Angus McDonald (born 1961) is an Australian contemporary visual artist, refugee advocate, columnist and documentary filmmaker.
Angus McDonald (born 1961) is an Australian contemporary visual artist, refugee advocate, columnist and documentary filmmaker.
Angus McDonald was born in Sydney [1] in 1961. [2] He earned an Economics degree at the University of Sydney, [3] and later (1993–5 [4] ) studied painting at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney. [2] He travelled to the small island of Leros, Greece, and lived and painted there from 1996 to 1999. [4]
In 2000 he was accepted as a student at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts in Italy. [3] [4] Upon his return to Australia in 2001 he settled in the Lennox Head region in New South Wales [1] and in 2003 in Lennox Head itself. [5]
McDonald was a visual artist, mainly a painter (although he didn't use a paintbrush until he was 31), [6] for around 25 years before he started making films, from around 2017. [1]
His works have been avidly collected, and exhibited internationally, including a 2007 London exhibition [6] which showed his work after painting an Antarctic expedition with the Mawson's Huts expedition. He returned to Antarctica in 2008/9 as an artist in residence for Aurora Expeditions. [4] He is renowned for his landscapes and still life paintings. [6]
As of 2020 [update] , McDonald's portraits have been finalists for the Archibald Prize art competition six times. [5]
In 2016 McDonald became interested in human rights and refugee issues after travelling across the Greek islands (including Leros, where he had lived a couple of decades earlier) to see how the local communities dealt with the huge numbers of asylum seekers who had arrived in 2015 and 2016 via the Mediterranean Sea, mainly from Syria via Turkey. He was struck by the more humane way that the Greeks treated these huge numbers of migrants, compared with the Australian Government's treatment of a relatively few who had arrived by boat in Australian territorial waters. [5]
McDonald established a social justice project called Howling Eagle, which advocates for humane treatment and raises public awareness of asylum seekers. The project began releasing videos on YouTube in 2018, under the title "Philoxenia" (Greek for "extending hospitality and friendship to the stranger"). [1]
McDonald was ambassador for World Vision's KidsOffNauru Campaign, and is on the Sydney Committee for Human Rights Watch Australia and Asia. [3]
In 2019, McDonald's short (13-minute) film Manus was released, about the stand-off between the asylum seekers in the Manus Island detention centre and the authorities, around the time the detention facility was closed at the end of 2017, after they had been there for about six years. The film was shot by Australian journalist Olivia Rousset, and used only clips from interviews with the men to create the narrative. [11] It includes a poem called "Manus Poem" written and narrated in Farsi by Behrouz Boochani, a prominent Kurdish Iranian former asylum seeker held on Manus Island. [1]
Manus was awarded Best Documentary at the 2019 St. Kilda Film Festival, and was an official selection for the Byron Bay International Film Festival in 2020, the Aesthetica Short Film Festival (ASFFest) in York, UK, in November 2020. It has been allowed to qualify for entry to the 2020 Oscars in the Documentary Short category by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. [1] It also won Best Documentary at the 2020 FIFO (Festival International du Film Documentaire Océanien) in Tahiti. [12] [13]
In 2020, McDonald began writing a weekly social commentary column for the Northern Rivers Review. [14]
The Archibald Prize is an Australian portraiture art prize, generally seen as the most prestigious portrait prize in Australia. It was first awarded in 1921 after the receipt of a bequest from J. F. Archibald, the editor of The Bulletin who died in 1919. It is administered by the trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales and awarded for "the best portrait, preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters, Science or Politics, painted by an artist resident in Australia during the twelve months preceding the date fixed by the trustees for sending in the pictures." The Archibald Prize has been awarded annually since 1921 and since July 2015 the prize has been AU$100,000.
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Reza Barati was a 23-year-old asylum seeker who was killed during rioting at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre (MIRPC), Papua New Guinea, on 17 February 2014. An Iranian Kurd, he had arrived in Australia on 24 July 2013 – just five days after the PNG solution was announced – and was sent to Manus Island in August.
The Manus Regional Processing Centre, or Manus Island Regional Processing Centre (MIRCP), was one of a number of offshore Australian immigration detention facilities. The Centre was located on the PNG Navy Base Lombrum on Los Negros Island in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea.
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Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian journalist, human rights defender, writer and film producer. He was held in the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea from 2013 until its closure in 2017. He remained on the island before being moved to Port Moresby along with the other detainees around September 2019. On 14 November 2019 he arrived in Christchurch, New Zealand on a one-month visa, to speak at a special event organised by WORD Christchurch on 29 November, as well as other speaking events. In December 2019, his one month visa to New Zealand expired. It has been confirmed that Boochani has not left New Zealand, and remained on an expired visa until being granted refugee status in July 2020. As of July 2020, Boochani is to become a Senior Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Canterbury.
Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time is a documentary film co-directed by Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani and Netherlands-based Iranian filmmaker Arash Kamali Sarvestani released in 2017. It was shot by Boochani from inside Australia's Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea. The whole film was shot over six months on a smartphone, which had to be kept secret from the prison authorities.
No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison is an autobiographical account of Behrouz Boochani's perilous journey to Christmas Island and his subsequent incarceration in an Australian government immigration detention facility on Manus Island.
Omid Tofighian is an Iranian-Australian philosopher and Honorary Research Associate at the University of Sydney. He is known for his research on ancient Greek philosophy and his translation of the award-winning book by Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker Behrouz Boochani, No Friend But the Mountains from Persian into English.
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