Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes: Islands of Empire 3030172899, 9783030172893

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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN MEMORY STUDIES

Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes Islands of Empire Kate McMillan

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series Editors Andrew Hoskins University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK John Sutton Department of Cognitive Science Macquarie University Macquarie, Australia

The nascent field of Memory Studies emerges from contemporary trends that include a shift from concern with historical knowledge of events to that of memory, from ‘what we know’ to ‘how we remember it’; changes in generational memory; the rapid advance of technologies of memory; panics over declining powers of memory, which mirror our fascination with the possibilities of memory enhancement; and the development of trauma narratives in reshaping the past. These factors have contributed to an intensification of public discourses on our past over the last thirty years. Technological, political, interpersonal, social and cultural shifts affect what, how and why people and societies remember and forget. This groundbreaking new series tackles questions such as: What is ‘memory’ under these conditions? What are its prospects, and also the prospects for its interdisciplinary and systematic study? What are the conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for its investigation and illumination? More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14682

Kate McMillan

Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes Islands of Empire

Kate McMillan Culture, Media & Creative Industries King’s College London London, UK

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies ISBN 978-3-030-17289-3 ISBN 978-3-030-17290-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17290-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Kate McMillan/Getty images Cover design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Empire of Islands: Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes 1 Part I  Islands 2 Islands of Empire: Geographies of Forgetting 17 3 The Global South: Disappearing Beneath the Equator 31 4 Imaging the Island: Interrogating the Settler Colonial Experience 77 Part II  Art, Memory and Unforgetting 5 Art and Unforgetting: The Role of Art and Memory in Postcolonial Landscapes 105 6 The Art Object as a Memory Trigger 141

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Contents

Part III  Art Practice as Resistance 7 Art Practice as Resistance/Defying Forgetting 165 8 Listening as Practice: Methodologies in Settler Societies 189 Index 215

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.6

Yuki Kihara, After Tsunami Galu Afi, Lalomanu, 2013 (Courtesy of Yuki Kihara and Milford Galleries Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand) Kate McMillan, History’s debris (and things you concealed and I tried to forget), 2006 digital print on polysynthetic fabric, sound (Courtesy of the author) Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venice (infected), 2015–2017. Single-channel video, Ultra HD, colour 7.1 sound, 64 minutes (Courtesy of Lisa Reihana and New Zealand at Venice) Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venice (infected), 2015–2017. Single-channel video, Ultra HD, colour 7.1 sound, 64 minutes (Courtesy of Lisa Reihana and New Zealand at Venice) Lisa Reihana, Emissaries, 2015–2017. Installation view, John Curtin Gallery (2018) featuring Sir Joseph Banks cabinets and recreation of Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Savages of the Pacific Ocean) (1804–1805) wallpaper (Courtesy of Lisa Reihana and photograph courtesy of John Curtin Gallery) Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venice (infected), 2015–2017. Single-channel video, Ultra HD, colour 7.1 sound, 64 minutes (Courtesy of Lisa Reihana and New Zealand at Venice)

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.7

Lisa Reihana, Emissaries, 2015–2017. Installation view, John Curtin Gallery (2018). Perspectival Tubes [I, II, III, VI, V + Yoke Holders], 2017, antique telescopes + digital photograph + LED driver. Cooks Folly (36000), 2017, Diasec printed on Canson Archival Rag. Emissary No. 1 Chief Mourner, 2017, digital photograph (Courtesy of Lisa Reihana and photograph courtesy of John Curtin Gallery) Fig. 4.8 Yuki Kihara, First Impressions: Paul Gauguin, 2018 Still; HD video; 16:9; 13-minute duration. 5-part episodic talk-show series. Commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen (Courtesy of Yuki Kihara, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen and Milford Galleries Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand) Fig. 4.9 Yuki Kihara, After Cyclone Evan, Lelata, 1 of 18 in the series Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 2013 (Courtesy of Yuki Kihara and Milford Galleries Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand) Fig. 4.10 Kate McMillan, Islands of Incarceration, 2010. Cockatoo Island, Biennale of Sydney (Courtesy of the author) Fig. 5.1 Kate McMillan, In the Shadow of the Past, This World Knots Tight, 2012 (Courtesy of the author and of the photographer, John Barrett-Lennard) Fig. 5.2 Julie Gough, Observance (film still), 2012 video projection HDMI, H264, 16:9, colour, sound, 17:09 minutes edited by Jemma Rea (Courtesy of Julie Gough) Fig. 5.3 Sidney Nolan, Untitled (Calf Carcass in Tree), 1952 archival inkjet print (Courtesy of Sidney Nolan Trust and Art for Words) Fig. 5.4 Julie Gough, Traveller, 2013 HDMI video projection, 16:9, 8:43 minutes, colour, sound edited by Jemma Rea (Courtesy of Julie Gough) Fig. 5.5 Julie Gough, The Lost World (part 1), 2013 HDMI video projection, 16:9, 13 minutes, colour, sound edited by Jemma Rea (Courtesy of Julie Gough) Fig. 6.1 Julie Gough, Ode, 2014. HDMI video projection, H264, 20,000 kbps, 16:9, sound, colour, 5:00 minutes, edited by Jemma Rea (Courtesy of Julie Gough) Fig. 6.2 Yhonnie Scarce Thunder, Raining, Poison, 2017. Blown glass yams, dimensions variable (Courtesy of Yhonnie Scarce) Fig. 6.3 Yhonnie Scarce Thunder, Raining, Poison, 2017. Blown glass yams, dimensions variable (Courtesy of Yhonnie Scarce)

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List of Figures   

Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 8.6

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Yhonnie Scarce, The Silence of Others, 2014. Blown glass, archival photographs dimensions variable (Courtesy of Yhonnie Scarce) 156 Yhonnie Scarce, The Silence of Others, 2014. Blown glass, archival photographs dimensions variable (Courtesy of Yhonnie Scarce) 157 Yhonnie Scarce, Breakaway Blue Danube series, 2015. Blown glass 60 × 25 × 25 cm (approx.) each, unique works (Courtesy of Yhonnie Scarce) 159 Karla Dickens, Looking at You VII, 2017. Inkjet Print, 100 × 100 cm (Photograph courtesy of Karla Dickens and Andrew Baker, Art Dealer, Brisbane) 168 Photograph of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and Vincent Lingiari by Mervyn Bishop (Courtesy of Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Commonwealth of Australia) 172 Petitions of the Aboriginal people of Yirrkala 14 August and 28 August 1963, Parliament House, Canberra (Photograph courtesy of House of Representatives, Commonwealth Parliament of Australia) 173 Richard Bell, Embassy, 2013–present, at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, September 2016 (Image courtesy of the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane) 176 Karla Dickens, Assimilated Warriors, 2014 (Photograph courtesy of Karla Dickens and Andrew Baker, Art Dealer, Brisbane) 180 Karla Dickens, Guardians, 2014 (Photograph courtesy of Karla Dickens and Andrew Baker, Art Dealer, Brisbane) 185 Kate McMillan, lost, 2008 John Curtin Gallery, digital print on polysynthetic fabric, sound (Courtesy of the author) 195 Kate McMillan (detail) Islands of Incarceration, 2010 Biennale of Sydney, digital print on polysynthetic fabric, sound (Courtesy of the author) 199 Kate McMillan (film still) Instructions for another future (listening with my feet), 2018 (Courtesy of the author) 203 Kate McMillan (film still) Instructions for another future (listening with my feet), 2018 (Courtesy of the author) 204 Kate McMillan (installation view) Instructions for another future (listening with my feet), 2018 (Courtesy of the author) 205 Megan Cope, Untitled (Old Kahibah), 2018 Interactive sound sculpture (Courtesy of Megan Cope) 208

CHAPTER 1

Empire of Islands: Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes

The ideas for this book have been unfolding for a number of years, but it began as a written text during research for my Ph.D. in 2010. Initially, I was specifically examining contemporary art and memory in relation to Wadjemup/Rottnest Island—a carceral island off the coast of Perth, Western Australia—that housed Aboriginal men and boys from across the state for almost 100 years. This largely concealed and minimised history has enabled a flourishing tourist community and subsequently become central to the identity of Perth’s people. However, the mechanisms of imprisonment, and the way in which these histories have been conveniently forgotten, point to much larger, overarching themes in contemporary colonial Australia and other colonial spaces. This book couples this earlier research with broader explorations into island histories in the global south. Using the lens of contemporary art practices, I explore the work of artists who engage with these island landscapes and trouble the stories that have been written around them. Through linking island geographies, colonial history, memory work, feminist and practice-led research methods, I hope to underline the crucial role that contemporary art plays in understanding identity and nationhood. This book is told through the lens of my own perspective of an artist. This sometimes difficult role of artist/writer ultimately means that I can offer unique insights into working, making and thinking. Like the argument I make for listening with our feet, my insight comes from ‘getting close’, rather than seeking objective distance. In Chapters 2 and 3, © The Author(s) 2019 K. McMillan, Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17290-9_1

