Love Is… Australian Wedding Fashion 

The Love Is… Australian Wedding Fashion exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum was very interesting. I enjoyed it immensely, and would recommend it. Today’s post reflects on its representation of race and nationhood.

The exhibition starts with a room about “early history” – which begins with “convicts.” This erases Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their marriage practices, their eternal connection to Country, and their violent dispossession. Yet the room uses an unnamed Indigenous song that plays in the background. I could only find only one Aboriginal designer in the exhibition – Dharruk and Darkenjung woman Robyn Caughlan (in this video). While the designs feature couples, none were depicted as First Peoples. 

My video shows the only other people of colour represented in the exhibition (one Australian-Indian couple; one Korean-Australian design house; one Chinese-Australian), and other minorities (one Greek-Australian couple: one Jewish couple; and one gay couple). All are the end of the exhibit, from the 1990s to 2016. 

First Peoples have lived on this land for over 60,000 years, and settlers since invasion, in 1788. There are 250 First Peoples cultural groups, and 52% of non-Indigenous Australians are either migrants or the children of migrants, who come from over 200 countries. Museums, like other cultural institutions, continue to reproduce racial stratification by omitting Indigenous people, whose sovereignty has never been ceded, and who continue to shape our ongoing history, along with other people of colour.