The Pull of the Empire: Circular Collage as a Wiradjuri Method for Thinking With, and Against Colonial Visual Economies

This article presents a circular mixed-media collage, The Pull of the Empire , made after a research journey through Paris, Oxford, Cambridge and Amsterdam, and reads it as a site of inquiry rather than an illustration of findings. Three contact points anchor the reading: a Wiradjuri marara in the Pitt Rivers Museum, world maps inlaid in the floor of Amsterdam’s Royal Palace, and a Cambridge college admission letter. Structured by the seven principles of Waya Yindyamarra Songspiral Methodology (Rogers, 2025), it develops one analytic device, what the making knew before the writing, showing how compositional decisions produced findings before prose could.