Blak Douglas, born Adam Douglas Hill in Blacktown (1970), Western Sydney to a Dhungatti
Father and Caucasian Mother, is an artist well-attuned to the power of language, of
words, as well as images1. He adopted the professional name Blak Douglas to reflect the
two halves of his genealogy. Douglas uses his artistic identity to reclaim and self-identify;
“Douglas being my middle name whilst my “ness” is primarily BLAK. ‘Blakness’ here is all
about who is actually calling the pot ‘black’, or defining ‘blackness’: the people who live
it, or those who prefer to think about it by degrees of ‘authenticity’ or through rosecoloured Primitivist glasses.”
