The role First Nations Elders play in the Wadawurrung community is reflected in their high, and highly revered, representation within the artworks of Wadawurrung identifying artists in The Torch program.

For her piece titled Weaving Warri Bagurrk #25, Alisha F acknowledges her innate talents for weaving plant fibres as being ‘second nature’ and attributes this to her Ancestors, especially women; their practice of weaving going back thousands of years.

Closer to the present, Anthony J portrays his immediate family in the work Family, each member represented by a platypus motif. The two little ones ‘talking to our parents about our culture and asking about our everyday things’, he says.

In Hunting, Billy Bottleo Joe and his little brother find themselves inhabiting and embracing the role of the Elders. ‘This is a story about my little brother and I, and my son Koda,’ he notes. ‘We are taking Koda out to show him a little bit about his culture and how the Elders past and present used to hunt.’

The theme of Wadawurrung Elders and traditional hunting is also prevalent in the works titled The Hunt by T. Julien and The Hunters Sun 8/8 by Tim N.

‘This was my vision of an Elder hunting to supply food for his Mob,’ shares T. Julien of his silhouetted evening landscape. ‘I painted a gecko and a lizard at the bottom’. A similar sentiment shared by Tim N. in his own work, a woodcut print depicting a ‘traditional Elder hunting with spears among some black boy palms with the sun watching over,’ he says.

‘Respect Your Elders’, says BMAC, directly, in his work of the same title. ‘This story represents our Elders, the respect we have for them and the guidance they give us for life.’ And despite the visual and narrative diversity inherent among these artists styles and stories, BMAC’s statement is the unifying subject, the very core of these works. ‘Learning and living to be a proud black fellow’, quotes Anthony J, their Elders are revered as the beating heart of Wadawurrung Culture and society. ‘Deadly’.