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2  K. McMILLAN

I specifically address the histories of islands of the British Empire. The naming and exploration of these histories provide a structural strategy to ward off forgetting and to address the context for the concerns of the artists explored. The group of artists in this book have had long and diligent careers problematising dominant cultures and then finding gentle and persuasive mechanisms to address violent and traumatic histories. They include Julie Gough (Tebrikunna); Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tū); Karla Dickens (Wiradjuri); Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha/Nukunu); Megan Cope (Quandamooka); and Yuki Kihara (Sāmoan/Japanese). I have tried to tell the stories of these women with respect and care, recognising how influential their approaches and practices have been on me as an artist and thinker. Selecting artists that are all women was an unconscious choice to begin with, but increasingly and finally a recognition that women work in particularly revolutionary ways—ways which draw me to their practices. Female artists often work more collaboratively; they listen a lot, work on smaller-scale projects and move gently, more enquiringly (self-critically?) through their research. Of course, this is a generalisation, but it has certainly been my observation from working as an artist for almost thirty years. The artists herein don’t always suggest or aim to provide solutions to complex problems, but their projects and practices often encourage audiences to ‘sit in’ their ideas and engage in discussion. As first nation women, they find their gender is not their biggest struggle, although it compounds the extent and impactfulness of their work. As Griselda Pollock noted in her seminal 1996 text, Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, ‘Feminism is not for gender what Marxism is for class, and postcolonial theory for race. First, there is a range of feminisms, in varying alliances with the analyses of what oppresses women’.1 This more complicated, intersectional and layered approach provides a certain optimism and clues about how we might approach the world today as we inadequately respond to the Anthropocene, war and injustice on unprecedented levels. The artists I explore use diverse and heavily symbolic materials that almost always employ disruptive but fragile processes of working and presenting ideas. They don’t lock themselves into material choices or 1 Pollock, G (ed.) (1996) ‘Generations and Geographies’. In Visual Arts: Feminist Readings. Routledge, p. 3.

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subject matter. Instead, their work emerges from a long tradition of storytelling and inclusivity. Some of these artists have been able to support themselves through their practice, but most have ignored the criteria of the art market, and none of them employ paint as part of their primary practice. This in and of itself is to take a position in the dynamic of ‘success’. It is instead the social and critical potential of the work that drives them. The women whose work I explore work in the global south, and I argue that ‘south-ness’ flavours an attitude towards working and thinking. Their relationship with the landscape is not European—the eye/land pairing identified by cultural geographer John Wylie is part of the dismantling capacities of their work.2 In particular, they use islands to form strategies and ideological frameworks for thinking through history. For Yuki Kihara, there is a vast difference in the European consideration of Sāmoa as a tiny island and how she envisages it as part of a sea of islands. On the surface, this position is beautifully poetic, but it is also deeply political. As Epeli Hau`Ofa notes, if we look at the myths, legends and oral traditions, and the cosmologies of the peoples of Oceania, it will become evident that they did not conceive of their world in such microscopic proportions. Their universe comprised not only land surfaces, but the surrounding ocean as far as they could traverse and exploit it, the underworld with its fire-controlling and earth-shaking denizens, and the heavens above with their hierarchies of powerful gods and named stars and constellations that people could count on to guide their ways across the seas. Their world was anything but tiny. They thought big and recounted their deeds in epic proportions.3 For Kihara then, the ocean is a landscape too—it connects, rather than isolating communities across Oceania. As Nicholas Thomas (2014) suggests, islanders are far from landlocked peoples but are constituted by outward worldly cultures that build communities based on voyaging.4 For Kihara and others, this perspective provides a framework to counter hegemonic views and practices. There is a recognition therefore that a priori knowledge already provides a framework for displacing colonial mentality. 2 Wylie, J (2014) ‘Vanishing Points: An Essay on Landscape, Memory and Belonging’. Irish Geography, 50 (1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.2014/igj.v50i1.1256. 3 Hau`Ofa, E (1993) ‘Our Sea of Islands’. In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands. 4 Thomas, N (2014) Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Central to the oeuvre of these artists is the contestation of the land, and specifically colonial invasions and land theft by the British. Their island homes are as varied as any landscape—the almost European climate of Tasmania in which Julie Gough’s stories are situated, through to the tropical islands of North Stradbroke where Megan Cope works from. Yet the islandness—the boundedness of these spaces—has enabled a distinct sense of place and locality to their works. Cope, for example, uses her island to escape the ‘white noise’ of the mainland. I have been in long discussions with the artists throughout the research—wanting to include their voice wherever possible and simply enjoying the generous and creative conversations that have unfolded. Key concerns that link them have become increasingly clear. Perhaps the most compelling thread is one of journey. This refers to the lives of the artists themselves and the difficult pathways to self-actualisation—in many places being an artist is an act of resistance still, and this is true of all the women I discuss. These narrative threads have led them back to ancestral homes and languages, across seas to excavate archives that hold the histories of colonisation, and back again. They have journeyed to shift and change museum and contemporary art world structures that have situated their stories at the periphery for too long. The situatedness of first nation histories has changed significantly since I have left Australia for London in 2012. Exhibitions such as Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia; With Secrecy and Despatch at Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales (2016); Sovereignty at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne (2016); and TARNANTHI at the Art Gallery of South Australia (2017) have altered the landscape of contemporary practice that it is at times unrecognisable from Australia that I began my career in as a young artist in the early 1990s. This has been in part because of incredibly powerful, largely female, curators such as Brenda Croft who I interned under at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in the early 2000s. Croft expanded the collection and support for first nation artists throughout Western Australia in unprecedented ways to build one of the most important state art collections in the country. A new generation of curators such as Kimberley Moulton and Clothilde Bullen—both women who come from or who have made deep connections with Western Australia in various ways. When you consider curatorial practices across the global south, women have always been curators, in the broadest definition of the term, of histories and people

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and stories left behind. They have been fierce fighters against injustice and used the platform of cultural practices to create pathways for better futures and to minimise the losses of the past. This strength and resilience is an act of survival in colonial spaces. In Australia, we see ourselves as apart from the world—the only nation that consumes an entire continent. It is also the only commonwealth nation of 200 that still does not have a treaty with its first nation peoples. It is therefore both wedded to Britain, but attempts to exist as separate from it in peculiar and unique ways. Like many former colonies of the British Empire, it is a land full of contradiction; it enjoys incredibly high living standards, except if you are Indigenous, and then, you can expect some of the worst in the world. Australians also consider themselves relaxed and laid back despite being one of the most over-governed and policed countries living conditions imaginable. It considers itself as being a young nation, yet is home to the longest uninterrupted culture on the planet. I argue that role of the island in the global south is defining and a crucial ingredient in the forgetting of history and the ‘upside down-ness’ of settler engagement with place. Anyone who has spent time on colonial land can testify to the layers of history one stands on. My feeling of being in Australia is one of a ‘sunny-disquiet’. If you sit still for long enough, you can feel its troubled, unresolved history. Most people don’t sit still; artists do; artists listen to place; we are a litmus test for the state of our island nations. My research argues that artists uncover place in unique ways. We work across disciplines, reaching into archives, listening to elders, rummaging through the detritus of landscape, re-working technology and incorporating almost-lost languages. Everything discipline is up for consideration, and so we must believe that if anyone is forging a path through the Anthropocene, it is the artist. But new ideas don’t evolve just from the viewing and conceptualisation of art, but through the making of it, and I have been keen to discuss the processes of working with all the artists included in this research. In this sense, I hope to contribute to how we consider arts-led research, that I can underline its crucial and urgent role and that the artists’ voice is given space. I argue that artists have long been resisting the forgetting of colonial history, parallel to transformative thinkers such as W.E.H. Stanner who in 1968 wrote about The Great Australian Silence. This is still true of many colonial spaces, but Australia in particular, who as historian Henry Reynolds argues still continues to mythologise a peaceful settlement and

