Pauline Hanson has unleashed at the federal government for handing out $365,000 in grants to an anti-Australian aboriginal artist who has made paintings insulting her and Captain Cook.
The One Nation leader shared two paintings by inner city Melbourne-based artist Kait James, who calls herself a “proud Wadawurrung woman”, on social media on Wednesday night along with copies of a freedom of information request showing a grant from Creative Australia.
The Cook painting depicts the explorer with his eyes crossed out and drinking from a can marked “fantasy” through a straw spelling out the word “cunt”, and the painting of Ms Hanson shows her saying “I’m indigenous, I was born here”.
Ms Hanson described the grants for the artist to tour her Red Flags exhibition as “outrageous”, and labelled the exhibition a “woke anti-Australian art display”.
“Federal government agencies Creative Australia ($48,048.80) and the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts (DITRDCSA, $317,551) provided a grant each to the artist for the touring exhibition,” she wrote.
“A commenter on a video about the artist says the exhibition ‘could cause offence to many Australians’ and notes they ‘don’t really understand why the Victorian and Australian government would sponsor exhibitions which undermines Australians as being citizens of their own country’.
“While Australians are struggling to live this is what Government is wasting your money on. This is divisive, anti-Australian and a waste of taxpayer money.”
Kait James says on her website that her work “explores her identity as an Australian with both Anglo and indigenous heritage” and that she uses humour and vivid colour to address “the way White western culture has dominated Australia’s history”.
In 2019 she won the Craft Victoria Emerging Artist Award for a piece titled Stolenwealth Games 2019, and in the same year won the Lendlease Reconciliation Art Award – Koorie Art Show for Hungry for Land 2019, according to the website.
Header image: Left, the Captain Cook painting. Right, Kait James (kaitjames.com).
