The death of a young Canadian backpacker, whose body was surrounded by dingoes when it was found on a sand island off the Queensland coast, has lent a sense of tragic urgency to a work created for the Biennale of Sydney (14 March-14 June).
Piper James, 19, went for an early morning swim on K’gari, formerly known as Fraser Island, on 19 January. Shortly after, her body was discovered on the beach.
A 6 March ruling by the Queensland Coroner’s Court found Piper James had drowned after being attacked by dingoes.
On the same day, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported a spokesman for the coroner’s court as saying: “The investigation into Piper’s death is ongoing, and no further information can be provided at this time”.
Dingo sanctuary
K’gari covers 166,000 hectares and is a sanctuary for around 200 protected dingoes, which roam the island in packs. Authorities have yet to establish the cause of James’s death, which may have been by drowning.
While the 400,000 people who visit K’gari every year are legally forbidden from feeding the dingoes, some still do. This emboldens the animals and eventually makes them aggressive around humans—they tear tents and break into cool boxes to get human food, and are capable of killing people.
In 2001, a nine-year-old boy was killed by dingoes on the island, which led to the culling of around 30 dingoes that had become used to people and displayed threatening behaviour.
Following the death of James, several dingoes are said to have been euthanised. Local Indigenous people, who consider the dingoes to be sacred, reportedly said they had not been consulted about this before it happened.
One of K’gari’s dingoes, which visitors must be wary of
Photo: Luis/Adobe Stock.
The sound of howling
Cannupa Hanska Luger, a New Mexico-based artist, was unaware of James’s death when The Art Newspaper spoke to him about his Sydney Biennale work, which references dingoes. The artist said the news was of great interest to him because his work, Volume III White Bay Power Station, created especially for the biennial, had involved making seven ceramic dingo skulls.
Hanska Luger’s skulls incorporate whistles whose sound, produced by a “mechanical lung”, will echo throughout the cavernous interior of the former White Bay Power Station, one of the key sites for the biennial. The decommissioned power station lies just across Sydney Harbour from the central business district. Volume III White Bay Power Station sounds to visitors as if the dingoes are howling, Hanska Luger says.
Born on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, Hanska Luger is Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota. He is one of 15 First Nations artists from around the world who were invited to exhibit in the 2026 Sydney Biennale, under the auspices of the Cartier Foundation. Hoor Al Qasimi, the biennial’s artistic director, chose the First Nations artists, while Bruce Johnson McLean, the Cartier Foundation’s First Nations curatorial fellow, says it was his role to realise individual artists’ commissions. He describes Hanska Luger’s dingo skulls work as illuminating ideas around Indigenous resilience and persistence.
Johnson McLean, from the Wierdi people of the Birri Gubba Nation in central Queensland, says he has camped “many, many times” on K’gari. “You always have to be careful of, particularly, the wild packs of dingoes in those camp areas. I’ve also been to lots of places in the desert where dingoes are almost entirely domesticated and act like pets. But there are wild populations that act very differently.”
Dingoes not the only danger
Other animals can also be a danger to the unwary, says Johnson McLean, who was chased by monitor lizards when he was growing up in south-east Queensland. His encounter was ultimately a result of people at campsites feeding the lizards, which grow to well over a metre long.
Hanska Luger says the dingo, “nearing extinction, and then on the rise”, felt like the right animal to engage with for his biennial piece. “The major problem is that we don’t know how to value wild species in our society,” he adds. The artist’s ceramic dingo skulls have gold-leafed teeth, reflecting the need to value elements of the natural world before they are gone.
