Melletios Kyriakidis and Sumugan Sivanesan re-wire iconic symbols from contemporary Australian history to interrogate how culture turns on this continent. The bush-ranger Ned Kelly and the then-infamous Lebanese bikers are set against one another, cleaved by a distressed Southern Cross flag commonly and persistently misappropriated as a symbol of the mythologised multicultural origins of the democratic process in Australia.
The work asks what these figures share: both are outsiders absorbed and expelled by the national imagination, both are made legible only through the violence of stereotype. The Southern Cross holds them together and apart, a flag that has learned to mean too many things at once.
Installed on ANZAC Day, 2009, the work positions itself inside the annual ritual of national memory, arriving on a day when the country is most confident in its own story.
