In January 2024, Mick Harding (from the Yowong-Illam-Baluk and Nattarak Baluk clans of the Taungurung people) was awarded a $20,000 commission to create the ACMI First Nations Welcome Installation.
His resulting 5-screen moving image work, Baan Biik Woora Woora Water, Land and Sky (2025), brings to life the vibrant sounds and movements of Country and native wildlife. It now sits pride of place in ACMI’s Fed Square foyer, greeting all visitors who enter ACMI via the heart of Melbourne's Arts Precinct. The work acknowledges that Australia’s museum of screen culture is, and always will be, situated on Aboriginal land.
In this short film, get a glimpse at how the work came together – from ideas to illustration to sound composition – and learn more about the work's cultural significance.
Learn more about the work
Transcript
[In Taungurung] Hello to my ancestors. Hello to my Country. Hello to my people.
I'm a proud Aboriginal man. Mick Harding. I'm from the Natarrak-Baluk and Yerrun-Illam-Baluk clans.
[In English] We're at Tahbilk wetlands which is near to Nakambee or what's commonly known today as Nagambie.
I've been commissioned to do a piece of work for ACMI and it'll be on permanent display, so if you're coming along at any time of the year, you'll see it as you walk through the front doors.
What we're doing out here today is we're recording the song which will be, in essence, the soundtrack to the animation. The three people that'll be singing will be my oldest son, Mitchell, our youngest son, Cory, and myself.
The theme of the work is 'Land, Water, Sky'. They're very unconscious, in a lot of the modern world, in that we don't pay loads of attention to them, and then if we do, we pay attention to them as a silo – so, as this 'water body', as this 'land body', as this 'sky body'; as silos, as different, separate things but in fact, they're not. They're part of the whole thing, as are all the plants and the animals... maybe I'll draw a say a Wedge-tailed eagle, and it's 'this' big, and then I'll draw a dragonfly and it's 'this' big. So, I don't put any kind of scale-y weight to it. I'm doing that deliberately to give some kind of cultural sense that just because something's bigger, it's not more important than the other.
Look, as human beings, we're just storytellers, right? We make sense of our world by the way in which we tell stories. As First Nations people, we still have a really important story to tell to the rest of Australia – as much as a much broader audience – but also to really hold our ground on who we are, where we belong, and this is a new form of storytelling that's not just strictly song and dance like we may have done in the past, which would have had its own important nuances. So, we're telling a story in a modern context.
I just get the biggest kick out of collaboration. If I'm trying to be the catalyst or the person that starts this thing off, I've got a direction I think I'm going in – so I might think I'm going 'there' – but when you get all these other people together with you, you often start to swing around and maybe it goes 'this' way or maybe it goes 'that' way... or maybe goes 'that' way [points up], you know [laughs].
I like to think that my artwork is a really good reflection of types of symbols and icons, and things that we used before invasion – how we would articulate our connection to our stories, connection to our Country and connection to ourselves. I'm really paying the utmost respect to my my lineage, to the First Peoples here, and I want everyone else to share in that. I'm trying to get this sense of fun as well, even though, subliminally, I'm trying to tell something that means a whole lot to to me and to us, and hopefully people get enjoyment out of it.