In December 2020, I began having a recurring dream related to the Indigenous Peoples of Australia, my home nation. I am not an indigenous person, I am about as mixed race as they come, and a first generation Australian who left his home country before the age of 20. However, given the strength of this dream, its’ repetitiveness, my own experience of being told to conform because of my skin color and artistic focus upon people and place, I decided to make, When The Ships Came, as a testament to the Indigenous cultures that have lived through colonization, and the brutality that it brought.

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I am sitting on a beach trying to start a fire for the evening. It’s important to note, that in the dream I am both the person starting the fire and the person who is watching the scene from behind the foliage.

I am on my knees with warm sand underneath me, trying to get the kindling to ignite. For whatever reason, this fire is taking a while to get going. I begin to sweat and as I rub my eyes to free them from stinging I see the three dots out in the ocean. There has never been anything out there. Nothing. I stare at the dots for a time. They are evenly spaced, moving slightly up and down. They slowly get a little bigger. After some time, I run and tell my family what I am seeing, we all return to the beach. The dots are no longer small and they are no longer dots. I would come to find that the dots are called ships.

Men with light skin and light hair use a small vessel to come to the beach. The have a lot of body coverings, especially compared to me and my family. Two men smile and approach us, behind them them other men are pointing long, thin objects at us. I would come to find that these objects are called guns. The two men extend their hand and speak a language we have never heard. They point inland and begin to walk toward it, all the while speaking to each other and us; though we do not understand them yet.

The men meet all of us over the next two or three days, always smiling and talking to each other. One day, they go to their ships and return with many things. Boxes and boxes of things.
They give us some food as we help them move these boxes inland, always smiling. Once we are done moving everything, one of them walked up to my grandfather, the head of our family, pointed their gun at his head and shot him. When he hit the ground the light skinned men stopped smiling and never once smiled at us again.

Over the following years the light skinned men dismantled everything that I had been taught was truth and everything that we as people believed. We had lived in this land before time was time, and within moments, it had been taken away and destroyed. We were not allowed to have an identity. Without doubt it was made known to us, that our lives were owned by someone else.

I reached breaking point after watching yet another one of my family get murdered. I ran towards a light skinned man, but heard a bang before I could reach him. My mind had left my body before I even hit the ground.

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With that I wake up. The middle of the dream changes slightly with each iteration, but the beginning and end are always the same. I am unsure as to why I have been dreaming this scene. But, given that I have made a choice to dedicate my output to the people and places of this world, I decided not to fight what feels to me as fate.

*Please listen with ear/headphones or decent speakers (i.e. not laptop speakers)*