I am thrilled to announce that The Alice Prize 2024 is awarded to Butchulla (Badtjala) artist Fiona Foley for her video work Janjari. This is an important, ambitious, and arresting moving image work by a fearless artist whose remarkable career over more than 35 years and across multiple mediums and forms, has consistently interrogated the hidden histories that are suppressed and erased because of colonisation.

Janjari is a Butchulla word for spirit guardian. In Fiona Foley’s Janjari, the magnificent landscape of K’gari (Fraser Island) – and its carpet snake creation story – is the setting for a sweeping meditation on colonial mythmaking versus truth-telling in the present. Her cast of characters wordlessly reclaim Country through ritual and dance, garbed in traditional nineteenth-century costume as a gesture aiming to dismantle past ethnographic practices that have oppressed First Nations people through classification and control.

Though it is a work rich with symbolism, its message is direct and clear, ensuring the hidden histories haunting this particular story are brought into the glorious light of this island setting. Congratulations to Fiona Foley, who was a Highly Commended entrant previously in 2020 for taking out The Alice Prize now in 2024.

Dr Daniel Mudie Cunningham