“Stockdale’s 2005 series of photographic portraits, Familija, emulated early photographic portrait processes in which subjects posed in front of backdrops of exotic locations. For her backgrounds Stockdale created a series of paintings, Terra Nullius, which appropriated well known colonial landscapes by John Glover (1767-1849) and Augustus Earle (1793-1838) but left out the representation of the Indigenous inhabitants. Several of these beautifully constructed photographs reference important portraits of well-known Aboriginal people of the time, including Earle’s Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales (c.1826), and Thomas Bock’s Mathinna (1842). Stockdale substituted non-Indigenous models for the original Indigenous subjects, playfully ridiculing the notion of terra nullius as a farcical construct.”

_Bryony Nainby, 2016