New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana's early encounters with Australia were not altogether favourable. It was 1988 and Reihana, a Māori artist, had been invited to work with Aboriginal artists and communities through the groundbreaking Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Sydney. While she made lifelong friends in the local artistic community, elsewhere she observed a politically charged and undeniably racist country.
“I worked with a lot of Boomalli artists so met a lot of black fellas and remember going down to Canberra with a girlfriend who took me out to a nightclub dancing with some of her friends,” Reihana recalls. “Suddenly all these big, white Australian girls surrounded us and started
