“My father didn’t talk about his family at all much and when he did I just thought it was boring and didn’t really listen to them,” he says. “And of course after he passed away it’s too late to ask anything. So there was a kind of a secrecy that makes me want to know more. And my mother also didn’t really talk about family much and I didn’t really have a connection with my mother’s parents.”

However, over the past few years, Moore’s intensive research has turned up some startling facts about his family, including the story of his great-great-grandfather, William Moore, who was sentenced to death in 1819 aged just 17 for stealing cloth from the house of a tailor. The sentence was commuted to transportation and he arrived in New South Wales the following year, going on to receive his ticket of leave and set up as a pastoralist.

Then there was his great uncle on his mother’s side who, in 1933, accidentally killed his own father in a dispute over unpaid wages. He served nine months in Brisbane’s Boggo Road Jail for the killing.

“I thought the judge was kind of sympathetic,” says Moore. “When you read the transcript [the judge] thought he’d be corrupted by the white prisoners in the jail and kind of took a bit of sympathy on him.”

Through the lens of these and many other personal stories, Moore hopes his work, which opens in Venice on April 20, will reveal wider truths about the nature of identity and the resilience of First Nations people here and elsewhere.

“It’s all about people, place and time and that fact we’re all connected in a larger kinship system,” he says. “I think if we go back far enough, we all have a common ancestor, so we’re all one and part of the same humanity.”

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