A conversation centred on Ray Jackson’s poster collection, between Madika Penrith, Sam Miers, Alex Tanazefti and Seb Henry-Jones

Ray Jackson Doing Time with Penrith Miers Archive, 4 July – 2 August, 2026 |

Seb: So, yeah, I thought we could use some of Ray’s posters as prompts for this conversation. You can just say whatever comes to mind when they come up. I thought I’d include this one at the beginning, because apart from Alex’s it’s the newest in the archive.

Madika: Are we going to include Alex’s poster?

Seb: Yeah, we’ll end with it so that the convo is kind of like a full circle. But yes, this poster is a good place to start. It was produced in 2015 by Mickie Quick at Bad Press, on the occasion of Ray’s passing. It’s great to be working with Mickie to produce a new poster for this show using Alex’s design.

Sam: Mickie also organised the Redfern Tour of Beauty walks that Ray was a regular on. I like starting with this poster because it’s got all the information about Ray as well.

Seb: And then there’s these ones… not all of the posters in the archive are around deaths in custody, but they’re emblematic of one of the biggest causes that Ray was invested in. What do you know about that?

Madika: Well, when I was a kid growing up with Ray, I think that’s around the time that he was working with ISJA: Indigenous Social Justice Association. I lived with him between the ages of 4 and 8. So I wasn’t deeply across what was happening, but I used to get taken to a lot of the meetings. We didn’t have a babysitter or anything, and, you know, the reason that I grew up with Ray in the first place is because my parents were incarcerated. So a lot of his work around deaths in custody, but also like, visiting inmates in prison and working with them, I think stemmed from his experience of having his own kids go through that system. So although I didn’t have a deep understanding of what Pop was doing at the time, our family was directly affected by police mistreatment and the prison system. And I spent a lot of my childhood visiting my parents in jail with Pop.

It probably wasn’t until I was much older that I got a better understanding of the kind of work that he was involved in. I think it was when I lived with him the second time? I ran away from home in Melbourne, and moved in with him when I was 17. He used to get me to do a lot of his mail outs. I did lots of typing for him. And I think it might be on that poster that Mickie made. At the bottom it says FKJ: ‘For Koori Justice’. That was how he’d sign off all his emails.

I was 21 when he died, and only just discovering social issues, like, really understanding where they stem from, and also kind of figuring out my own identity politics and things like that. Partially through my family, but also through becoming an adult and going to art school and getting politicised there. There’s a photo of Alex and I in the Financial Times from around that time at a rally. We’re protesting student cuts. When he saw it Pop was incredibly proud because it was like, ‘oh my God, you’re protesting on your own’. He cut it out and had it around the house, which was very sweet. Now that I’m in my 30s and getting this archive again, I’m grasping how deeply involved he was with all that stuff.

Sam: It’s been exciting for both of us to build knowledge of who Ray was and how he connected with different issues, and how he was able to actually change some of the protocols around incarceration. I think one of the things that he did was make it possible for the family to be there at certain points when there was a death in custody. I thought that was really powerful, how – without a law degree – he knew the law so well that he was actually able to go and re-write some of the laws for mob.

Seb: He seemed particularly good at knowing the law, and understanding its incompatibilities with Aboriginal cultural practices. Sam, you sent me a soundbite of him talking about drug use amongst youth in Aboriginal urban communities. He’s saying that the government departments – the Department of Community Services and Juvenile Justice – focus on fixing the individual, whereas an Aboriginal strategy might be more holistic; working with girlfriends, boyfriends, friends and parents; grandparents and so on – an entire network of relations required to fix what is perceived by the state as an individual’s problem.

Sam: Yeah he’s saying that the government departments deal with the individual and wonder why nothing changes. That you’ve got to work with the family to make things change. From what I can tell he was staunch when it came to embedding Aboriginal cultural practices within harmful, non-Aboriginal structures, and successful at doing it too.

Madika: You know, we’ve got all these posters and stuff, but then, yeah, Pop kept copies of all his email correspondences, all the deaths in custody case files. Also, the thing that I remember him the most for is videotaping, like, everything. Like, the TV. He just had everything. I think that’s why he knew the law so well, because he was such a prolific reader. His book collection was crazy. It was huge, and I remember he told me that he read the Bible, like, 10 times or something, even though he was a mad atheist.