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a denial of the brutal frontier wars.5 Yet even the denial is denied. Stanley Cohen writes that ‘denial is always partial, some information is always registered. This paradox or doubleness – knowing and not knowing – is at the heart of the concept’.6 In the case of islands of the global south, the silencing of the histories through the partial knowing and the subsequent disinterest in knowing more has been instrumental to settler disengagement with the impact of colonialism. The lack of infiltration of first nation histories into mainstream consciousness mirrors what Nancy Tuana and Catherine Sullivan call the ‘epistemology of ignorance’, a willingness to forget, a silently negotiated concealment which affirms community sentiment and eradicates any space for it to be called into question.7 This not-knowing and knowing is evident in almost all issues that relate to first nation histories. Colishaw states that in rare mainstream discussions of, for instance, the Australian Stolen Generations whereby Aboriginal children were removed from their families for five generations (and arguably still are)8 or the ‘dispersal’ of Aboriginal ­peoples from their land and subsequent policies of incarceration that; these histories seem to present with ease a view of our own past that fills us, as readers, with horror at the same time as it distances us from it. How is it that in reading these accounts we position ourselves on the side of the Aborigines and identify our forebears as the enemy? These violent and racist men could be our grandfathers and they certainly left us something, if not the land they took or the wealth they made from it, then the culture they were developing.9 I argue that in colonial spaces, it is often artists functioning as singular voices against these traumatic histories and the contemporary refusal to remember them. Like the German Nachgeborenen (those born after the Second World War), contemporary settler life in the global south is 5 Reynolds, 6 Cohen,

H (1999) Why Weren’t We Told? London: Penguin Books. S (2001) States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Polity Press,

p. 22. 7 Tuana, N & Sullivan, C (2007) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. New York: Suny Press. 8 For a thorough account of the Stolen Generations in Australia that saw multiple generations of Aboriginal children taken from their families and institutionalised as part of policies that sought to eliminate the ‘dying race’ see Haebich, A (2000) Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. 9 Colishaw, G (1992) ‘Studying Aborigines: Changing Canons in Anthropology and History’. Journal of Australian Studies, 16, 20–31, 26–27.

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stained by the consequences of oppressive policies that are constantly played out through the disadvantaged circumstances of first nation existence. I argue that by ignoring the residue of the past, we are implicated as if we also bore first-hand witness to settler atrocities. The work of the artists I explore shows how creative strategies have resisted this forgetting. These traces of history live on and haunt all of us, implicate us, the Nachgeborenen of the global south. The work of artists signals an urgency for us to remember. In order to provide a framework for the places and histories these artists engage with, I have broken up the book into three sections: Islands; Art, Memory and Unforgetting; and finally Art Practice as Resistance. The first section Islands provides the lens through which the remainder of the book is situated. In the first instance, it traces an historical arch of islands used by the English and British Empire from the seventeenth century onwards. This includes, but is not limited to, slaving islands, islands used for biological experiments, prisons and militarily strategic islands such as the Falklands. The British in their almost 300-year land grab understood the role and function of an island. Being islanders themselves gave them the edge over other empires such as the Portuguese, Spanish and French. As Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith note in their introduction to Islands in History and Representation, that as far back as the fourteenth century, British poet ‘John Gaunt thought of England as divinely favoured “a fortress built by nature herself”’.10 These are not new histories, and my role as a non-historian is not to generate new contributions to the canon of history. Rather, it is to consider existing historical research in a new way—to make links between the island nation of Britain and how it used this knowledge to expand and secure the project of empire. At its widest point, Britain is only 470 kilometres wide and less than 1000 kilometres long, its citizens always at proximity to its edges. As historian Paul Readman notes in considering the psychology of the British people that ‘the sea, then, was British: it carried the trade that sustained the workshop of the world, it helped provide the means of exploration and colonial expansion; it was seen as the happy hunting ground of the Royal Navy and nursery of the national character. Britain’s relationship with the sea promoted what might be termed a discrete

10 Edmond, R & Smith, V (2003) Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge, p. 2.

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sense of islandhood’.11 This research situates this in ways not explored before. It suggests that through understanding the island-grabbing, seafaring mechanisms of the coloniser, we can better understand the legacy of these practices. I argue that the residue of empire is its penultimate carceral island legacy, seen most recently in the terrifying examples of Nauru and Manus Islands, currently used to indefinitely incarcerate refugees trying to claim asylum in Australia. I argue that the remoteness of the islands of the South Pacific has enabled a forgetting and minimising of history that could not have been achieved in northern geographies. This first section concludes with various projects that have interrogated the islandness of the global south and the intersection of colonial invaders: my own work for the 2010 Biennale of Sydney titled Islands of Incarceration which explored the massacre of almost 1000 Wardandi Nyoongar people in Western Australia, presented on Cockatoo Island, Sydney’s first carceral island; Lisa Reihana and her epic retelling of Cooks voyages for the Aotearoa/New Zealand Pavilion of 2017 Venice Biennale in the exhibition Emissaries; and Yuki Kihara’s most recent commission, First Impressions: Paul Gaugin, which interrupts Paul Gaugin’s Island legacy in the South Pacific. The second section concerns Art, Memory and Unforgetting. I aim to firmly situate the practice of first nation artists working in the global south as urgent contributors to memory work. I have used the term unforgetting instead of ‘remembering’ quite deliberately. Building on American theories around epistemologies of ignorance such as those explored by Charles Mills, Nancy Tuana and Catherine O’Sullivan, I and the artists explored are specifically interested in deliberate, structural and systemic forgetting. Unforgetting is therefore a verb, a deliberate action to undo what has been deliberately done. In recent years, various books and exhibitions have been dedicated to the exploration of contemporary art and memory such as Scanlan’s (2013) Memory: Encounters with the strange and the familiar and Ian Farr’s edited text (2012) Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art. This book distinguishes itself from these explorations to artworks that provoke tensions in the boundaries between remembering and forgetting as well as contested histories that seek to undermine ongoing colonialism in the making of history and

11 Readman, P (2014) ‘“The Cliffs Are Not Cliffs”: The Cliffs of Dover and National Identities in Britain c1750–c1950’. History: The Journal of the Historical Association. Wiley.

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nationhood. It suggests that there are distinct ways of understanding memory work in colonial spaces. Nonetheless, it draws on scholarly practices that largely emerge from Europe and North America. Research on Holocaust memory work such as Jessica Rapson research on memorialisation and topographies of remembering has been crucial in the field.12 Yet Germany was a nation forced to undertake its own memory work—Australia, Britain and other colonial landscapes never have. Instead, it has been the undertaking of individual scholars, historians, artists and activists to work with the traces of what we have left and to largely wage an ongoing battle with the structural amnesia that is endemic across all layers of society. For artists such as Julie Gough, the landscape, on the one hand, contains everything that defines and informs cultural belief, but it is also the place in which great violence was enacted and then concealed. Her work carries many things; like identity, it is complex, intersectional and changing. Ann McGrath uses the term ‘long history, deep time’ to attempt a way of articulating the vast and temporal nature of Indigenous time.13 Julie Gough’s work, in particular her films, encapsulates this sense—that this moment could be set within a seemingly endless timeline of circularity. It is now, but it is always; it is both on the surface and it penetrates deep within landscape and self. Like a Greek tragedy, it uses humour and self-deprecation, but ultimately it leaves a sense of sadness and loss. Gough’s practice is a constant battle with memory and forgetting. Contested landscapes are littered with clues. I suggest that artists are amongst those who can see these traces and the signposts to our current crises, and those imminent. In considerations of these traces, I have, in Chapter 6, appropriated the ideas of Marcel Proust and involuntary memory to develop a concept I call Proust in the Antipodes.14 Proust enabled Europeans to think of time in the way first nation peoples in Australia and across the globe always have—namely that it is not linear and that smells and objects can take us on vast journey’s back to key experiences that lay otherwise forgotten. Proust also enabled the real and 12 Rapson, J (2015) Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice. Berghahn Press. 13 McGrath, A (2015) ‘Deep Histories in Time, or Crossing the Great Divide?’ In Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place. Canberra: ANU Press. 14 Proust, M & Carter, W (ed.) (2013) Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1. Yale University Press.

