Exhibition Opening | Finding Eliza & Tracks

Join us for the official opening of two locally curated exhibitions, Finding Eliza & Tracks. 

This Reconciliation Week 2026 HBRG launches 2 new exhibitions with significance to local Butchulla Country and Community that we invite you to experience through history, performance discussion and connection. 

Finding Eliza
Finding Eliza at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery marks the 10-year anniversary of Professor Larissa Behrendt’s (Yuwaalaraay/Gamilaroi) seminal book Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling (2016). Presented on Butchulla country, the exhibition revisits the story of Eliza Fraser, not to retell her account, but to examine how her version of events was elevated, amplified, and mythologised within colonial culture. These sensationalised narratives cast the Butchulla people as figures of fear and savagery, legitimising violence, dispossession, and massacre, while silencing Butchulla law, knowledge, and lived experience.

Tracks
In both history and Lore, tracks have allowed Indigenous peoples to navigate Country through trade, song and spirit.
The significance of tracks left by ancestors continue to be honoured today by our community through ongoing cultural practices of art, ceremony, storytelling and leadership.
Coinciding with Reconciliation Week and NAIDOC Week 2026, Tracks celebrates the achievements of young Indigenous creatives and custodians across our region, making visible the footprints these leaders follow and the new pathways they forge.

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Image: Natasha Harth