Seb: I might move on to these posters that demonstrate his interest in global politics, as well as his belief in an international solidarity amongst the world’s oppressed. The blue poster was made by the Community Art Workers group around 1976, the black one is a portrait of Salvador Allende, the Socialist president of Chile from 1970-73. The poster was made by Sydney artist Jorge Villazon in 1975. Does anything come up? I’m thinking specifically of Ray’s passport project.

Madika: I do think he saw his struggle as an Aboriginal man as part of a global struggle. Yeah, he definitely did. He was a mad communist. Had a cat named Comrade; his favorite color was red; he always wore red. He was deeply interested in world issues.

Seb: What was the passport project?

Madika: The Aboriginal passport program was something he created, I think he worked with other Indigenous leaders like Uncle Robbie Thorpe. Like a traditional passport, he made them for the different tribal groups and nations and various countries that one should get permission to visit.

Seb: I also remember from that radio show (Doin Time on 3CR) that he would give a lot of these passports to refugees seeking asylum in Australia. He’d also send them to people in Palestine.

Madika: The Palestinian issue was something that he was deeply passionate about.

Sam: The passports are quite exciting for me, because it’s saying like, Indigenous law is still here, it’s still relevant today. And, like, there is no treaty anyway. So under international law Indigenous people still have the right to say who can and can’t come onto Country.

Seb: Yeah, conventional processes of international relations and diplomacy between nation states are turned upside down by those passports.

Okay, the next poster is this Doing Time one. It was made for a film night about incarceration, put on by the Sydney Filmmaking Co-op, I don’t know when. I chose it here because of the title, ‘Doing Time’, which is also the name of the radio show that you guys have spoken on, and it’s also in the title of this poster show.

Madika: Before they reached out to me, I didn’t realise that Doin Time were doing a tribute show every year since Pop died. My aunt had been going on but never mentioned it to me. The whole premise of the show is about spreading information about incarceration, and also humanising prisoners. One thing that we found in the archive with the posters was a publication they made, a book called Goodnight Sweetheart. It’s for children of prisoners that explains what’s going on, you know, like, ‘your parents still love you’, this and that. I have heaps of letters from my parents when they were in jail, and obviously Pop never hid that fact. We’d go and visit them a lot.

So that’s one aspect of the title ‘Doing Time’. But the posters themselves take you through time and all these different issues and different periods in his life. They show what he was passionate about, all the way from the 70s up until like the 2010s. It’s like moving through time with him, through his archive.

Sam: Before we ended up with that title we spoke a lot about traveling through time with these posters, and how by showing them we can collapse time by bringing together different generations of the movement all together. It’s about creating a portal in that place. I’m really excited to see how that plays out on the opening night as well.

Seb: You’ve spoken before about when something has an ‘eternal’ quality. Does that apply here?

Sam: Yeah, it’s that idea of collapsing time. Ceremony is always about creating a moment where you can connect with ancestors and to the future, with all age groups colliding around the Same issues. I think because of the work that you’ve (Seb) done specifically in inviting everyone connected to the posters to the show, there’s gonna be a special feeling in the room because of the collision of all of those people from different generations.

Madika: Another thing about that is, you know, a lot of the movements that are represented in the posters are still happening. Maybe the organisations that are running them have changed, or the way that they’re being approached has changed. It’s crazy and sometimes kind of heartbreaking to see how relevant these things still are. We were saying yesterday during install that if you have a gripe, like, it’s going to be represented somewhere in the show.

But yeah, I hope the show also encourages people to approach protesting and things like that in a different way, by looking back through time at how people did it before.

Seb: What you’re saying about how effective contemporary activism is today in our inner city circles is something I want to return to in a few poster’s time. But yeah, that was a good segue because the next posters are going to answer another question.