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the imaginary to cohabitate, which is particularly seductive to artists who almost always, certainly in the case of the artists explored herein, create new imaginings formed from the residue of history, objects and their own experiences. I therefore take an imaginative leap by situating Proust in the antipodes and enjoy the oddness of including a sickly, French man from the early twentieth century alongside powerful first nation women like Yhonnie Scarce. Scarce was born in Woomera, a town established in 1947 to facilitate a British Nuclear Testing range during the Cold War. Maralinga, the main testing site, is country to Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal peoples who were ‘somewhat’ r­ elocated prior to the tests, but continue to suffer accelerated rates of various cancers. When the British sought to identify sites for nuclear tests, they eliminated various islands in the South Pacific; the ‘empty’ desert of ­ Australia was instead selected—testimony to the enduring attitude of terra nullius well into the twentieth century. Yhonnie Scarce constructs hauntingly beautiful empty glass vessels made from the sand collected around Woomera. Her work is a Proustian umbilical cord back to place, underlining the timeless reservoir of knowledge, poisoned not just by initial colonial invasion but by endemic environmental destruction that has never desisted. I couple Proust’s ‘art as memory trigger’, with the much more ancient idea of Tjukurrpa—a central desert Anangu word that refers to the creation time, but is not an historical period, rather one that is being constantly updated—and is passed on through memorised epic stories. Ian McLean calls them Dreaming Saga’s, referring to the vast, complex Homeric-style poems that spread across the 250 nations on what is also called the continent of Australia.15 For to be a first nation artist in the world today is to have many identities, to be versed in ancient and new cultures. Perhaps this is why the work of artists such as Scarce and Gough so compellingly speaks to all of humanity, well beyond the psychogeographic borders of the global south. In the final section, Art Practice as Resistance, I examine the work of Wiradjuri women, Karla Dickens. Her work is perhaps the most fiercely situated of all the artists discussed herein. I place her, as I could all the

15 McLean, I (2016) Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., p. 16.

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artists, as part of a timeline of the civil rights movement in Australia. Dickens’ unapologetically political work combines various objects one may associate with the traditions of the European Surrealists ­alongside her first nation knowledge of ritualised object making. Her works include masks reminiscent of Klu Klux Klan paraphernalia, chastity belts encrusted with rusty detritus and text-based works that appropriate the racialised language of colonial Australia. Dickens objects provide many portals to many pasts, highlighting the soup pot of injustice for first nation women. Like all the artists contained in this book, her work is an act of resistance. Australia was never ceded by Aboriginal people, and like the Mabo and Wik high court ruling of the 1980s and 1990s testify, Aboriginal people have prior claim recognised in both law and lore. I conclude this section with the work of Quandamooka artist Megan Cope. Coupling her recent foray into sound-based sculptures with my ongoing research into what I call listening with your feet, I show how listening can provide an ethical framework for making in colonial landscapes. ‘Listening with your feet’ is a place-based engagement that combines observation and listening practices as a more nuanced alternative to the often aggressive, ‘helicopter style’ making that characterises much of the contemporary art world. Many of these ideas have arisen from researching colonial conflict with Indigenous people, in and around my home town of Perth/Whadjuk along the Swan River/Derbal Yiragan. It is also the result of a ten-year collaboration with sound ­artist and ­composer Cat Hope who has taught me to listen. Her interest in low-frequency sounds, literally the things we cannot hear, has been utterly formative. The chapter concludes with hope for the future, with the possibility that we may listen to the work of the women in this book as we try to identify instructions for better futures. The chapters of this book do not aim to represent what has happened in the centuries since European invasion specifically, but to examine the mechanisms of forgetting and to explore the residue of these traumas in the landscape and in the bodies of those who occupy it. To seek out a singular historical position would undermine the subtle seepages and subjective vantage points through which this residue leaks out and stains contemporary life. This idea responds to Deleuze’s principle of subjectivity that we are within ‘a world with no axis, no centers, no ups and downs….’ and that consciousness both ‘blocks and reflects the light-lines hitherto in every possible direction…’ and that subjectivity be designated

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as ‘the fold which bends and envelops the forces of the Outside’.16 The research, its methodologies and outcomes are then dialogues in subjectivities that are not fixed, but that move in empathic exchanges, open to the possibility of constant change. In conclusion, I hope that bringing these ideas and artists together in new ways will create a logic of thinking that befits contemporary times. That women, indigenous artists working in the global south, hidden from the art markets of the north, allow us to cut through the distracting quagmire of contemporary life and for art to bring us back down to the ground. As Marsha Meskimmon argues, ‘the powerful anti-colonial perspectives on time, subjects-in-process and aesthetics demonstrated by both the art and scholarly textual work, remind us that feminism remains a vital force for change’.17 This is a hopeful account for questions not yet asked, for environmental sustainability, for listening, for making art from our mind and heart, as well as our history. We push forward into the future, from deep history into long time.

Bibliography Boundas, C (1991) Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay in Human Nature. New York: Columbia University Press. Cohen, S (2001) States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press. Colishaw, G (1992) Studying Aborigines: Changing Canons in Anthropology and History. Journal of Australian Studies, 16, 20–31. Edmond, R & Smith, V (2003) Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge. Haebich, A (2000) Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Hau`Ofa, E (1993) ‘Our Sea of Islands’. In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands. Suva, Fiji: The University of the South Pacific. McGrath, A (2015) ‘Deep Histories in Time, or Crossing the Great Divide?’ In Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place. Canberra: ANU Press. McLean, I (2016) Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. 16 Boundas (1991) Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay in Human Nature. Columbia University Press, p. 5. 17 Meskimmon, M (2015) Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge, p. 184.

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Meskimmon, M (2015) Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics. London and New York: Routledge. Pollock, G (ed.) (1996) ‘Generations and Geographies’. In Visual Arts: Feminist Readings. London: Routledge. Proust, M & Carter, W (ed.) (2013) Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1. London: Yale University Press. Rapson, J (2015) Topographies of Suffering: Buchenwald, Babi Yar, Lidice. New York: Berghahn Press. Readman, P (2014) ‘“The Cliffs Are Not Cliffs”: The Cliffs of Dover and National Identities in Britain c1750–c1950’. History: The Journal of the Historical Association, 99 (335), 241–269. Reynolds, H (1999) Why Weren’t We Told? London: Penguin Books. Thomas, N (2014) Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tuana, N & Sullivan, C (2007) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. New York: Suny Press. Wylie, J (2014) ‘Vanishing Points: An Essay on Landscape, Memory and Belonging’. Irish Geography, 50 (1), 3–18.

PART I

Islands

CHAPTER 2

Islands of Empire: Geographies of Forgetting

By the end of the eighteenth century virtually every Atlantic island had been found, explored and exploited to the fullest extent possible. At this point, the insular imagination moved on to the Pacific, where a whole new mythical geography was in the process of formation.1 As John Gilles suggests, the exploration of the global south during the eighteenth century formed pathways of knowledge, power and colonialism that still exist today. When I arrived from England to the shores of Perth in 1982, Western Australia, I was almost eight years old. I had imagined, from the soft rural setting of Hampshire, that we would travel to the end of the earth and live on a boat in a swampy marshland not far from the beach, and that the school day would be punctuated by quick dips in the Indian Ocean. I have no idea where this image came from, but even today it sits so strongly in my mind’s eye that I can smell the sweaty jungle ­landscape I had conjured. Of course, the reality was incredibly different. As we drove through the central business district of 1980s Perth, I saw glass skyscrapers for the first time. Far from travelling to an ancient land, it was as if I had journeyed into the future. The landscape was parched and flat and the sun, unrelenting. Suburbs sprawled with little identity to the north and south, eradicating the nuances of the a priori Nyoongar land. 1 Gillis,

JR (2003) ‘Taking History Offshore: Atlantic Islands in European Minds 1400– 1800’. In Edmond, R & Smith, V (eds.) Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge.

