grow up with that combination, it becomes impossible to separate art from politics, or politics from story. Which meant that once Margaret asked me to make something responding to Whitlam and dismissal and democracy and whatever this “nation” is pretending to be, it was inevitable that my mind would slide straight into sovereignty.
Or, more accurately, the absence of it.
After the visit, I went home, sat down with a coffee, and asked myself the question I always end up asking:
What is the work I need to make right now?
Not “what fits the brief” or “what will play well in the room.”
But what is the thing the voice inside me is demanding be made?
I knew instantly it wasn’t a sculpture or a painting or a clean conceptual piece. I needed something with teeth. Something that pushed the conversation further than “representation” or “First Nations content.”
I kept circling back to a question I’ve held for years:
What would it look like for First Nations people to actually exercise sovereignty—not symbolically, but functionally?
Not just on Country, not just in culture, but on paper, in law, in political reality.
The idea of a Gamilaroi Constitution came first. A foundational document. A living document. A container for law, lore, governance, and nationhood. A frame for imagining a future where Gamilaroi people don’t just survive the Australian state—they outgrow it.
And then the idea sharpened further. A Declaration of Independence.
A document that says—in plain language—that Gamilaroi people do not recognise the sovereignty of the Commonwealth of Australia because it has never recognised ours.
A document that reverses the legal fiction Australia was founded on.
Something formal. Something ceremonial. Something dangerous.
The truth is: none of this arrived out of a vacuum. I’ve been circling these ideas for years.
When I was working on the podcast Fear of a Blak Planet, I spent months improvising with First Nations artists about a fictional paramilitary group of Blakfullas reclaiming sovereignty by force. We were exploring what resistance could look like if it wasn’t metaphorical or symbolic. The kind of storytelling that lets you step sideways into another timeline where courage meets consequence.
Before, during and after that, I’ve been buried in an unfinished sci-fi/fantasy novel—a sprawling future epic about a First Nations power rising in the wreckage of a collapsed Australia. It’s was messy and speculative and too big for its own good, but it holds a core question that still sits with me:
What if we didn’t wait for permission, what if we don’t ask forgiveness – what if we imagine ourselves free and act upon those imaginings?
Speculative fiction has always been my way of stress-testing the possible. Political and deep identity conversations between characters is safer for me than having those conversations out loud in the open.
If you can’t imagine a liberated future, you will never build the material conditions for one.
In 2023, I joined the Darug X Palestinian artist residency Always: Call and Response with UTP. It was one of those rare cross-cultural collaborations that wasn’t extractive or symbolic—it was genuinely relational, grounded in the shared experience of displacement, surveillance, resistance.
As part of the residency, we played the tabletop game A Quiet Year—a slow, careful world-building exercise where you collectively imagine a community rebuilding after collapse. It became a tool for thinking through political futures with people who understand what it means to be pushed out of history and geography.
Lux Eterna and I later wrote about this approach in our essay for the Sydney Review of Books, “The Architecture of Play.” We wrote about games as tools for thinking, for imagining, for resisting the narrow frames of colonial governance.
That residency showed me something important:
You can’t build a liberated world alone.
You build it in conversation. In community.
And—sometimes—in play.
Those ideas flowed directly into the Declaration project. The constitution became not just a document but a container for speculation, collaboration, and collective imagining.
At the same time, I was listening to Roman Mars and Elizabeth Joh break down the U.S. Constitution in 99% Invisible’s series on foundational documents. It’s one of the best dissections of political design I’ve ever heard—how power is coded into paper, how language becomes machinery, how democracy is essentially architecture with a PR problem.
It made me think about how First Nations political history is overflowing with activism but under-resourced in infrastructure.
We have Elders, thinkers, radicals, artists, theorists, guerrilla scholars, diplomats, organisers.
But we don’t have the documents.
Not in a cohesive, adoptable, enforceable way. Not in the way that we can refer to them, point to a paragraph, a line, a word that says this is our Nation and our Laws.
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy understood this fundamentally. Gary Foley understood this. Aboriginal political artists like Richard Bell, Fiona Foley, and others built careers around insisting that sovereignty is not metaphor. It’s material. It’s legal. It’s lived.
And I kept thinking:
If Australia can be conjured into existence by documents, why can’t Gamilaroi?
What if the first step toward an independent Gamilaroi nation is not an army or a diplomatic corps but a piece of paper?
A declaration that says:We are here.We were always here.And if we choose to move differently, we now have the tools to do so.
Years earlier, I’d created the Gamilaroi Tax Office website (I let the domain ownership slide so it is now a wordpess.com link), sending mock invoices to mining companies operating on our land. It started half as a joke, an act of political performance for the internet—but it revealed something real:
People take paperwork seriously.
Bureaucracy can be subversive.
You can weaponise admin.
That project taught me the power of a good façade. The Declaration extends that logic: creating the infrastructure of a nation backing up an oral history thousands of generations strong. A Nation that exists in history and in people yet not on paper.
When the idea finally settled, it did so with clarity:
The artwork would be two documents.
A Gamilaroi Constitution – a document that will grow and change as the Gamilaroi people will it to.
And a Gamilaroi Declaration of Independence.
Written in English and Gamilaroi language.
Signed by Gamilaroi Elders and knowledge holders.
Backed by ceremony.
Held in public.
Made real through action.
When we sign the first edition at Western Sydney University—at Gough Whitlam’s actual desk—there will be a moment where art and politics stop pretending to be separate things.
It won’t be a performance anymore.
It’s a proposal.
An offering.
A tool.
The work is ongoing. I plan to take this work around Gamilaroi country – offering it to our people to take to the next level. More signings. More dialogue.More country. More imagining. More action.
We are living through a moment where First Nations politics is both exhausted and on the verge of transformation. The last few years have shown a rise in local, regional, and pan-Aboriginal movements—not all of them successful, not all of them movement I fundamentally agree with, but visionary and important nonetheless.
We talk a lot about “sovereignty never ceded,” but sovereignty is not just something you feel. It’s something you enact. It requires frameworks. It needs rigour. And it must move beyond symbolism.
A declaration is not a solution.
It is an invitation to refuse the comfort of colonial imagination.
It is a reminder that nations are built—not discovered.
So here is the truth of it:
I intended this project to be a work of art.
A response to generations of activism—from the Tent Embassy to Wave Hill to grassroots community fights across the continent.
A conversation with contemporary First Nations political thought.
A way of imagining sovereignty not as nostalgia, but as possibility.
I am not a political organiser.
I’m not a leader.
I’m not a spokesperson.
I’m an artist.
A writer.
A person obsessed with the possibilities of story and paper and ceremony.
This is what I can offer.
If Gamilaroi people see this project as art, then art is what it will be.
If Gamilaroi people see it as something more—
as a beginning, as a blueprint, as a nation in embryo—
then that decision belongs to them alone.
I have made the tool.What happens next is up to us.
_____
Exhibition details:
Where to from here? Visions for Australia
October 8 2025 – February 5 2026
Margaret Whitlam Galleries, Whitlam Institute, Parramatta
Gamilaroi peoples are invited to attend an official signing from 10am–5.30pm on Thursday December 4. Travis De Vries will be attending from 1pm.
The signing will be followed by: Western Sydney Creative's Where to from Here? Visions for Australia Supper Club at 5pm.
_____
Artist note:
The typesetting and design of the final documents was contracted to a friend Teresa Tan who has been a long time creative collaborator.
Photography of Travis De Vries at Gough Whitlam’s desk putting the first signature on the Declaration of Independence by Sally Tsoutas.
Thanks go out to Jade Goodwin and Margaret Hancock for their conversations about the project.
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