Lilla Watson

Lilla Watson is a Gangulu woman who grew up on the Dawson River Central Queensland her 'Mother's Mother's country'. Born 1940, during World War II. She is a highly regarded Aboriginal academic, especially in the field of Women’s issues and Aboriginal epistemology.

Lilla Watson is also an Aboriginal Australian or Murri visual artist, activist and educator.

Since moving to Brisbane in the late 1960s, she and other members of her family have become well known through their involvement in the Indigenous community. Lilla worked at the University of Queensland for ten years, the last six as Lecturer in Aboriginal Welfare Studies within the Social Work Department at the University of Queensland where she developed inter-disciplinary courses on Aboriginal perspectives. Lilla has also held membership on the university senate, and has since retired.

Lilla has served as the Inaugural President of the Aboriginal and Islander Child Care Agency, was a founding member of the Brisbane Indigenous Media Association, and was a Vice President of the Aboriginal and Islander Independent School Board, Acacia Ridge. She has acted as a consultant and a member of working groups, panels and selection committees for many Government and non-Government bodies.

After leaving her lecturer post in the nineties she developed her own medium for visual art: elaborate patterns of hundreds of holes scorched in layers of paper, pieces she calls "burnings." Many of her works draw their themes from traditional Aboriginal art and the landscape of Queensland. Lilla describes her work as having an ‘ants eyeview’, looking up through roots and foliage from beneath the ground, looking up through the earth, the 'Land'. As an artist, Lilla has developed portrayals of her cultural and spiritual identity that are admired nationally and internationally.

Lilla has expanded her art practice greatly over the years. From collaborative works, such as Soft Night Falling (2005) with saxophonist, Tim O’Dwyer to public artworks which can be seen in the New State Library (Brisbane, Qld), the Roma Street Parklands and the New Magistrates Court in Brisbane city.

She is often credited with the quote:

cquote| If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

This quote has served as a motto for many activist groups in Australia and elsewhere, including United Students Against Sweatshops. A possible origin for the quote is a speech given by Watson at the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi. [http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=724]

External links

* [http://www.elision.org.au/collaborators/watson.html Profile at Elision 2007]
* [http://books.google.com/books?id=cWJkUOj925EC&pg=RA1-PA88&vq=lilla&dq=lilla+watson&sig=cTVvA7qNqjGLKbSB9EeXoQa3-Ys The affirmation of indigenous values in a colonial education system] , a chapter by Watson in the book "" edited by Stone and MacKenzie
* [http://www.weavin.org.au/30years.htm Quotes from a 1976 speech by Watson]