One of Australia’s most articulate photographers has just released a 348-page book that traces the progress of Aboriginal activism in Australia mostly through photographs, reports arts editor HELEN MUSA.

Junos Gemes is already a celebrated snapper, the subject in 2003 of a National Portrait Gallery exhibition of her portraits related to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander reconciliation activists and personalities. She was also one of 10 photographers invited to document the National Apology in Canberra in 2008.

Her book, Until Justice Comes: 50 years of the Movement for Indigenous Rights, will be unveiled at Kambri, ANU, in February with a conversation between Gemes and former minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, moderated by ANU historian Prof Ann McGrath .

Burney has written a foreword to the book, which she describes as “an incredible act, an important act, a seminal act of truth telling” and is herself the subject of many photographic studies by Gemes in the latter part of the publication. 

Gemes has been documenting the progress of black activism in Australia since at least the 1970s and the book features images taken between 1970 to 2024.

When I catch up with Gemes, whom I had first met at the 40th anniversary of the National Institute of Dramatic Art some years ago, she reminds me that after taking a production course there and staging The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, she had joined the Black Theatre in Redfern as its embedded photographer, a natural way of easing into presenting a positive image of Aboriginal people. 

“My time at NIDA was helpful to me as a photographer, but when I got to the Black Theatre, I realised the plays they were putting on were the most important plays being written in Australia – a real wake up.”

Born in Budapest, she had arrived as a five-year-old not speaking a word of English. With a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, she says: “I knew what genocide was, we fled Hungary to save our lives.”

She always felt like an outsider, but tells me that there was a positive side – “being an outsider gave me a terrific outside perspective and advantage – I was not carrying the burden of Australian history with me.” 

As an outsider on the inside, Gemes would go on to work and live with locals on Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria for three years, returning with her two-year-old son during school holidays. 

“I learnt how to think and see in slow time and to feel how the community moved,” she says. “It is totally different from photojournalism. I was embedded with people and shared my life with them in slow time.”

Inevitably, with her steadfast focus on Aboriginal communities, she was on hand for leading political events and she recollects as both exciting and dangerous the time of the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane during the Bjelke-Petersen era, while she was working for the first Aboriginal newspaper AIM (Aboriginal-Islander-Message) and people were being arrested every day. 

“Now,” she says, “I want to share my experiences with Australian people in a new context, so that those people who voted No in the Voice referendum can have a look at this and learn something.”

The book is massively ambitious. It features more than 220 photos, many of which will be screened at the ANU event, and has a useful timeline of Aboriginal activism by Prof Ann Curthoys. 

There are sections on ceremony, culture and survival, on the civil rights movements in Australia and the US, on the Redfern Revolution, music and musicians, on the Uluru Handback ceremony in 1985, the walk across the Harbour Bridge in 2000, the Apology in 2008, election of eleven indigenous members to the 47th Federal Parliament, and the preparations for the 2023 Referendum on the Voice to Parliament.

While there are short essays and interviews by experts such as Larissa Behrendt, Djon Mundine, Fred Myers, Frances Peters-Little, John Maynard and Catherine de Lorenzo, an unexpected but welcome aspect of the book is the inclusion of poetry by Robert Adamson, Oodgeroo Noonuccal and Ali Cobby Eckermann.

She praises the wisdom of Noonoocal, who once said: “We don’t celebrate, we educate,” and when Gemes thinks about it, “until justice comes, that dictate continues.”

Meet the author – Juno Gemes, Kambri cinema, ANU, February 10.