Rachel O'Reilly: Northern Waters

Next date: Saturday, 07 March 2026 | 12:00 AM

Northern Waters (2025) is a feature-length video installation exploring complex aftermaths of the 1967–75 Save the Reef campaign, which successfully protected the Great Barrier Reef from the global oil industry.

At the time, Indigenous people in Queensland lived under apartheid conditions, and non-Indigenous artist/activists involved had no knowledge of the reef’s cultural heritage.

Today, as Indigenous governance is increasingly recognised in World Heritage reef and rainforest regions, hyper-real images of bleached coral circulate globally as symbols of climate crisis, while biodiversity policies continue to fail many at-risk species. 

Across eight chapters, Northern Waters weaves together uneven Indigenous and settler testimonies of struggle surrounding industry, labour, tourism and environment ‘protection’, as history lived in the present-tense. Directed by artist, writer and researcher Rachel O’Reilly, the work is a sensitive portrayal of power imbalances, passion, care and action in a region that is rarely presented to global audiences outside of the lens of tourism.

Featuring: Phil Rist (Nywaigi), Sonya Takau (Jirrbal), Percy Neal (Guru Bana Kungunghj/Djungan), Leonard Andy (Djiru), Margaret Moorhouse (Alliance to Save Hinchinbrook), Rohan Lloyd (reef historian), Hillary Smith (marine biologist), Jacob Cassady (Nywaigi), Isaac Cassady (Nywaigi).

^{This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, and through the philanthropic legacy of Paula and Tony Kinnane.} 

^{Image: Leonard Andy on Djiru Country, Mission Beach. Courtesy of Rachel O’Reilly.}

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Production Background

Northern Waters is the culmination of a multi-year regional research residency undertaken by Rachel O’Reilly through UQ Art Museum’s partnership with the JCU Blue Humanities Lab. An important outcome of the residency was a 3 day intensive workshop curated by the artist called Northern Conditions, Planetary Practices (2023) which brought together regional arts workers and environmentalists on Djiru Country (Bingil Bay), some of whom are in the film.

The workshop enabled information sharing on plural histories, regional renewable energy and ecological conflicts in the context of global warming futures. The workshop was located at Ninney Rise Historic House, the original location of the 1960s Save the Reef movement that brought together artist-activists (i.e. Judith Wright and John Busst), politicians (former Prime Minister, Harold Holt), and scientists (Len Webb, the Queensland Littoral Society, Charlie Veron), and now houses part of the campaign archive.

 

Artist Biography 

Rachel O’Reilly is a settler Australian artist/writer/researcher b. Gladstone, QLD. She was film, video, new media curator at GoMA/Australian Cinematheque, has an MA (Cum Laude) in Media and Culture from the University of Amsterdam, was a writer/artist in residence at Jan van Eyck Academie and inaugural Fellow in Ecology at Sandburg Institute. From 2014-21 Rachel taught ‘How to Do Things with Theory’ at the Dutch Art Institute, NL and edited Theory on Demand for the Institute for Network Cultures. Her artistic work has been presented at Haus der Kulturen de Welt, Berlin; E-Flux, New York; Tate Liverpool; Museum of Yugloslav History, Belgrade; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Jakarta Biennale; Qalandiya International, Jerusalem; and Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil. Curatorial/editorial collaborations include The Leisure Class (GoMA), Moving Images of Speculation (NL), ‘Planetary Records’, Contour Biennale (BE), EX-EMBASSY.com (DE) and Feminist Takes (Sternberg Press).

She writes with Jelena Vesic on Non-Aligned Movement legacies, with Danny Butt on artistic autonomy, and edits with Aboriginal contemporary artist Richard Bell. Her longterm project, The Gas Imaginary (2013-2021) used poetry, drawing, installation, essays and moving image media to explore the difference of unconventional gas (fracking) from colonial modern mining regimes, in dialogue with Gooreng Gooreng elders and frontline activists, culminating in www.infractionsdocumentary.net. Northern Waters (2025) is her third major moving image commission.

 

When

Location

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