Shahleena Musk is Larrakia lawyer from Darwin. She was the first Aboriginal person to graduate from the Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University) and to be admitted to the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory. Musk was a Crown Prosecutor for the Director of Public Prosecutions in both the Northern Territory and Western Australia. In 2013 she was instrumental in the creation of the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency youth team and took on the role of the Senior Youth Justice Lawyer. She joined the Human Rights Law Centre in Melbourne in 2017, working in the Indigenous Rights Unit. Since 2020 she has been the Manager, Koori Advisory and Engagement at the Commission for Children and Young People. Musk is also a director at the Larrakia Development Corporation, providing employment and business opportunities for Larrakia people, and is on the steering committee of the #RaiseTheAge Campaign, a national coalition to raise the age of legal responsibility from 10 to 14.
Penny Tweedie spent a year travelling around Australia in 2000 photographing and interviewing successful young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, which resulted in her 2001 book Indigenous Australia: Standing Strong. This photograph was taken when Musk was a Crown Prosecutor in Darwin.
Gift of the artist 2004
© Estate of Penny Tweedie
Penny Tweedie (47 portraits)
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Well behaved women seldom make history, as the saying goes, and the National Portrait Gallery, consequently, is full of awesome Australian women who refused to conform to narrow ideas about their place and their worth.
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