Deutscher and Hackett

Brisbane-based Bidjara artist Michael Cook’s photographic works, always sumptuously presented and carefully staged, address personal and socio-political issues of post-colonial identity in Australia. His choice of medium, historically linked to the ethnographic othering of First Nations people, allows for a reimagining and rewriting of history, cinematically illustrating alternative perspectives of familiar historical narratives. The figurative works which brought Cook critical acclaim early in his career – Undiscovered, 2010; Civilised, 2013; Majority Rule, 2014; Object, 2014, and the present suite, Invasion, 2017 – oscillate between different cultural perspectives and introduce surreal imagery to disarm and amuse viewers. Invasion, throughout its sequence of eight story-board tableaux, again takes as subject Australian colonial history – this time imaginatively inverting its power structures within the stylistic framework of 1960s popular cinema. As a time of crucial advances in land and civil rights for Indigenous Australians, this historical setting thus also adds a superlative dimension to Cook’s speculative images.  
 
With a characteristically post-modern practice, Cook is a bricoleur (to use French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ term), taking inspiration and techniques from diverse sources, and applying them to a composite visual representation of cultural collision and intertwined histories. Replicating the terror of colonial ‘first contact’, Invasion is set in iconic locations around the city of London – the heart of the British Empire – and presents dramatic scenes of a sudden, violent arrival of aliens taking the form of oversized Australian fauna (lorikeets and cockatoos, possums, lizards, and witchetty grubs) and bronzed cyborg warriors. This invasion disrupts the everyday life of London residents, who, dressed in period 1960s fashions, appear within the still photographs thrown into silent states of melodramatic panic. At the time, Invasion was Cook’s most ambitious project to date, the technically complex series requiring eight months of production, shot on location in London and requiring a cast of fifty actors.
 
Cook came to art relatively late in life, using his extensive technical experience in commercial photography to his advantage in these complex photographic tableaux. Each of Cook’s images is dense with dozens of layers of visual details, creating an immersive density. Further editioned prints based on the newspaper, The Evening Standard, provide a satirical metanarrative for the interpretation of the photographic series, explaining in its newsprint: ‘England has a lot to answer for, and the attack on London this week proved that a lot of people in the world have an axe to grind when it comes to ye olde Empire.’1
 
Cook’s photomontages present a pastiche of grainy textures and unsophisticated special effects inspired by B-grade sci-fi movies. Cut-out flying saucers hover in Cook’s grey English sky, carrying large possums, or depositing the various invaders on shore with luminescent tractor-beams. Laser-beams shot from the bellies of these spaceships create massive explosions on land, clouds of smoke and fire emanating from the roofs of Big Ben and Somerset House, mimicking the action-movie trope of an explosive Armageddon finale and uncomfortably evoking the ‘Blitz’. While the artist has explained that the kernel of inspiration came from Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal 1963 film, The Birds, and initially intended to include swarms of birds in every frame, the popular culture references and the strong relationships they have to real-life historical events can be traced to much earlier foundational texts.2
 
Writing in the Memo review in October 2023, in a review of the presentation of the Invasion suite at the National Gallery of Victoria’s Ian Potter Centre, art historian and critic Rex Butler noted the strong links, both stylistically and historically, between Cook’s series and H. G. Wells’ foundation science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds (1898).3 Codifying the genre of the alien invasion, the War of the Worlds told the story of a Martian invasion of Earth, the aliens colonising the planet only to be eventually destroyed by a simple microbe. Coincidentally, both the works of both Cook and Wells were inspired by stories of the British colonisation of Tasmania in the early 19th century – the most violent chapter of Australian colonial history – with each author empathising through their work with the tragic consequences wrought on the Palawa First Nations people of the island.
 
1. INVASION (EVENING STANDARD) 2017, inkjet print, 43 x 55 cm, edition of 100
2. Martin - Chew, L., ‘Michael Cook talks about staging an Indigenous invasion of London’, Art Guide, 25 July 2018 at: https://artguide.com.au/michael-cook-talks-about-staging-an-indigenous-i... (accessed 18 February 2026)
3. Butler, R., ‘Michael Cook’s Invasion’, Memo Review, 14 October 2023 at: https://www.memoreview.net/reviews/michael-cooks-invasion-by-rex-butler (accessed 18 February 2026)
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH