Cars

I’m not really into cars; ask my children who would love me to replace our 20-year-old clapped-out Corolla. But it was because of a conversation about cars when I was a child that I realized there was something different about the class status of my mother's family. The members of my dad's sprawling family are mostly doctors. There are a few teachers and pharmacists too. No one in my known bloodline was doing it tough when I was growing up. But I remember a conversation with my dad about a car that my maternal grandparents had bought for my parents. Dad said to me in an uncharacteristic clandestine whisper that ‘the Doc and Mrs Fagan only ever buy the best’. It wasn't something we usually talked about. I hadn't noticed before that they had a luxury car themselves and when the number of my siblings bulged to four and we outgrew our grandparents’ gift, it would be the last high-end car our family ever owned.

After I gave a talk to some historians in the very early stages of this project, one of my senior colleagues who gained his degree in Canberra was keen to tell those assembled a story of stopping in Yass in the early 1960s. He was on his way home to Melbourne at the end of the university year. I can't remember the exact details, but at the centre of the story was a local pastoralist, and a luxury car that was damaged in some way only to be abandoned and replaced by another luxury car. The point of the story was that the university student had been struck by the casual wealth, the lack of concern to preserve the first car when there was another waiting to replace it. I have no way of knowing who those pastoralists were, but I could guess.

Reko Rennie, a Kamileroi artist based in Melbourne, has a different car story. His grandmother was removed from her family at the age of 8 and enslaved in domestic labour. OA_ RR is a video installation that Rennie made in the Riverina in New South Wales, on Kamileroi country, north of Ngunnawal land and the Yass Valley.