Gallery on the go looks for a new home

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This was published 15 years ago

Gallery on the go looks for a new home

By Joel Gibson

Gordon Syron's most famous painting, 1978's Judgement By His Peers, depicts a personal fantasy of sorts: a black man being tried before a panel of black men.

"If you want to know where our blackfellas are at, put them up on a serious charge and see how many of their peers are really on the jury," he says.

A convicted murderer who learnt to paint in Long Bay jail 30 years ago, he paints and collects art to depict his experience of a racist and unjust Australia. Syron's collection - 1300 paintings and artefacts gathered from around the country - is among the most significant Aboriginal-curated holdings of black art in Australia, experts say, and perhaps the most important existing record of urban Aboriginal art.

In a leaky, disused, government-owned railway shed in the back streets of Redfern, Syron, 67, lives with his wife Elaine, surrounded by Gordon Hookeys, Clifford Possums and Emily Kngwarreyes.

But in February the Syrons and their works will have to find a new home as they are due to be evicted to make way for the State Government's plans for the area. It has all got to go, but where?

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The Redfern-Waterloo Authority had offered them the shed plus $200 a week to catalogue the collection before relations soured and it cut off the cash, calling them "indolent". (Syron says they gave him a computer but no training in how to use it, and that he had almost finished the job in any case.)

Art-rich but dirt-poor, he has already sold about 20 per cent of the collection to make ends meet but is loath to break it up further. "People are coming in and cherry-picking and I won't have it any more. It just hurts us too much," Syron said.

The City of Sydney council plans an Aboriginal Keeping Place and cultural walk as part of its Sydney 2030 vision for the city but the project remains in the early stages.

It is understood the city is not interested in the collection in its entirety - not yet, at least.

So a group of supporters has begun a campaign to create a new institution in the Redfern area dedicated to telling the story of urban Aboriginal art, with the Syron collection as its centrepiece.

First, they need a buyer for the collection and a space to hang it.

Professor Larissa Behrendt, who is on the committee with art curators Djon Mundine, Keith Munro and others, said there was room for more than one new institution - one in Redfern, perhaps, and another in the CBD.

"There's enough Aboriginal culture to go around," she said.

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