Sarah Rhodes’ ‘Home/On Country’ consists of 17 black and white images of elders from different language groups in Victoria, both on traditional lands and in their modern homes. 

One of the subjects is Boonwurrung elder Carolyn Briggs, who owned Tjanabi restaurant in Melbourne’s Federation Square. In 2010 Prime Minister Julia Gillard entertained Hillary Clinton at Tjanabi. A few months later, Ms Briggs had to close her doors. 

“One photo shows her in a women's refuge,” Ms Rhodes said. “The other is on her country, on the same day, and you can see just how strong she is.” 

The Sydney-based photographer spent years researching and working on the exhibition. But the inspiration came to her in a moment. 

Ms Rhodes took a job in the Powerhouse Museum in 2008 after a decade in the newspaper industry, working in London, Tasmania and the ‘Harbour City’. One day she happened upon a photo of a possum-skin cloak in the museum’s online collection.  

“That night I had a dream, that I was at the Opera House and I was photographing someone coming out wearing a cloak, someone who was part of the opera,” she said. “It was all very theatrical – and perhaps a bit random.”

But it was enough to set Ms Rhodes on the path which, seven years later, brought herself and 17 of her photographs to Moree. 

Local Kamilaroi researcher, Noeline Briggs-Smith OAM, said the possum skins would have been used around Moree and North West NSW mainly for skin drums and wrapping the dead. 

“It wasn’t as cold here so we mainly used kangaroo skin for keeping warm because it was larger – less sowing,” Ms Briggs-Smith laughed.

The possum was a totem of some people and clans in the Kamilaroi area and those who were associated with the animal were not allowed to kill it. Those who were not possum totem could use it for making skin drums and cloaks for burial, where the deceased person was wrapped and placed in bark coffins and sometimes placed in hollow tree trunks, Ms Briggs-Smith said. 

Both the totem system and the art of making possum-skin cloaks were shattered when Aboriginal people were removed from their traditional lands and placed upon missions and reserves.

Only a handful of possum-skin cloaks from the 18th Century remain, and are held in museums around the world. 

The cloaks used in ‘Home/On Country’ were part of a project to revive the art. They came from a project in which the different language groups of Victoria each created a cloak to display at the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games.  

Each cloak is created from between 36 and 40 possum pelts, brought from New Zealand where the marsupial is a pest. 

Motifs displaying family trees, good fishing and hunting locations, maps and men’s and women’s business are seared into the cloaks.

“Each language group is a country which has its own customs and beliefs. Originally the cloaks were made to carry a people’s stories on them, so when a visitor came from another country they could share their culture with them,” Ms Rhodes said.

“So the cloak is almost like a pictographic dictionary of the place and which it comes from.”

‘Home/On County’ is an Albury City Touring Exhibition and is hanging in Moree until April 15.