Madjem Bambandila: The Art & Country of Kelly Koumalatsos is a triumph. The beautiful new monograph gathers perspectives from over 20 artists, writers and cultural figures. It’s a survey of Kelly Koumalatsos’s wide-ranging career, but also a history of Melbourne, a testament to living culture, and a moving exploration of how art, activism and community all intertwine.

Koumalatsos is a Wergaia and Wemba Wemba artist and cultural activist who is known for her work reviving possum skin cloak making in the South East. Her interest started when she began a traineeship at the Melbourne Museum in 1979 and discovered only two madjem (possum skin) cloaks in the museum’s collection. “Many people were buried with their cloaks, so that was one reason for the relatively small number of historic cloaks,” she writes. “However, that didn’t explain why cloaks weren’t visible at all in the art and culture world.”

Koumalatsos became part of a groundswell. There was a sense, she says, of the need to make cultural cultural objects in order to reclaim them. “Making a possum skin cloak was a way of living my sovereignty,” she writes. Madjem Bambandila records some of the cultural and technical challenges involved, from sourcing and treating hides, to handling animal materials sensitively, and decorating and sewing them. It took time though. Koumalatsos finished her first cloak in the mid 1990s. Also working in this space were others; Wally Cooper, Dr Vicki Couzens, Treahna Hamm and Lee Darroch, whose collective work is now well recognised in the art world, and has inspired many artists. (Hamm and Darroch were also celebrated in the National Gallery of Australia’s recent exhibition A Century of Quilts.) In a sign of its deeper impact, Koumalatsos also says one of her earliest cloaks is now falling apart, after being shared with so many schoolchildren over the years.

Koumalatsos began printing on possum skins, and moved to making direct prints of the fur itself. These delicate works are like tonal pencil drawings. In a recent 2020 body of work, she printed the fur onto tissue paper and made clothes like those worn by the women in her family lineage. This series included an austere, high-collared gown, a pair of milking overalls, and a crisp 1960s mini dress. These paper garments appear incredibly fragile, but also speak of history and strength.

Over the years she has also made made sculpture, jewellery and public art, and worked in community-facing roles at the Melbourne Museum, Koorie Information Centre and Gurwidj House. In 2009 she made a sharply funny series of screenprints about life as an arts worker and the office politics of reconciliation, which she called The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions. One set a young woman with the thought bubble: ‘I wonder if I can be an Aborigine in the office today?’ Throughout Koumalatsos’s career, there has always been a close relationship between art, life and research.

Koumalatsos talks openly about family and country, her influences, and life in Fitzroy from the 1970s onwards, but it’s her insistence on bringing so many voices and perspectives into Madjem Bambandila that really makes the book. Her co-writer, the curator, artist and academic Dr Paola Balla, provides a critical framework. Balla’s essays discuss healing art and reparative aesthetics, and introduce the idea of ‘survivance,’ a term for collective efforts to disrupt dominant colonial narratives. This collective energy infuses the rest of the book through a vibrant mix of essays, poems, artworks and reflections from a breadth of contributors. Highlights include an interview with the trailblazing Lynette Briggs and Lyn Thorpe about their art and health projects, an essay on language by Wayne Thorpe, and affecting poems by Susie Anderson, π.O. and Lisa Bellear.

The decision to weave community throughout the publication is a powerful statement. The Western art tradition is still obsessed with singular artistic genius but decolonial approaches like this one shift attention to the wider political and cultural contexts. That takes work and care. Conversations and research have to be given time to unfold, and the different perspectives edited into something that flows. Madjem Bambandila is stunning proof of what can be achieved, and shows Koumalatsos doing what she does best. As Balla puts it: “The limiting binaries imposed by the Western art world cannot contain Kelly or her work—she dances out of their reach, defining her own story and curating her own works while opening up space for other artists to do the same.”

Selected by the Art Guide Bookstore, your guide to Australian art publications.

Madjem Bambandila: The Art and Country of Kelly Koumalatsos by Kelly Koumalatsos and Dr Paola Balla is published by Museums Victoria.