TRAVELLING WITH Ben Quilty
When I was 19 I left art school for a year. I was pretty off the rails. A mate and I took an old Commodore station wagon and travelled around Australia. He had a book of Pitjantjatjara language, which we were trying to learn around campfires at night. One night in Cairns we met a young man who told us we’d already travelled through 60 different Aboriginal language groups. I realised at that point I knew nothing about my own country. When we came back I enrolled in Aboriginal culture and history at Monash University.