These ones here are all dated to 1988, the bicentenary. The image for the one with the blue background was created in 1977 by Australian artist Chips Mackinolty as a land rights poster. He later gave permission to artist Peter Chester to use the image to promote a January 1988 rally, as detailed in this poster. Mackinolty initially took inspiration from Joe Rosenthal’s iconic 1945 photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, which depicts six United States Marines raising a US flag atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in WWII. The poster with the single figure was designed by Colin Russell.

Collectively in the room, I was hoping to talk about what we know about Aboriginal urban politics in Sydney around that time, because it seems to me like there was a lot of momentum built up from, like, the 70s in places like Redfern that has dissipated today. Maybe diluted is a better word. It doesn’t feel as potent as it was back then.

Madika: For me, personally, I do find it disheartening, and although I am really passionate about the Palestine issue – and my family has been for a very long time while fighting their own battles – it is kind of crazy to me to see the energy people put into that cause. If people put just a little bit of that effort, like, on a weekly basis into First Nations issues in their own country instead of just protesting once a year on Australia Day. Yeah, that would be sick.

Sam: It’s set up within our education systems to make us care more about things overseas than in the country/Country that we live in/on, so that we’re disassociated. So that we can’t make good decisions or challenge anyone’s power.

Madika: It seems like it’s about visibility in a lot of ways, like, a lack of… Every now and then there’s a news report or commission about a death in custody or how Aboriginal people are treated but it doesn’t feel that visible. Conversely, I think a lot of people go to a protest that they can be visible at, and the Palestine issue is the hot thing. It deserves a lot of visibility, and people should be really fucking upset about it, I am too. When we were living in Melbourne (Seb) you made the comment that you see so many people sharing stuff on Instagram but when you’ve been going to the protest every week those people aren’t there.

Seb: I’m thinking particularly of the art scene.

Alex: And even then. Okay you’re visibly out on the street. You’re showing your frustration to the authorities, but, like, you get ignored.

Seb: Yeah like that Palestine march across the Sydney Harbor Bridge… It feels like there’s so many marches these days with record numbers, but it’s so easy for the government to ignore.

Alex: Even for the media to report accurately on it. You know those ongoing weekly protests for Palestine were hardly even mentioned in the media. But they were happening every week for ages.

Sam: It’s also about identity. I reckon settlers in Australia are more comfortable making Palestine their identity than the Aboriginal struggle. They’re scared of what’s close to them and the implications. Even terrified of –

Madika: – having to give the land back.

Sam: Yeah, and that they can’t identify too closely with where they live if they aren’t Aboriginal or something. When it’s so far away in Palestine, they can put their whole heart into it, and go, ‘yes’. It’s easier than getting too involved in Aboriginal issues, because then they’d have to actually confront the land that they are on.

Madika: I do appreciate when at the rallies, there’s a speaker who says we also have to recognise the Aboriginal struggle. Mob have always really turned out for the Palestinians because we see ourselves in them, and that’s what makes me upset: I know that most of the people at a Palestine rally don’t feel the Same way about us. Because it is happening to us. We’re not being bombed every day, what’s happening here is very different. But that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening here, it’s just a lot more systematic and normalised.

Seb: I read an essay recently saying that like, that awareness of how you’re being perceived from within a discourse online is called ‘hyperpositioning’. Seeing yourself in the third person.

Alex: Yeah. And it’s not an entirely cynical thing, thinking about how you’re perceived by your engagement with a cause.

Madika: Yeah sometimes it’s just what your friends are doing so you become involved in it too.

But I think on the subject of 88’... in the 70s there was huge traction for First Nations self-determination, like, the opening of the AMS (Aboriginal Medical Service) and ALS (Aboriginal Legal Service).

Sam: The big thing at that time for Madika’s family – and I was upset that it wasn’t in that Australia Daze documentary, which had all those different perspectives in Sydney around the Bicentenary – was that at that same moment, Madika’s uncle, great-uncle was in England, reclaiming –

Alex: – That was 88?

Sam: Yeah

Madika: He claimed England as Aboriginal land. And in our own family history we look to that a lot. I’m really proud of what he – Burnum Burnum – did for us.