© The Author(s) 2019 K. McMillan, Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17290-9_2

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Having to quickly correct my vision, arriving in a new country for the first time, with a commitment to not just visit, but to find a home, was perhaps one of the most defining experiences of my life. From a white settler perspective, it was a world ‘upside down’, magical and full of possibility. I would not travel back to the island of Great Britain until I was an adult. Instead, this place, Perth, on the edge of a great continent shaped my cultural identity. Like most white settlers, these edges marked by ‘beach-life’ are, as Greg Dening notes, the spaces of ‘beginnings and endings. They are the frontiers and boundaries of islands’.2 It was here that we connected to the European mythology of utopia and escape; the beach a reminder of the boundedness of the island and our distance from the rest of the world. As children, we thought almost nothing of Australia’s interior vastness, steeped in the history of hundreds of nations extending far back beyond any sense of time I could have understood. I was at great pains to relinquish my Englishness—to fit in. I lost my accent in a matter of weeks. Like many immigrants to Australia, I integrated. The family home was on the beach in the northern suburbs. At night, I could hear the Indian Ocean rolling against the shoreline like a natural clock lulling me to sleep. It is this sensation I miss more than any. The ocean, this ocean, sits within me wherever I go and it makes me happy to imagine it, which I do, daily. A contemporary sense of belonging was formed, like most settler Australians, distinct from the ancient connectedness of first nation cultures, but weighty nonetheless. From my home, I looked out from the edge of this vast island, to a smaller island that I would later come to know as Wadjemup, but what I first knew to be called Rottnest Island. It is from these early experiences of place, and of islands, that the impetus for this research and the ideas in my art practice were formed. Philosophically, island sites in the first instance have lent themselves to metaphorical and symbolic representation largely via their geographical instability and isolation. This perspective aided in constructing a somewhat provisional cultural and political identity for settler colonialists, providing a stark contrast to the embedded and ancient first nation histories that were supplanted. Islands in the global south were places of opportunity, but they also needed to be commandeered, conquered

2 Dening,

G (1980) Islands and Beaches. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, p. 32.

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and shaped for ‘civilisation’. The island was then always two things— beautiful/terrible paradise/prison stable/unstable, in this way it became the geographical and metaphorical pinnacle for what I call the ‘sunnydisquiet’ of settler colonial life. Since antiquity, islands have held a special place in literary texts and the visual arts. It is perhaps the weight of this history that drove explorers to search for the great southern land. The terror and possibility that unknown islands presented had captured the European imagination for centuries. In Greek mythology, they are central to every great moral story. David Lowenthal writes that our fascination is age-old, that ‘from Homer’s Odyssey to Augustine’s Confessions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, islands have served as archetypes of good and evil, dream and nightmare, despair and fulfillment’.3 In the geosophy of the middle ages, John R Gilles argues that ‘water represented chaos and islands were seen as fragments of an earth, once whole, which would remain in a fallen condition until redeemed at the end of time’.4 Thus from the period of the enlightenment onwards, islands were typically represented as marked spaces, as illustrative scenes of heightened significance. They were often surrogate spaces that made larger cultural concerns visible and gave shape to political fictions, historical processes and personal fantasies. The boundedness of the island, the possibility of taking them in at a glance, as well as their emptiness, made them spaces that could so easily be filled with ideological content. Artists have been giving shape to these fantasies for centuries. Islands have also been vulnerable to violent conquest and escape. At the same time, they tend to be unstable, shifting spaces marked by the provisional, where personal, cultural and political constellations and configurations are exposed, contested and renegotiated. Typically, the island is often envisaged by a voyage to, and a voyage back. As such the island is often beyond the present space, characterised, by a view towards it— rarely from it. In terms of how this point of view may be applied to this research, the island alludes to the containment and viewing of a certain 3 Lowenthal, D (2007) Islands, Lovers, and Others. Geographical Review, 97 (2), 202–229. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/30034162. 4 Gillis, JR (2003) ‘Taking History Offshore: Atlantic Islands in European Minds 1400– 1800’. In Edmond, R & Smith, V (eds.) Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge, p. 20.

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type of history, one that has been removed from the ‘mainland’. The viewing of the island brings an awareness to the present (and self), and the possibility of a future direction or journey. It privileges the point of view of the colonisers, who may have observed the islands of the global south from the seat of empire. As Johannes Riquet’s observes, the island can thus be understood as an in-between zone that functions both as a site of memory and as a transformative space that opens up possible futures.5 The British, island-bound themselves, were nonetheless invested in understanding the islands of empire as ‘other than British’. The colonies were a symbol of power, but not an extension of nationhood or identity. The subjects of the southern colonies—India, and later Australia and Aotearoa—were co-opted for the project of empire but never ‘British’. Elaine Freedgood argues in ‘Islands of Whiteness’ that during the Victorian era, ‘inventing a suitable Anglo-Saxon past required racializing the Saxon to Victorian specifications … the irony here is that Englishness is German, although this was not ironic to Victorians. From India to Italy, the South is a place of passivity and indolence, decadence and degeneration. Better the “rudeness” of the Gothic than the ornamentalism of the Oriental’.6 Thus, the expansion of Empire enabled a cementing of whiteness in Britain through the integration of previous Roman identities, Norman communities and the assimilation of Anglo-Saxons. The expansion into the south was never about expanding, co-opting or absorbing southern national identities. Islands of the south became ­strategic outposts, indicators of technological superiority and the discovery of the Other. In contemporary times, the ‘island as paradise’ has been replaced with its potential as a fear-drenched retreat from the outside world. The island nation of the United Kingdom chose to extricate from the European Union in the 2016 Referendum. Australia’s war against refugees resulting in thousands being incarcerated indefinitely on Nauru and Manus Islands continues. Nation states across the globe swelter under fear and oppression, forcing us to retreat into psychological and geographical islands during a heightened period of uncertainty and paranoia. Small islands 5 Riquet, J (2014) The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics. Doctoral Thesis, Faculty of Arts, University of Zurich. 6 Freedgood, E (2012) ‘Islands of Whiteness’. Victorian Studies, 54 (2), 298–304. https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.54.2.298.

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in the Pacific and elsewhere face extinction from rising sea levels. The United States of America, once a nation proud of its history of immigration and acceptance, is remastering an identity forged with ­ whiteness and protectionism. Perhaps in the future, climate refugees will barricade themselves on islands near the polar caps. The way we understand ­geography has changed radically. Yet the historical contexts of islands prior to the twenty-first century provide great insight and reflection into contemporary concerns and the role geography plays in defining ideology and politics. Islands have in fact long been seen, and used, as a solution to ‘problems’, threading a not-too-disparate link to these contemporary concerns noted above. Therefore, even though the way we understand geography is changing, there is nonetheless evidence of a strategic approach to the geographical limitations and possibilities of islands. It is likely that the British first consciously understood the importance of islands as a tool of expansion in the seventeenth century during the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade, and, in particular, their trading posts in the Caribbean. Prior to this, and as early as 1570 when English writer and philosopher John Dee first outlined a rationale for British Expansion and coined the term ‘British Empire’, England was far behind the French and the Spanish in the establishment of overseas territories.7 With the exception of a failed voyage to the Americas by John Cabot, England had spent most of the sixteenth century laying claim to Irish Territory through the confiscation of land and establishment of plantations, largely across what is now Northern Ireland. Consequently, many regard the colonialisation of Ireland as the first stage of the English Empire.8 However, even prior to the systematic implementation of slavery, the British were already using the movement of people to establish and make overseas colonies profitable. As early as 1611, governors of the British colonies in the Americas were calling on the Crown to use convict labour in sugar and tobacco plantations in order that labour 7 Dee, J (1570) ‘Brytannicae Reipublicae Synopsis’. In The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee, and the Catalogue of His Library of Manuscripts: From the Original Manuscripts in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and Trinity College Library. Cambridge and London: Camden Society 1842. 8 Technically, the British Empire did not begin until 1707 Acts of Union when England and Scotland became united as Great Britain.

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shortfalls could be met. Abigail Swingen writes that: transportation can also be understood as a source of coerced colonial labor and therefore part of a larger imperial project, intimately connected to both indentured servitude and slavery. In the 1580s, Richard Hakluyt lamented the fact that many potential laborers were wasted when petty criminals were executed for their offenses. In 1611, four years after the initial settlement of Jamestown, Governor Thomas Dale of Virginia sent a request to Lord Treasurer Salisbury asking for two thousand men.9 At the same time, there was also pressure in England to address increasing levels of poverty, unemployment and associated crime. The potential for improving the lives of the lower classes in the colonies, as well as ridding England of them, was recognised by the ruling elite. Legislation would finally be passed that encoded transportation as a punishment for certain crimes. Notably in 1685, almost a thousand men were transported to Barbados and Jamaica for their role in the Monmouth Rebellion. By 1700, 4500 men, mostly Irish, were transported to the West Indies and the British colony of Virginia. The system of transportation to islands out of site can thus be traced back to the early seventeenth century, well before the convict colony in New South Wales. Slave labour, for England and later the UK, was deeply embedded within the class system long before the construction of whiteness was even developed in the Americas.10 Yet despite the impressive number of convicts being deported, this did not alleviate the need for labour. Men with specific skills were required, and perhaps most importantly, soldiers who could help defend the British Islands from the French. To counter the pressure for labour in the Caribbean, various schemes were set up by merchants to encourage and ferry English servants. Yet the difficult conditions in the colonies were increasingly known and rumours of merchants ‘spiriting’ servants to Barbados dissuaded many. However, between 1630 and 1700 almost 400,000 people emigrated to the colonies. This change in behaviour by free settlers added to the concern that large labour forces were leaving England, depleting the home country of workers.

