"This painting is about Badimaya Sovereign rights. Native Title legislation places the onus of proof of connection to land firmly on the shoulders of First Nations people. This racist notion flies in the face of generations of people who were forcibly removed from their families and their country. It is denial of the impact of brutal policies that still affect all our families. Many of our people have broken or truncated continual connection to country but still try to claim it back. The image shows a family mourning for country because they have been rejected by the native title process. This is what happened to Badimia people and others. ‘Sorry’ is in reference to the statement by former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd to the Stolen Generations as said on the floor of the Australian Parliament in 2008. It is important to refer to a quote here by Maori Chief Judge Joe Williams commenting on native title in Australia: ‘The doctrine of surviving title has some deep problems with it. It requires the Indigenous applicant to prove that colonisation did not hurt. The more it hurts, the less you get. The less it hurts the more you get. There is a deep contradiction in that idea.’" – Artist's statement.

Julie Dowling
Born into a large Badimaya/Badimia extended family, Julie Dowling’s traditional country (Barna) is located in Western Australia’s central-west. Dowling’s pictorial works subvert traditional power relations between the observer and the observed, the coloniser and the de-colonised. She has won numerous art awards and in 2002 received an Honorary Doctorate in Literature (honoris causa) from Murdoch University. Her work has been extensively exhibited nationally and internationally.