Seb: We’ve got some good momentum on this topic. To go one step further – we were talking about how in progressive left circles in the city there’s a kind of diluted political expression today. Looking at Ray’s posters here, you know, there’s one about Marx, there’s one about a Marxist summer school… this poster was produced by the Communist Party of Australia, this one was an event organised by Socialist Alternative that Ray spoke at. For me, you can see someone with similar politics to us who was seeking out an engagement with those left-wing institutions that could help him amplify the impact of his politics, oriented around decolonisation and First Nations justice. Today, union registration is at an all-time low. I can’t remember the last time that the words ‘Socialism’ or ‘Marxism’ were mentioned in an art scene that’s obsessed with saving the world and imagining different futures. One hundred years ago, the global reach of socialism made it seem like we were literally going to be living in a socialist, alternative world to the one shaped by Capitalism. I was wondering if we have any thoughts about that.

Madika: I reckon a lot of people today consider themselves socialist. I do wonder, though, if people truly understand what it means. I think people are kind of moving away from Marxism and stuff. They’re finding other versions of it or something. I don’t know.

Alex: Maybe it’s more of an intuitive thing today.

Sam: Marx has a great critique of capitalism that I think most people can agree with. There are a lot of great tools within that philosophy to organise groups of people. Indigenous movements around the world – even when they’re fighting for their own Country – use some of the tools from Marxism to critique the system and then to organise together.

But I’m not a Marxist because Marx isn’t really interested in Place or belonging. A lot of good happens through connecting to Country. I believe in animism, and I feel like that worldview can be activated in the city as well. Communism also leads to a type of industrialisation. So even though Ray would very much call himself a Marxist, I don’t personally call myself a Marxist.

Madika: I’m not sure if he would call himself a Marxist today…I think that’s also his generation. He grew up in a day where it felt like you were either a Marxist or a capitalist. It’s a much broader spectrum now. And back in those days people had to talk to each other from a position about these things, rather than doing all the reading on the internet at home.

Sam: I think most activists today – in general – wouldn’t have an idea of what to do if they actually did get the power that they want. Which is a problem.

Seb: I like what you (Sam) were saying about Place, because Marxism does seem like it’s a universal strategy.

Sam: It’s not related to the particular ecology of a place.

Madika: I think people are also getting really hung up on, you know, if somebody points out that Marx was flawed or whatever — that he was kind of well-off and educated and stuff — they get hung up on who’s good, who’s bad, cancel culture, things like that.

Alex: Yes, the bigger issue is the actual analysis. There’s a lot to take from him, even if you don’t agree with dialectical materialism in every sense. The analysis of how capitalism works — and how it developed — is still incredibly useful.

Seb: I mean, he wrote it in, what, the 1860s or something, right? And it’s still pretty relevant.

Sam: Yeah. But my belief is that Indigenous laws here have been refined over thousands of years. They’re made specifically for each Country in Australia, for these ecologies, and they’re still relevant today. They still have force, and they’re still playing out in their own ways now. It’s our responsibility to pay attention to them, even in the city, and to look for how those Indigenous laws are present — even in the Dreaming stories, or in the Songlines, or whatever.

Alex: Have you read Walter Benjamin? He writes about social histories and Place all being on top of each other as, like, a living sociology and a living history. Acknowledging that what has happened in a place effects site and geography, and how you live in it. That’s my understanding of it.

Sam: Sick. Yeah, In many parts of Australia — where First Nations people are still singing all the Songlines they’ve always sung — they’re actually masters of integration. Any new issue that happens – when Cook comes, or people start arriving, or petrol sniffing enters a community – they’ll just write a new song. An example is that someone was sniffing petrol in the rain, and a Songman wrote a song, linking it to an ancient song about rain, to integrate that issue into the ancient knowledge system. It positions that event in relation to the land where they are.

I mean this practice is present in Koori culture too. Madika’s other great uncle Jimmy Little, whose grandmother is a Penrith, recorded his father Kunkas’ song ‘Honest Colored Lad’ about him being refused the opportunity to work in Moruya because of his colour. In Jimmy Little’s version, one verse is updated to express his own battles to find work in Sydney in the 50s.

