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AIn the 2000s, Billy Bain surfed around Sydney’s northern beaches, having traveled the world watching his racing father. Rob Bain to compete. But even though he was close to his home in Avalon, he often felt like an unwelcome guest.
“I’m told that I don’t belong there, so I have to go in (to the mainland),” he says, seeing these warnings as veiled threats of violence. Otherwise, you know, ‘something will happen to you’.
Now 33, the Dharug artist sees being an Aboriginal surfer as a means of reclaiming land. “(The northern beaches are) a remote and mostly clean place,” he says.
“You know, the beach was and still is an Aboriginal place, but in popular culture it’s represented as a very sacred space.” There’s obviously a bronze Aussie, who’s your shiny shiny, dashing man, but he’s not seen as an Aboriginal place anymore.”
In his studio in Granville in Sydney’s west, Bain is planning solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, On the River. The survey will include new work, including five paintings of the Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury river landscape – a place that connects the Manly-born artist to the land of his ancestors.
Bain, who has come to see flooding on the northern coast as a way of reclaiming culture, because the Dyarubbin enters the coastal waters of Pittwater. “I see the story of the eel and how it spawns in the ocean and then finds its way back to these rivers to be an interesting metaphor for coming back. I see myself as having a similar journey.”
For By the River, Bain has created 11 funny, symbolic family members (and one dog) in bikinis, shorts and budgie smugglers painted in Aboriginal colours: red and black with yellow ties. These clay sculptures represent the reclaiming of the beach as an independent place, open to everyone.
These figures will be displayed while holding a four-meter tall pole – the totem animal and brave spirit known in the Dharug language. men – which Bain created as a soft sculpture using fabric on wire and metal, decorated with 200 items handmade by his mother, Kathleen Bain.
Kathleen, a Dharug woman who grew up in Balgowlah, north of Sydney, met Bain’s father when they were teenagers. She encourages her children to be creative with all kinds of materials, and Bain would love to make faces and pictures out of the wax removed from her bathtubs.
Bain’s surfer father has also been part of his art. The two took a small “tinny” boat over Dyarubbin, bush rocking the mountains and found ancient Aboriginal documents in the caves, to help make the drawings for his five paintings.
Bain said: “(We saw) this mural that someone had painted that said ‘Don’t burn Aboriginal art.’ “It was a vile warning, more oppressive than the (graffiti) tags that people did.”
Landscape painting is a new development in Bain’s work, although he has also painted portraits, including his oils. work of Western Aranda deaf artist Rona Panangka Rubuntja and her dog, Nghuba, present her final entry in the Archibald prize, in 2025.
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Ultimately, Bain’s artwork has become “a healing thing”, he says. “It’s been a huge part of learning to speak.”
Like the other men in his family, Bain is blind. They have to “work hard not to get confused” by the colors, he says. “Being blind has probably hindered me, in some ways, in terms of confidence in painting, because I feel like I might be getting something wrong.”
In 2023, Bain chose pink tones for self-portrait in which he looks frustrated and angry, he filmed the night of the result of the failed parliamentary vote. This photo is now owned by a private collector. “I think it’s funny, someone looking at my angry face on their wall,” he says, laughing.
Artists aren’t there to change the minds of skeptics, but “fun, engaging” humor in art can provide great ideas, Bain says.
“I don’t know exactly what reconciliation looks like,” he adds. “But I’m optimistic and I look at the human spirit and the ability of people to be kind and embrace other people. I think that’s important in us as humans.”
