Gary Foley (b. 1950) is a Gumbainggir activist, actor, historian, curator and academic. Born in Grafton, Foley moved to Sydney at the age of seventeen. Not long after, he read the biography of African-American activist Malcolm X and developed into an Indigenous rights activist. Foley helped to set up Redfern's Aboriginal Legal Service and the Aboriginal Medical Service in Sydney and Melbourne, and in 1972 was prominent at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. An advocate of Indigenous creative culture, he took Aboriginal films to the Cannes film festival in 1978. The first Indigenous Director of the Aboriginal Arts Board (1984–1987), he was active in the Bicentenary protests of 1988, and was a consultant to the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody. Foley has written extensively on Indigenous political movements and in 1994 created the Koori History Website, an intensive history archive and education resource. Senior Curator for Southeastern Australia at Museum Victoria from 2001 to 2005, he completed at PhD in History at the University of Melbourne in 2012 and is a professor at Victoria University.
Photographer Juno Gemes has spent much of her career documenting the lives and struggles of Aboriginal people. She took this photograph of Foley with a 'We Have Survived' banner at La Perouse in Sydney on 26 January 1988.
Gift of the artist 2004. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© Juno Gemes/Copyright Agency, 2024
Juno Gemes (22 portraits)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Portraits from The Movement is the first comprehensive survey of photographs from the Juno Gemes archive, which has supported the Aboriginal struggle for justice in Australia from 1978 to the present day.
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