Finding Eliza

Next date: Saturday, 30 May 2026 | 12:00 AM

Finding Eliza at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery marks the 10-year anniversary of Professor Larissa Behrendt’s (Yuwaalaraay/Gamilaroi) seminal book Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling (2016).

The book interrogates the colonial story of Eliza Fraser, who was purportedly captured by the Butchulla people in 1836 after surviving the shipwreck of the Stirling Castle and the death of her husband, Captain Fraser.

Presented on Butchulla country, the exhibition revisits the story of Eliza Fraser, not to retell her account, but to examine how her version of events was elevated, amplified, and mythologised within colonial culture. These sensationalised narratives cast the Butchulla people as figures of fear and savagery, legitimising violence, dispossession, and massacre, while silencing Butchulla law, knowledge, and lived experience.

At its heart, Finding Eliza recentres Butchulla history, presence, and truth-telling. It foregrounds the voices and perspectives that colonial storytelling worked to erase, asking whose stories were believed, whose were ignored, and why. Rather than treating the past as fixed, the exhibition reveals colonial history as a contested and ongoing narrative, one that continues to shape public memory and power.

In 2023, Fraser Island was officially returned to its traditional name, K’gari—a significant and symbolic milestone that reignited national conversations about the myths and misrepresentations that have long distorted Butchulla history, culture, and presence. This exhibition sits within that broader movement of reclamation, contributing to national conversations about naming, memory, and the enduring authority of First Nations peoples over their own histories.

Finding Eliza has been developed in collaboration with Aboriginal lawyer, writer, and filmmaker Professor Larissa Behrendt and renowned Badtjala/Butchulla artist Dr Fiona Foley, bringing together works by Fiona Foley, Mia Boe, Sidney Nolan, alongside archival materials and historical accounts.

^{Image: Fiona Foley, Out of the Sea Like Cloud (video still), 2019. Courtesy of the artist.}

 

When

Location

Hervey Bay Regional Gallery, 166 Old Maryborough Road, Pialba, 4655, View Map