Kyra Mancktelow’s series No Blak in the Union Jack takes its title from British academic Paul Gilroy’s seminal book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. First published in 1987, Gilroy’s text remains a forceful critique of the racial politics of postwar Britain, arguing that questions of race were persistently marginalised by intellectuals and politicians across the political spectrum. His analysis exposes how national identity is constructed through exclusion, denial, and selective memory.
Mancktelow extends this critical framework into an Australian context. Flags carry multiple meanings depending on who encounters them, but the Union Jack, reconfigured through a Blak lens, speaks directly to the histories of colonialism, dispossession, and the ongoing persecution of Indigenous peoples in Australia. Rather than treating the flag as a static symbol, Mancktelow approaches it as a site of contestation, one that can be materially and conceptually reworked.
Her unique ink print of the Union Jack is produced using tarleton, a stiff, open-weave fabric traditionally used to wipe ink from an etching plate. This material choice operates as a pointed metaphor for colonial assimilation, a process that sought to erase difference under the guise of absorption and control. By rubbing ink back into the fabric, Mancktelow performs a deliberate reversal. Blakness is reinserted into the flag, not as decoration, but as an act of resistance. The resulting image holds the trace of its making, a transfer of ink that mirrors the transfer of ideas, histories, and power. What emerges is a charged encounter between a dominant colonial emblem and the persistence of Indigenous presence.
Shown alongside Dylan Mooney’s The Story of My People, Mancktelow’s work enters into a broader dialogue around sovereignty, identity, and cultural survival. Together, the works foreground the lived realities behind national symbols, insisting that histories of violence and resilience cannot be separated from the images that nations use to define themselves.