9 Swingen, AL (2015) ‘Unfree Labour and the Origins of Empire’. In Labour, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire. Yale University Press, p. 14. 10 Sipress, J (1997) ‘Relearning Race: Teaching Race as a Cultural Construction’. The History Teacher, 30 (2), 175–185. https://doi.org/10.2307/494572.

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During this period, the Duke of York and other London Tory members had developed significant commercial interests through the Africa Company. As a result of these various interests and conditions in the colonies and at home, in 1627 the first boat carrying ten slaves from West Africa arrived in Barbados. This small number of slaves soon expanded and by 1786, almost 80% of the population of Barbados were from West Africa.11 The strategic placement of ‘labour’ through slavery and its ability to lubricate the spread of empire had become a core strategy. When the Treaty of London in 1604 ended hostilities with Spain, the English set its sights on securing substantial overseas colonies. This included expansion into North America, the Caribbean and the establishment of mercantile trading businesses such as The East India Trading Company, The London Company and The Plymouth Company. After three failed attempts to set up colonies in Guiana, St Lucia and Grenada, the Caribbean Island of Barbados would become the most successful of all the British colonies. In 1645, Barbados was home to 5680 slaves, and by 1700, it was the richest of all the colonies and home to 50,000 slaves.12 This would become ‘a pattern which was replicated through all the smaller islands in the region: St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat and Antigua. By the end of the seventeenth century, these islands of the United Kingdom (along with Jamaica) had absorbed more than a quarter of a million African slaves’.13 Slavery thus became the main trading focus for the British in West Africa and the West Indies, and the UK would ultimately be responsible for the transportation of 3.5 million slaves to the new British colonies in North America. This lasted until the slave trade (but not slavery) was abolished in Britain in 1807.14 The slaves, now confined to these island nations, were a source of free labour for the British expansion around the world. Cities such as London were ultimately built with the profits of slavery, and the residue of this wealth is reflected in the social structures of contemporary Britain.15 So far, more than 49,000 slave-owning families have been identified in the UK. Compensation of £20 million 11 Beckles, 12 Walvin,

H (2016) The First Black Slave Society. University of West Indies Press. J (2007) A Short History of Slavery. London: Penguin Books, p. 52.

13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.,

p. 162. N (2008) ‘The City of London and Slavery: Evidence from the First Dock Companies 1795–1800’. Economic History Review, 61 (May, 2). 15 Draper,

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(equivalent to £16 billion in today’s money) was paid to slave owners when slave owning was finally abolished in 1833. Ironically, it was this payment which has enabled research into British slavery today, as the compensation system provided a census on every slave-owning family in the UK on and before the 1st of August 1834. The ‘Legacies of British slave-ownership’ project based at the University College London has identified that at least half of the compensation was awarded to slave owners living in the UK and the remainder to those living on slaving islands and colonies throughout the British Empire.16 Yet this chapter in the British Empire has, until very recently, been almost entirely penned out of the history books. David Olusoga writes that: few acts of collective forgetting have been as thorough and as successful as the erasing of slavery from the Britain’s “island story”. If it was geography that made this great forgetting possible, what completed the disappearing act was our collective fixation with the one redemptive chapter in the whole story.17 Olusoga, who also narrated the BBC documentary series ‘Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners’, draws links with the distant geography of the slaving islands and the forgetting of this brutal enslavement. Unlike the Americas which indentured slaves singularly on American soil, the British administered slave labour throughout the empire, diluting its presence in the minds of the English, other than the elite land and slave-owning gentry based in Britain who politely evaded discussions around the structures of oppression that made their wealth possible. Charles Mills refers to this as The Racial Contract, describing an unspoken agreement between whites to not discuss racial injustice.18 It is not then surprising that the barbaric underpinning of the wealth of empire was silenced in subsequent discussions of nationhood and prosperity. The British, unlike even the Greeks, had combined an attitude of superiority with the maritime experience of an island nation. While vast swathes of land such as Africa and Australia were crucial to British domination, so too were smaller strategically placed islands, such as the 16 For more information on the research project, see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ project/. 17 Olusoga, D (2015) ‘The History of British Slave Ownership Has Been Buried: Now Its Scale Can Be Revealed’. The Guardian, July 12. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed. Accessed 4 September 2018. 18 Mills, C (1997) The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press.

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Falkland Islands. Located at the base of South America in the South Atlantic Ocean, they were a critical example of the way islands were co-opted. Unlike the colonisation of the Caribbean which was based on agriculture and industry, the Falkland Islands were seen by the British as a strategic base for warfare and as a resting point for further explorations in the region. In 1766, Captain John McBride established a British Settlement at Port Egmont, unaware that the French had previously situated a base on the East Falkland. Conflict between the French and Spanish saw the French base being relinquished to the Spanish in 1767. Subsequently, conflict arose between the British and the Spanish (who saw the region as their own) and the British decided to leave the settlement in 1776 due to increasing pressure from the demands of the American Civil War. The British left the site, but asserted British sovereignty over the islands through the placement of a small plaque. Until 1780, British sealers continued to use Egmont as a base. The real conflict would arise decades later after the British resumed settlement on the islands in 1833, some twenty years after the Spanish had left and one year after the Argentinean government had unsuccessfully tried to assume control over the region. The issues of sovereignty between Argentina and the UK would last well into the twentieth century, culminating in the Falklands War in 1982. This extraordinarily complex process of negotiations lasted well over two hundred years. The claims to this small but strategic group of islands highlight the way in which small tracts of isolated land had become part of a crucial strategy for the expansion of power across the globe.19 Thus, the project of empire and the land claims of various island states continued well into the twentieth century. It was not until 1962 that the slaving island of Jamaica was able to claim independence from the UK. It is often thought that the latter half of the twentieth century was spent given lands back to the colonised, yet the legacy of empire was 19 This very brief overview can be explored further in the writing of Scott Nietzel in his Ph.D. examination entitled ‘The Falklands War: Understanding the Power of Context in Shaping Argentine Strategic Decisions’ (2007). Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. For a more detailed analysis on the historical colonisation of the Falkland Islands see Reisman, W. Michael (1983) ‘The Struggle for the Falklands’. Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 726. Yale Law School.

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not so simple to overturn. Not only are the resulting economic disparities enormous, but the legacy of trauma is twofold. Communities displaced in the first instance, from their African ancestral lands, language and culture were then inflicted with the brutality of slavery. Averting the potential of resistance was a core strategy. The British ensured that communities did not congregate and self-identify. Slaves arriving from hundreds of language groups and nations as diverse as Angola, Senegal, Madagascar and Mozambique were carefully broken up and placed on separate plantations. This has had real, inherited consequences for the African diaspora. Adlai Murdoch argues that ‘the twin terrors of colonialism and slavery galvanized a diachronic series of ethnic crossings and transformations that gave rise to the region’s new role as a zone of contact’.20 After the ‘Peace of Paris’ Treaty in 1783, British Colonial expansion looked instead towards interests in India, the Middle East and the Pacific, marking what is known as the ‘Second British Empire’, pinnacling from 1814 to 1914 and often referred to as the Imperial Century. This period was distinct and the mechanism particular. Slavery had been largely abolished, and colonialism took a different turn. These new landscapes of empire were even further removed, and it was therefore more possible to succumb to the myth of the benevolent British Empire. The attitude by Europeans that non-Western lands and their occupants were up for grabs permeated all European nations right up to the early twentieth century during the ‘scramble for Africa’.21 ‘To the twenty-first century it seems almost incredible that a whole continent could be carved up between the European Powers in this way, with little or no consultation of the inhabitants. To the nineteenth century, it seemed not only natural but inevitable’,22 and by 1914, 90% of Africa was under European control. This extraordinary deliverance of power evidences the European attitude of global imperialism. Thus, the shift from domination by slavery through to economic imperialism reflected the swiftness and reflexivity of European powers. 20 Murdoch, H (2009) ‘A Legacy of Trauma: Caribbean Slavery, Race, Class, and Contemporary Identity in “Abeng”’. Research in African Literatures, 40 (4), 65–88. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40468162. 21 This took place most notably during the Berlin West Africa Conference (1884–1885) and through a series of smaller agreements in 1890. 22 Chamberlain (2010) The Scramble for Africa, 3rd edition. London, UK: Pearson Educated Ltd., p. 3.

