Noosa Woods, Noosa Heads

Sat 24 June to Sun 30 July

With a practice that integrates sculpture, moving image,performance and painting, Sydney based artist Todd Fuller is, at his core, adraughtsman. Underpinning all aspects of his practice is a love of drawing anda belief in its power as a democratic medium to connect, engage and delightaudiences.

Mounted to the exterior wall of the public amenities in Noosa Woods, Fuller gives us two contemporary works that give animated form to early documented accounts of same-sex relationships in Australia’s history.

1727; Pieter for Adriaan explores what appears to be the first evidence of a European same-sex relationship in Australia as well as what could be considered the first European trial and recorded gay-hate-crime. The incident at the heart of Fuller’s exhibition involved two young Dutch sailors off the coast of Western Australia nearly 50 years before Captain Cook ‘found’ Australia. In 1727 an East Indies Trade vessel veered off course so see the land that we now know as Western Australia and was shipwrecked on a reef. According to diary notes and the ships log, these sailors performed the act of sodomy and were then marooned on separate islands as punishment for their crime. From the reference material available, Fuller speculates the nature of this relationship in this animation.

Adjacent to this, with whom I was united by every tie (Captain Moonlite) tells the story of Captain Moonlite, a fierce bushranger who was arrested while cradling his dying younger male lover. In the context of Australia’s 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite, it is easy to think of the Australian Gay community as being a contemporary phenomenon. But on the peripheral of many of Australia’s historically great myths and legends, lie untold stories of Australian Queer Histories. Captain Moonlite is one such story. In January of 1995, 115 years after death, Captain Moonlite’s body was exhumed from Rookwood Cemetery to be buried in Gundagai near the remains of his lover Nesbit.