One with nature but not society

The title of Jagath Dheerasekera’s latest exhibition in Sydney is the response he received to his question: “Why sleep outside at night?” “Stars, sky, trees, breeze,” his subjects answered.

Having moved to Australia a few years ago, Jagath already knew who he would like to photograph. “Even long before I came to Australia, I was reading about the aboriginal people and knew about their plight. I first came across John Pilger’s writings in the Guardian in the ’90s when I was living in Europe. I was immediately hooked,” says this photographer, adding that while in Sri Lanka he did a series on the Veddhas.
In January of 2010, Jagath had a chance to meet an aboriginal elder named Richard Downs. “He told me about many things. The Northern Territory National Emergency Response (commonly known as NT Intervention) and his people’s walk-off against it.” Richard belonged to a community settled in Ampilatwatja, located 320km north-east of Alice Springs in central Australia.

A ‘Prescribed Community’ under the NT Intervention, the Alyawarr people now number less than 1,000. “Their struggle to survive for the last 200 years has been made further difficult by the NT Intervention introduced in 2007, which many in Ampilatwatja consider as ‘an invasion, total disempowerment and revoking hard won land rights’,” says Jagath. In July 2009, the Alyawarr people of Ampilatwatja walked off from the Prescribed Area controlled by the government and began to build a new community on their homeland.

The longer he stayed, the more obvious the issues became – “abject poverty, racial discrimination, disempowerment, dispossession, the legacy of 200 years of subjugation prevail in every corner,” says Jagath. He hopes his exhibition will draw much needed attention to the plight of the Alyawarr.
Jagath wanted to capture this moment. He decided to make the trip to Ampilatwatja and joined a group of volunteers who were helping the community build their first house or coordinating centre. “Everybody called it the Protest House. There were many volunteers from different states to help build it,” he explains. Jagath had initially hoped that he would have a chance to photograph fridges owned by the Alyawarr, but could find only one in the whole community.