Rada Priya

I’ve already written about  The Wiiyaan   as a journalist. That piece lives in the Tweed Weekly . It’s careful, respectful, measured. It honours Bundjalung origin story, place, and the quiet authority of listening. It was written for a broad audience, many of whom - like me - come from settler families, carrying our own histories alongside the land we now call home. But after filing that story, I knew I wasn’t done. Some stories ask something back from you. This one did. So this is the version that doesn’t fit in a newspaper column. This is the version that explains why that exhibition cracked something open in me - why listening to Kyle Slabb speak about holding  one  version of Country, with care and restraint, felt like a mirror I wasn’t expecting. Kyle spoke about perspective. About how this telling is not  the  story, but  a  story - shaped by lineage, responsibility and law. He was clear, careful, and deeply respectful of other versions held...

 There is a quiet ritual in returning to an artwork a year after year-be a painting, a fashion monograph, or shadowy photograph once captured in a fleeting second. What once stunned me with surface beauty begins to find deeper things with time. These work don't fade. They gather. They become layered - like fabric worn in the elbows, softer, richer, more personal. The artists I return to, Alexander McQueen, Collette Dinnigan, Yves Saint Laurent, etc, never really leave. The work isn't just historical or trendy, it resists the very idea of expiration. These aren't seasonal moments, they are iterative legacies. The garments, sketches, philosophies, continue to reveal themselves in fragments - as I change, as the world does. This is the infinite life of art: it doesn't age, it ages with you. And in that shared timeline, you co-author its meaning. You respond differently at 22 then at 39. The heartbreak you hadn't yet lived, the maternal instinct that hadn't yet woke...