Billy Bain Blak men can’t surf

This work reappropriates hand-painted colonial beer advertisements, which adorn the walls of the pubs lining the Manly Corso on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, where I was born and raised. Painted post–First World War, they show white men engaging in masculine activities like football, cricket, boxing and surfing. The images were made at a time when Indigenous people were refused entry into these venues.

By replacing the colonial figures with an embodiment of myself, I am reimagining an alternative cultural narrative that celebrates Indigenous strength and presence. Subverting these colonial cultural iconographies undermines the pub and surfing subcultures’ history as a place of segregation and an epicentre of white masculinity.

Billy Bain, 2023