"The moment an Australian savage commences his day’s hunting, his whole manner and appearance undergo a wondrous change: his eyes, before heavy and listless, brighten up, and are never for a moment fixed on one object; his gait and movements, which were indolent and slow, become quick and restless, yet noiseless; he moves along with a rapid stealthy pace, his glance roving from side to side in a vigilant manner, arising from his eagerness to detect signs of game, and his fears of hidden foes. The earth, the water, the trees, the skies, each are in turn subjected to a rigid scrutiny, and from the most insignificant circumstances he deduces omens—his head is held erect, and his progress uncertain, in a moment his pace is checked, he stands in precisely the position of motion as if suddenly transfixed, nothing about him stirs, but his eyes, they glance uneasily from side to side, whilst the head and every muscle seem immoveable; the white eyeballs, may be seen in rapid motion, whilst all his faculties are concentrated, and his whole soul absorbed in the sense of sight and hearing."

—Sir G. Grey, Expeditions in Western Australia, 1837–1839¹

In Geoff Lowe’s painting Impersonation (1984), there’s a figure standing in that distinctive pose associated with the Dreamtime Aboriginal: balanced on one leg like a stork, boomerang in one hand, spear in the other, looking out towards a somewhere vast and open. But that somewhere is not here. Here, space is not infinite but limited, determined by the height, depth, and width of an interior doorway. Nothing about the figure is particularly convincing—sort of silly, shrouded in a crude blackface mask and loose-fitting, dark costume like those worn by the "invisible" stagehands of Kabuki theatre, a string of ethnic-looking beads looped around its neck—not to mention the paintwork which is tenuous, sketchy, processual—like life, rather than being life-like. And yet for all its contingency, this picture disturbs, its slippage evoking all the conflicting thoughts that you and I might have about the Other—more moderate, perhaps, than the alternately idealizing and derogating responses of European colonizers toward indigenous peoples in their discovery and usurpation of so-called terra nullius, but conflicted nonetheless. Mimicking the games of dress-ups and charades we’ve all played, this image also conveys something of what it might feel like to be that Other now, in the nervous culture of our present. Bringing together the world of the artist’s studio with the variously constructed world that we inhabit, Impersonation attempts to deal with what it is to not know, in this case presenting the contradictory, often stereotypical, impressions—"the models we carry around inside"²—of the most ancient of indigenous peoples in our modern midst.