Overview

Mathieu Gallois’ project centres on the history and community of Wellington, a small town located in central New South Wales, traditional home to the Wiradjuri people. Gallois’ grandfather Ernest Moulton (1905–1966), a British migrant who settled in Wellington in 1944, purchased the local paper, the Wellington Times, and as editor became a prominent conservative voice in the community for the next twenty-one years. Taking form as an historical analysis To Move Forward To Destiny of Full Epuality: The Wellington Times 1944–1965 (2012) features a series of twenty-one front pages of the paper selected for their rare reference to the Aboriginal communities of the region.

Wellington (2012) is a seventy–page newspaper–styled publication featuring contributions by and perspectives on the local Aboriginal community as a gesture toward writing their narratives back into the recorded history of the area. Wellington draws upon the stories and views of the Aboriginal community as well as contributions from the artist and a number of prominent social historians to chart the history of the Wiradjuri people’s post-European colonisation and to contextualise their current situations. The publication represents two years of research and community engagement that has manifested in the publication being widely distributed as an insertion within the Wellington Times in late 2012. The Wellington projects represent an intimate history of Wellington’s race relations, the processes of colonisation and the community’s tentative steps towards reconciliation, highlighting some of the complexities of cross–cultural engagement as well as issues of censorship and selective historicising.