About Julie Gough's Fellowship research

The Enaction Plan is a parallel process that maps a pathway of using the Library’s collections to strategically seek and resurface material aspects between 1800 - 1850, that most impacted Tasmanian Aboriginal people. The project involves developing artwork responses to this journey to access and reconstruct history. 

Julie Gough, The Silenced, 2020 (video still, re-proportioned), edited by Jemma Rea, commissioned by ACMI (Australia Centre for the Moving Image, Victoria)

The Enaction Plan consists of two interconnected actions. The primary focus is creating new artworks as direct responses to the Library’s collections that informs the impact of British colonisation on First Peoples of Lutruwita/Tasmania from 1800 - 1850. In addition, historic material – particularly maps, images and manuscripts will be reviewed for information, with the process documented on a dedicated website. This process involves seeking, auditing and recovering relevant material within the Library’s collections relating to Tasmanian Aboriginal people, from the wreck of the Sydney Cove in Bass Strait in 1797 to the closure of Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island in late 1847. 

This tracking of collections to identify material relevant to Aboriginal history, within records produced by and for colonists, will also serve as a case study of how repositories can facilitate First Peoples’ truth-telling.

Julie Gough is a 2025 National Library of Australia Creative Arts Fellow. 

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About Julie Gough

Julie Gough is an artist, writer and curator at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Gough’s multi-media artworks reveal and re-present conflicting and subsumed histories, and the legacies and impacts of colonization, sometimes referring to her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people.  

Gough has exhibited in more than 200 exhibitions since 1994, including 65,000 years (2025), Shadow Spirit (2023), Biennale of Sydney (2022, 2006), Tarnanthi (2021, 2017), Adelaide Biennial (2018, 1998), Eucalyptusdom, Tense Past, Defying Empire, The National, With Secrecy and Despatch, Undisclosed; Clemenger Award, Liverpool Biennial, UK (2001) and Perspecta (1995).