In Conversation: Larissa Behrendt and Fiona Foley

Next date: Saturday, 30 May 2026 | 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM

To mark the opening of Finding Eliza at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery, join lawyer, writer and filmmaker Professor Larissa Behrendt (Yuwaalaraay/Gamilaroi) and Badtjala/Butchulla artist Dr Fiona Foley for a conversation hosted by HBRG’s Director Sarah Thomson.

Finding Eliza examines the story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the Butchulla people in 1836 after surviving the shipwreck of the Stirling Castle. Her highly publicised account was mythologised in colonial culture and cast Butchulla people as figures of fear and savagery, legitimising their dispossession and massacre.

The exhibition marks the ten-year anniversary of the publication of Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling by Larissa Behrendt and gives context to the 2023 return of Fraser Island to its traditional name, K’gari—meaning paradise.

Bringing together two leading cultural voices, this unmissable discussion will reflect on the impact of colonial storytelling on Butchulla people and Indigenous people across the continent, asking whose stories were believed, whose were ignored, and why.

Drawing on Foley and Behrendt’s extensive output—spanning visual art, filmmaking and writing—this conversation offers a timely reflection on truth-telling, cultural memory and reclamation on Butchulla Country.

About the speakers

Fiona Foley
Dr Fiona Foley is an Aboriginal artist, Badtjala woman and provocateur, part of a highly influential generation of urban Indigenous artists. Over a career now spanning thirty years she has consistently asked questions about hidden histories, the Frontier Wars waged against Aboriginal peoples, and brought the massacres and dispossession into galleries, public spaces and to a broader, society-wide debate.

Retrospective exhibitions include Fiona Foley: Veiled Paradise at QUT Art Museum, McClelland Gallery and Hervey Bay Regional Gallery in 2022-2023; Who are these strangers and where are they going? in Ballarat and Sydney in 2019-2020; and Fiona Foley: Forbidden at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane in 2009. Her work is in every major institutional collection in Australia, many private collections, and occupies public spaces all over Australia, including in the State Library of Queensland.

Larrisa Behrendt
Professor Larissa Behrendt (Yuwaalaraay/Gamilaroi) is the author of three novels: Home, which won the 2002 David Unaipon Award and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Legacy, which won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and After Story, shortlisted for the Indigenous Writers' Prize at the 2022 NSW Premier's Literary Award, General Fiction Book of the Year at the 2022 ABIAs and Nielsen Adult Fiction Book of the Year at the 2022 ABA Booksellers' Choice Awards, and longlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award.

She has published numerous books on Indigenous legal issues; her most recent non-fiction book is Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling. She was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year. Larissa wrote and directed the feature films, After the Apology and Innocence Betrayed and has written and produced several short films. In 2018 she won the Australian Directors’ Guild Award for Best Direction in a Documentary Feature and in 2020 the AACTA for Best Direction in Nonfiction Television. She is the host of Speaking Out on ABC Radio and is Distinguished Professor at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

When: Saturday 30 May, 10:30 - 11:30am
Where: Hervey Bay Regional Gallery, 166 Old Maryborough Rd, Pialba
Tickets: Free, bookings essential

Book here