Seb: That’s cool. I would love to talk to Ray about how he reconciled his, like, hardcore socialism–

Alex: –Maybe more communism

Seb: Yeah… reconcile that hardcore communism with his learnt Aboriginal worldview, and the philosophies that come with that.

Sam: It’s interesting because in a lot of ways, when I look at them, they do seem at odds with each other. But all over the world, mob have turned to communism to organise themselves, including Marxist philosophies and stuff.

Alex: Because it has that element of self-determination built into it. Once you get to an anti-imperialist worldview, Marxism becomes inherent in it. I think that’s why it becomes useful for Black people in a lot of ways.

Sam: It’s also egalitarian.

Seb: There’s quite a few film posters. Did Ray watch a lot of films? Was he a film buff?

Madika: I don’t know if he was a film buff. A funny anecdote about growing up with him is that I wasn’t allowed to watch Disney at all. We watched a lot of South Park and like..Neon Genesis. I kind of grew up watching Soviet animation and Soviet films. Well, I did get to watch some movies, but they weren’t Disney. Maybe Pixar later on. I remember watching Soviet Alice in Wonderland, which is actually deeply dark in a lot of ways.

Seb: So was that like an anti-American imperialist thing?

Madika: Yeah. Disney was ‘American’. Even looking at Pocahontas now, the rewriting of that history is kind of abysmal. They turn it into a love story, which is psychotic. But in terms of him watching films himself, I don’t really recall. We watched Midsomer Murders together — that was a good show. I still love it to this day. If I’m sick I’ll watch it.

Sam: But we took it pretty seriously. The films that are listed on those posters. We actually made our own list.

Madika: We had a whiteboard, and as we went through the posters we wrote down every film that was mentioned. I think we’ve watched about ninety per cent of them. We used them in our curation for the Invasion Day Prop screening.

We watched Too Many Captain Cooks. We screened it too (at Prop Records, January 26, 2026) from one of Ray’s posters.

Sam: It’s an Arnhem Land Dreaming story about how Captain Cook came to Australia, and he had to basically fight the Devil to take over Australia. And he kills the Devil, and then he’s able to come and take over all of Australia (everyone laughs).

Madika: And they talk about how Captain Cook keeps coming back in different forms over different periods. Like he was here thousands of years before they came to Australia. It’s a metaphor.

So, yeah, I don’t know how many of the films Ray watched himself, but we used that list to guide our work.

Sam: I suppose that shows how much he has already shaped our work before this exhibition. We’ve been taking little pieces of what he was doing and integrating them into our own practice over the last year, or whatever, leading up to this show.

Seb: Okay, let’s talk about the final — or the latest — poster now.

Sam: And also your (Alex) relationship with Madika, and how it’s sort of come to this point now.

Alex: Yes I guess we kind of touched on that before with the protest stuff... Madika and I met not long before that and have been friends since. I like working with friends on things, so this has been really great. I love doing that. And I feel like it’s been the first proper project we’ve worked on together.

Where it sort of came from was… you know, it’s a poster for a show that’s full of posters — a whole material history that often gets repurposed. Because we were also doing street posters (to promote the show around Sydney), I thought it would be interesting to make them two separate things: The street poster is the promotional material for the show, and then, used in the offset-printed version, it becomes part of the archive. The content from the first version gets reused, remixed and re-collaged back into the archive through the second version.

The type that’s on the offset version is the same typeface as the street poster. It’s just been rearranged at different scales. The graphic over the top of all the text is actually from tape. I made that by scanning pieces of tape into the computer and manipulating them, but it was directly referencing the actual posters in the show: A lot of them have been hung up at some point, and they’ve all got remnants of tape on them. Sometimes it’s around the edges, sometimes it’s strangely through the middle of the posters. There are all these traces of tape and paste. Within the context of the exhibition, the tape becomes a symbol — or a graphic — that references history and use. In the case of the poster, it also serves as a very graphic design element.

There was an idea at one point to incorporate imagery from the posters themselves, but I felt like there were just too many of them. It would have been difficult to represent what the exhibition actually feels like because you’d be leaving so much out just to make it work visually. So it’s more referential than actually borrowing from the posters themselves.

