Collective Shout's Board of Directors and Staff wrote to the Council for the Order of Australia to request the termination of photographer and artist Bill Henson’s appointment as Officer of the Order.
We write on behalf of Collective Shout, a grassroots, not-for-profit movement dedicated to challenging the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture.
We wish to express our strong objection to the appointment by the Australia Day Council of photographer and artist Bill Henson as an Officer of the Order of Australia as announced in the 2024 honours. Mr Henson was awarded the honour for “distinguished service to the visual arts as a photographer and to the promotion of Australian culture.”
The Council will be aware that, over the years, Mr Henson has produced and exhibited many pieces that include repeated nude images of children, prepubescents, pubescents, and early teens. A number of these young people are posed and styled in a manner that appears sexually suggestive or who appear to be cast in the role of seducer and seduced. Some images include representations of violence and violation, with adolescents depicted as bloodied, bruised, distressed, and corpse-like.
Indeed, images of the young girl at the centre of the controversy in 2007 are included in a 2019 publication (in an open-out ‘centrefold’ section), one of the many published books by Mr Henson in the public domain Bill Henson - Principio Era.
We also understand that the conditions under which these photographs were produced warrant consideration by the Council. In 2008, Mr Henson was subject to a high-profile police investigation related to publication of a child nude associated with a Sydney exhibition of his work. In the course of that investigation, evidence emerged of practices that had been adopted by Mr Henson in identifying ‘models’ from a local primary school. (See: Book claims Henson scoured playground for models; Julia Gillard joins row over Bill Henson school lurk; Bill Henson, the unlikely poster boy for liberalism; Parents back Bill Henson and principal who allowed kid-scouting; The Henson Case by David Marr (Text Publishing, 2008. pp 108-111).
In our opinion, the techniques adopted to produce Mr Henson's celebrated images are directly at odds with child protection goals and do not reflect Australian community values, or the healthy promotion of Australian culture as Mr Henson’s citation suggests. This is especially the case during a period when greater public attention and concern is rightly being focused on issues of child protection and the curse of sexual violence.
The award in this instance undermines the important work done by the Australia Day Council over recent years to acknowledge and celebrate citizens who have fought against child abuse and sexual violence (such as Denise and Bruce Morcombe of the Daniel Morcombe Foundation, Rosie Batty and Bravehearts Founder Hetty Johnston). In the circumstances, and especially given heightened social awareness of the issue of systemic child abuse, we believe Mr Henson’s appointment as an Officer of the Order is out-of-step with community values, offensive and brings the Order of Australia into disrepute.
As an organisation supported by thousands of Australians committed to ending the sexual exploitation of women and children, we call on the Governor-General to revoke Mr Henson’s award in the interests of preserving the reputation of the Order.
Collective Shout intends to make this letter, and its concerns, public.
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