Jack Wilkie-Jans

The Cairns Indigenous Art Fair 2027’s theme, Superhighway: Country Sings to Stars Dancing, immediately evokes a sense of wonder and majesty of First Nations storytelling and knowledge-keeping traditions. Not only are these practices timeless, but they’re also ever evolving and protected—yet, under threat.

Superhighway—a learned nod by Artistic Director, Teho Ropeyarn, to Yothu Yindi’s immense cultural influence, and influences—represents our peoples’ and totemic counterparts’ incredible wisdom to listen to the Earth and the Elements (and Spirits), to nurture what would be the world’s first ‘information highway’ in every respect. This by which we navigated, traded, learned, dreamt, and remembered knowledge of kin, practical and spiritual and existential purpose.

Today, with all new (and old) technologies, we only add to our Superhighway, to our super-strength as Sovereign and to our collective and irrepressible knowledge-banks. As always, for future generations, we traverse the trials and tribulations of our times and take stock and keep record. This is what we do as artists and as Cultural Practitioners: Every piece we create carries some element of our Superhighway knowledge; those pieces carry this forth to wherever across the globe they go.

This impact, this sustained presence on Earth, adds to our peoples and is reflected in the stars far away; for they glitter back to us an embracing Motherly and Fatherly light. Those dancing stars represent our wildest dreams and boundless love, our immense memory and living Lore, as it’s all part and parcel of the fabric of our Universe. And, through the art, colour, form, and vision of the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair’s artists, is manifests as a celebratory vortex of beauty, skill, intention, joy, story, safety and might, humanity, and our evergreen excellence.