Seb: Cool. Any thoughts?

Madika: Yeah, I love it. I love how we decided to keep tape on the posters in the show. So I was really excited when I realised that was the direction we were going to go down. From a design perspective it’s really interesting and fun, but it’s also a nice nod to the exhibition itself.

Alex: It’s almost anti-conservation in a way. Because you could do a show with Ray’s posters where they exist only as pristine, archival objects. And in that case even though they are historical objects, they become almost history-less. Leaving all those traces of tape and repair and history, that’s really what the Penrith Miers archive is about.

Sam: I think the important thing — even with cave paintings or whatever — is that they’re not static. People from different generations can add to them, relate to them, and create situations where the art is still alive. I think we’ve done well to include all those signs of change within the exhibition. The tape is probably the strongest representation of change through time in Alex’s poster as well. It’s like you said – it keeps the practice alive, and it can slip through time in a different way. It’s not trapped in time.

Alex: The word that comes to mind to describe it is that it’s a palimpsest.

Sam: Cool I haven’t heard that before.

Alex:I could be wrong, but I feel like it comes from when people used to write on tablets or manuscripts. Over time you could still see traces of what had previously been written underneath. It never becomes a completely blank slate. I’d have to check the etymology, but I’m pretty sure that’s where it comes from.

Sam: Because there’s a type of thing that happens with old objects now where people develop this sense that they’re sacred, so they should be left untouched.

Alex: Yes.

Sam: I actually think that’s a fairly new idea. In the past, the sacredness of something came from the fact that it was powerful enough that new things needed to be integrated into it. It’s a representation of something that’s cultural. New things should become tied to it because it’s a deeply referential place for culture. I hope that what happens with this exhibition is that it creates that feeling as well, and I think the poster contributes to that.

Madika: What I actually love about the show is that Ray’s house wasn’t controlled or pristine. It would have posters, papers and bits of material all over the walls. You’d walk into the apartment and there were posters and paper cut-outs everywhere, mixed in amongst childhood drawings of mine and things like that. So I’m glad we’ve done this almost salon-style hang, because it’s really representative of what his home looked like and how he displayed his own archive.

I really loved working with Alex. It was really exciting to let you (Alex) decide what you wanted to do with it. It’s like your own visual response to the exhibition.

Alex: Thanks for letting me.

Sam: That’s part of working with friends. And every project that we (Penrith Miers Archive) do — whether it’s with a moderator, a designer, or anyone else — we try to work with someone who we have a long-term relationship with. That way we can make long-term decisions because you trust someone through time over a long period of time. Even if you might not notice it on the surface, I think there are things that can emerge from those relationships.

Madika: Once we were given this poster archive, I’d always wanted to do something with it but didn’t know what. Then you (Seb) approached us to work together, and I thought, ‘Oh’. Because I know you and Harrison — and now Emma — I know what your interests are through our friendship. I know your interests align with mine, like local histories and those kinds of things. So as soon as you approached us, I thought, ‘this is actually the perfect partnership for this particular exhibition’. Because I trust so much in you and Harrison, and getting Alex involved – that all came from knowing you personally and from our longstanding friendship. I’m very happy with how it’s all worked out.

Sam: And long stories and long relationships are really important today when everything is becoming shorter and shorter. Like ads are getting shorter, Instagram reels, even the time that the Prime Minister can be in charge. They can’t make long-term decisions because they’re always trying to make things work in the short term, while they’re in power, or while they’re visible. They’re making quick decisions that make them look good for a second, but they’re just fucking the next person up. That’s why I think we need to create systems where we can tell long stories, and put those long stories back into this short-story culture. We need to be able to make long-term decisions again.

Madika: I think the other thing I’d say is that, obviously, this show is about my family and my grandfather. Losing him was incredibly dark. But now being able to bring this story to life, and doing it with my friends… when I talk about doing it with my friends, it’s also that you guys are my family. That’s really important to me. It feels like I’m working with my family in terms of what the material is, but also in terms of the people I’m making it with. It feels like the Same thing.

Seb: Okay. That’s probably a good place to end it, I think that was really good.