The price of admission

2026, Oil on Italian Linen, 101.6 x 101.6cm

E. Phillips Fox’s acclaimed depiction of Cook’s landing at Botany Bay - where an Aboriginal man is shot and killed in that first interaction - occupies an established place within the Australian art canon. Yet the national ideology it helped perpetuate has become increasingly difficult to view through the colonial language of discovery and settlement. What was once framed as nation-building is now also understood through invasion, dispossession and the devastating consequences of colonisation for Aboriginal people. This work considers how cultural value changes when inherited versions of history are reassessed.

The work traces that change in perspective through the familiar form of the souvenir plate, where people, events and places are packaged as “collectible” objects. A moment once celebrated as part of the national story is subjected to a literal reassessment of worth, reflecting the shift from unquestioning celebration - towards a more critical understandingof the past. The issue is not simply whether an old image has lost value, but how contemporary Australians renegotiate their relationship with it.

The title moves between economic and moral value. Admission may be the price of entry, the cost of ownership, or the far greater price imposed on those who never consented to their arrival. It also carries another meaning: the act of admitting what took place. Within the broader series, value is again reassigned, this time through historical reckoning. The declining price becomes a measure of a national story confronting both the consequences of its origins, and the inherited narratives that for so long allowed those consequences to be minimised.