25 for 25 Curtin Writers Respond

Copies, Answers and Aunties Denise Woods Are copies ‘always inferior to the original’?

Copies aren’t necessarily inferior, ‘it depends on your framework.’

I try to look into the carbon deposit heavy eyes of the subject of Lindy Lee’s The Silence of Painters. This is not easy. There are many versions that make up the entire artwork, and between the blue background paint and layers of photocopy carbon, I feel unable to get to know them. The European subject seems a bit shy, as if hiding behind a veil. Yet I feel drawn to them, all of them. They may not be the original, but they are not inferior, they have a haunting mystery and beauty about them. They have an aura.

Lindy Lee saw these as copies of herself, a ‘bad copy of China and European Australia’.

What am I a copy of?

My parents grew up in countries that were colonised. My father’s family were known as ‘the King’s Chinese’. They took on the traits of their British colonial masters – speaking English, listening to the BBC, loving Western classical music and musicals, having afternoon tea, enjoying British literature and cricket. But they were not carbon copies – my grandmother still wore sarong kebayas, attire influenced by the Indigenous people of the Southeast Asian islands they’ve lived on for generations. She didn’t wear this just for special occasions, she wore this all the time. She cooked Peranakan food and cakes, owned British recipe books, made butter cakes 84