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In the nineteenth century, the turn towards Asia highlighted this different approach to colonialism. The East India Company was at the forefront of expansion, joining forces at times with the Royal Navy—for example with the eviction of Napoleon out of Egypt in 1799, and in 1811 capturing Java from the Dutch, and the ‘acquisition’ of Singapore and Malacca between 1819 and 1824. India would become the ‘jewel in the crown’ for the British Empire, the most profitable of all colonies over a 200-year period. Beginning with a trading arrangement, following in the footsteps of the Portuguese and Dutch who had been trading with India since the 1500s, the British would take direct and indirect control over the whole region in what was called The British Raj from 1858 to 1947. This included the areas now known as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Burma, Sri Lanka and The Maldives. The British implemented what was perceived as a softer approach by installing universities which could be accessed by Indian upper classes, thus earning favour with existing land owners and enacting a double-government system which mocked a sense of self-governance. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 against the British East India Company (functioning at the time as a sovereign power on behalf of the British Crown) resulted in up to 300,000 Indians killed and an estimated 50,000 British soldiers. The consequence was the implementation of the 1858 Government of India Act which saw the dissolution of the East India Company rule in India, despite the existing bureaucracy more or less remaining. Most scholars recognise the uprising as the beginning of organised nationalism in India. Swarupa Gupta writes that: ‘it has been regarded as a unique moment in India’s history where the soul of the nation awoke from a slumber to oppose alien rule’.23 This was an important lesson for Britain in balancing exploitation and rule in the colonies and effected the way other colonies such as Australia, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand were managed. As I have stated, it is not the role of this research to revisit well-worn histories of British expansion, but rather to evidence that British imperialism manifested in particular ways. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British elite, educated in the classics and often at the forefront of mercantile trades in the colonies as well as in diplomatic roles, saw 23 Gupta, S (2007) ‘1857 and Ideas About Nationhood in Bengal: Nuances and Themes’. Economic and Political Weekly, 42 (19), 1762–1769. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4419582.

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the project of empire as following the tradition of Rome and Greece. Having been colonised by the Romans, the British saw their colonial project as an inevitable trajectory of a superior civilisation. What made the mechanisms of the British Empire unique was maritime technology, unavailable even a century earlier to the Portuguese or Spanish. This small island understood the project of empire in terms of benevolent Greek enlightenment rather than dictatorial Roman rule, thereby gently moving forward and spreading civilisation to all corners of the globe. At its height, in the 1920s, the British Empire was the largest in history, occupying a quarter of the globe’s land mass and almost a quarter of its people.24 When Britain invaded Australia in 1788, it would secure its most loyal and long-serving colony, a carceral island at the end of the world, carved out through a vision of whiteness, superiority and discipline.

Bibliography Beckles, H (2016) The First Black Slave Society. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press. Chamberlain, ME (2010) The Scramble for Africa, 3rd edition. Abingdon, UK: Pearson Educated Ltd. Dee, J (1570) ‘Brytannicae Reipublicae Synopsis’. In The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee, and the Catalogue of His Library of Manuscripts: From the Original Manuscripts in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, and Trinity College Library. Cambridge and London: Camden Society 1842. Dening, G (1980) Islands and Beaches. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Draper, N (2008) ‘The City of London and Slavery: Evidence from the First Dock Companies 1795–1800’. Economic History Review, 61 (May, 2), 432–466. Edmond, R & Smith, V (eds.) (2003) Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge. Freedgood, E (2012) ‘Islands of Whiteness’. Victorian Studies, 54 (2), 298–304. Gillis, JR (2003) ‘Taking History Offshore: Atlantic Islands in European Minds 1400–1800’. Economic and Political Weekly, 42 (19), 1762–1769. Gupta, S (2007) ‘1857 and Ideas About Nationhood in Bengal: Nuances and Themes’. Economic and Political Weekly, 42 (19), 1762–1769.

24 Krishan, K (2017) Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World. Princeton University Press, p. 314.

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Krishan, K (2017) Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World. Woodstock: Princeton University Press. Lowenthal, D (2007) ‘Islands, Lovers, and Others’. Geographical Review, 97 (2), 202–229. Mills, C (1997) The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Murdoch, H. 2009. ‘A Legacy of Trauma: Caribbean Slavery, Race, Class, and Contemporary Identity in “Abeng”’. Research in African Literatures, 40 (4), 65–88. Olusoga, D (2015) ‘The History of British Slave Ownership Has Been Buried: Now Its Scale Can Be Revealed’. The Guardian, July 12. Reisman, MW (1983) ‘The Struggle for the Falklands’. Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 726. Yale Law School. Riquet, J (2014) The Aesthetics of Island Space: Perception, Ideology, Geopoetics. Doctoral Thesis, Faculty of Arts, University of Zurich. Sipress, J (1997) ‘Relearning Race: Teaching Race as a Cultural Construction’. The History Teacher, 30 (2), 175–185. Swingen, AL (2015) ‘Unfree Labour and the Origins of Empire’. In Labour, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire. London: Yale University Press. Walvin, J (2007) A Short History of Slavery. London: Penguin Books.

CHAPTER 3

The Global South: Disappearing Beneath the Equator

Britain’s expansion into the Pacific in the eighteenth century coincided with new pseudo-scientific ideas of biological race, the development of anthropology as a discipline and evolutionary theory. Vanessa Agnew notes that ‘Cook’s instructions from the British Admiralty indicate that ethnography was an institutionally mandated aspect of the voyage’ and he was to observe ‘the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number’ of islanders in what Agnew describes as an ‘encounter practice’.1 Thus, it was with a very different set of ideas and eyes that the British explored the islands of the global south. Like much of the ‘accidental’ empire described in the previous section, the establishment of the colony of New Zealand occurred on the back of private companies and independent traders. Even before the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the New Zealand Company had dispatched explorers across the north island. For a decade previously, British traders had been pressuring the government in England to seek more control of the region in order that their business interests were protected under British law. The British government was also wary of French interests in the Pacific. Some 2000 white settlers were living in New Zealand at the time of the Treaty, some of whom had been sold land and small islands via the New Zealand Company who had sold off lots of land via auction 1 Agnew, V (2003) ‘Pacific Island Encounters and Race’. In Edmond, R & Smith, V (eds.) Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge, p. 85.

© The Author(s) 2019 K. McMillan, Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17290-9_3

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in London. Director of the company, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, defined the vision as one which would help establish a model-English society in the Southern Hemisphere.2 His goal would ultimately fail as the British government proceeded to take hold of the land before Wakefield could broker a significant number of deals with Māori people. Regardless, the government, other white business interests and Wakefield sought to exploit land and opportunity from Māori people in what has become mythologised as a fair and equal exchange between cultures. The Māori had arrived in Aotearoa in a series of voyages between 1250 and 1300 AD from eastern Polynesia. Over the next two centuries, they established tribes across the north and south islands, as well as surrounding islands. United by one language (although regional dialects emerged) and cultural practices, various traders recorded and recognised their occupation and ownership of the land from 1640 or onwards. The distinct Māori culture has its origins in many Polynesian practices throughout the Pacific. The recognition awarded to the Māori by Europeans provided a more equitable foundation than other parts of the empire, uniquely exampled in the Treaty of Waitangi. However, it is now clear that the Treaty, translated into Māori by a church missionary named Henry Williams, whose language skills were only moderately accurate, was far from a mutually understood exchange of contracts.3 Despite Māori people having representation in government since the signing of the treaty, Māori have had to fight for justice and equality ever since. By the 1890s, Māori had sold most of the land they were granted and only retained a little over 15%, most of which was considered poor farming land.4 The experience of Māori in Aotearoa/New Zealand is thus often one of one step forward and two steps back. The relatively homogenous language meant that as early as the 1830s, Europeans had compiled dictionaries and conversed and traded in language. Yet by the early twentieth century, it had become infrequently used in everyday parlance, only to be reinstated as an official language in 1987. Today, it is taught by selection

2 Burns, P (1989) Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company. Heinemann Reed. 3 Orange, C (1989) The Story of a Treaty. Wellington: Allen & Unwin. 4 Hill, R (2009) ‘Maori and State Policy’. In Byrnes, Giselle (ed.) The New Oxford History of New Zealand. Oxford University Press.

