Kinjarling Djinnang Ngalak: Country Sees Us

About this event

Kinjarling Djinnang Ngalak: Country Sees Us is on at State Library of Western Australia (25 Francis Street, Perth, Western Australia, 6000) on Sat 31 Oct 2026.

Tickets and details are on the organiser’s website, linked on this page.

The organiser lists these accessibility features for the event: employs people with disability, disability awareness training for staff, accessibility information published and website meets wcag 2.0.

From the organiser

An immersive exhibition centred around newly recorded video oral histories of Menang Elders and a large-scale visual meditation on the Kinjarling/Albany landscape.

This exhibition marks 200 years since colonisation began on Menang Country and asks visitors to encounter Kinjarling not as a backdrop to history, but as a living landscape with its own voice and memory.

The stories within this exhibition have been recorded to add important new layers of meaning to the largely colonial maps, photographs and illustrations in the State Library's collection.

Visitors will step into a quiet 6-metre-wide dome inspired by a kornt (a traditional shelter) to hear the Elders' stories. These include reflections by Carol Pettersen, Lester Coyne, Mark Colbung, Vernice Gillies, Doreen Hancox, Sharrlyn Maddren and a young Menang ranger, Cleve Humphries.

This immersive experience also features a specially commissioned animation that reinterprets the State Library's collections through a Menang lens, weaving Menang artist and academic Shandell Cumming's artworks with centuries-old maps, photographs and illustrations to reveal new ways of seeing and understanding these materials. The exhibition gives new voices and stories to evocative landscape photographs taken by government and commercial photographers over many decades.

This exhibition is curated by Denien Toomath, a Menang Noongar woman and Senior Partnerships Officer at the State Library.

Produced by the State Library of Western Australia in partnership with the Community Arts Network.

The venue’s recorded access

Inclusable’s venue database has an entry for Forrest Library at this location. It records wheelchair access, step-free entry and accessible parking, with an accessibility score of 72/100. The venue hasn’t confirmed these details. They describe the venue in general, not this particular event.

Not yet recorded for the venue: accessible toilet and communication and sensory features such as a hearing loop or quiet hours. We don’t know either way, so it’s worth checking before you go.