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in every school. However, given the aural origin of the language, much was lost in the transcribing of it into a written tradition.5 Many of the devastating impacts on colonisation experienced throughout the British Empire manifested at epic levels in Aotearoa due to its isolation. Diseases that Māori had never been exposed to wiped out significant populations well into the twentieth century. The introduction of a wheat-based diet, guns and alcohol also significantly undermined the strength and determinacy of Māori tribes across the country.6 Today, mortality rates, health, education and every other social determinant put Māori people at a significant disadvantage to Pākehā, white settlers.7 However, the British held Māori culture in higher regard than other nations they had invaded, and this gave the Māori an advantage over other cultures, in particular, in Australia where no land rights or treaty were (and have been since) awarded. By contrast, Australia was regarded ‘terra nullius’, an empty land. Fifty-two years prior to the Treaty of Waitangi, the British had very different ideas about the potential of the larger island to the west of Aotearoa. The invasion of the island nation of what would later be called Australia in 1788 was a high point of the Second Empire—barely conceived of as an island until the mid-twentieth century. A shift in thinking turned it from a continent to an island. The inherited sense of islandness from the British slowly transformed Australian national identity. Elizabeth McMahon argues that it was only when the ­interior of Australia was narrated through the Australian novel, such as Voss written in 1952 by Patrick White (which articulated the experience of colonial explorers into the desert), that it was possible for the nation to conceive its geography as having a centre and a periphery, the crucial ingredient in island psychogeography.8 5 Wehi, PM, Whaanga, H, & Roa, T (2009) ‘Missing in Translation: Maori Language and Oral Tradition in Scientific Analyses of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)’. Journal of Royal Society of New Zealand, 39 (4), 201–204. 6 Kunitz, S (1994) Disease and Social Diversity: The European Impact on the Health of Non-Europeans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 7 Lashley, M (2006) ‘Remedying Racial and Ethnic Inequality in New Zealand: Reparative and Distributive Policies of Social Justice’. In Myers, Samuel L, & Corrie, Bruce P (eds.) Racial and Ethnic Economic Inequality: An International Perspective, vol. 1996. New York: Peter Lang. 8 McMahon, E (2010) ‘Australia, the Island Continent: How Contradictory Geography Shapes the National Imaginary’. Space and Culture, 13 (2), 178–187. Sage.

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For the first 150 years, Australia was a series of colonies dotted along the coastline of Australia. The absurdity that these tiny pockets of settlement justified a claim over a, as yet unexplored, continent was not questioned. During the establishment of the 1901 Federation, these histories would be decontextualised into a mythology of a peaceful settlement and the erasure of many straightforward and honest settler accounts of the horrors of invasion and the frontier wars, which were later erased from the public consciousness. For the first fifty years, the presence of colonial Britain was limited only to the eastern seaboard. Melbourne, as a result of the gold rush and wool trade, would become for a short time the wealthiest of all British cities and the second largest after London.9 However, the aim to establish the east coast of Australia as an outpost of the British Empire was predominantly about forming a penal settlement at Botany Bay to cope with the issues of overcrowding in British prisons.10 Large prison hulks lined the Thames as temporary measures in an increasingly punitive British penal system. Some of these hulks would have also been used in the transportation of convicts to the Americas.11 The appalling disrepair they were in at the end of the eighteenth century would have made their use as sea-going ships impossible. These pressures, as well as the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which resulted in the 13 British colonies in the Americas severing ties, encouraged British expansion elsewhere. The prison hulks were based mainly at Woolwich in south-east London. English penal reformers were concerned that due to the appalling conditions, their capacity for criminality in the un-compartmentalised ships was significant.12 These floating prisons, not unlike islands 9 Fieldhouse, DK (1999) The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence and Development. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 145–149. 10 Keneally (2007) The Commonwealth of Thieves. London: Vintage Books, p. 3. 11 On average about 1000 convicts each year had been shipped to the Americas to help with the building of infrastructure. However, because free settlers had moved in significant numbers (many because of religious intolerance in Britain), there was not the same requirement for labour. For exact data on convict transportees to the Americas, see the British National Archives. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/ transportation-australia.htm also, Coldham, PW (1983) Bonded Passengers to America. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing. 12 Campbell, C (2001) The Intolerable Hulks: British Shipboard Confinement. Tucson, AZ: Fenestra Publishing, p. 12.

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themselves, would finally be disbanded in 1857 when the last of them was burned down. From which time, the worst of the criminal classes was deported to Australia. It was not just the giant continental land mass of Australia that was used as a prison. The islands surrounding Australia, some 8000, were also used strategically to imprison and isolate. The first island, other than Australia itself, that was used in this way was Norfolk Island, located in the South Pacific off the coast of New South Wales. In March 1788, just three months after the First Fleet had arrived in Botany Bay (adjacent to the current site of Sydney), seven free men and fifteen convicts arrived on Norfolk Island. In 1824, the British government instructed Thomas Brisbane, the then governor of New South Wales, to send only the worst of convicts, those that had been spared the gallows, to serve then at Norfolk Island as well as recalcitrant prisoners who had reoffended once they had been transported to Australia. The horrors of Norfolk Island and the men who were imprisoned there generated many of the arguments for anti-transportation. Rumours of ‘sodomy as rife as dysentery’13 and suicide lotteries were rife throughout the colony and the British Empire.14 By 1855, the penal settlement on Norfolk Island was closed, and all convicts were redirected by the British government to Tasmania. When the remaining convicts were awaiting transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) ‘even the Comptroller-General of Convicts of Van Diemen’s Land, John Hampton, was anxious about the prospect of the arrival of long-sentence men from Norfolk Island. He drew up plans for a separate prison at Port Arthur to punish and restrain “such fearfully bad men[…] a number of whom I am convinced that nothing but the most strict and uninterrupted separate confinement will either produce reformatory effects or prevent them being a pest and a terror to society”’.15 As historian Katy Roscoe argues: punitive relocation to offshore islands was an important part of the colonial system of punishment that emerged in Australia between 1788 and 13 Hazzard, M (1984) Punishment Short of Death: A History of the Norfolk Island Penal Settlement. Melbourne: Hyland Publishing, p. 215. 14 Causer, T (2010) Norfolk Island Suicide Lotteries: Myth and Reality. London: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College. 15 Ibid., p. 4.

36  K. McMILLAN 1901. It operated as a system because colonial officials in Australia and London compared islands to one another, explicitly modelling future establishments on the perceived successes or failures of the past. Islands were flexible spaces, and sending convicts to them fulfilled various aspects of colonial governmentality, including territorial acquisition, commercial expansion, and the governance of both European convicts and Indigenous populations.16

The original and defining role of the island of Australia as a place of exile and punishment therefore became part of the psychogeography of its inhabitants. It was a land of opportunity, but also of punishment. As the nation developed, the mainland of Australia as a site for incarceration was replaced with smaller islands. Free settlers, and former convicts granted tickets of leave, wanted to disassociate from the criminal underclasses. This desire to banish uncomfortable truths about the founding of the nation was formative. Significant amounts of correspondence between officials in Australia and the colonial office in London concerned the locating of sufficient islands for various purposes, mainly carceral. The purpose of islands in the control and governance of populations was an essential strategy throughout the colonial period and continues today in Australia’s offshore detention system. Aboriginal people were either entwined within the British convict and penal system (and later, complex and finely orchestrated incarceration regimes would be set up solely for Aboriginal imprisonment), or dispossessed from or murdered on their own land.17 In reading accounts of the sadistic and cruel treatment of Aboriginal peoples right across the continent for over two centuries, it becomes increasingly hard to separate those who ‘civilised’ Australia from the criminal classes who formed a large proportion of early populations. Far from being a peacefully settled land, it was a land fought in bloody battle for over a 100 years. In researching the absence of these stories from twentieth-century history 16 Roscoe, K (2018) ‘A Natural Hulk: Australia’s Carceral Islands in the Colonial Period 1788–1901’. International Review of Social History, 63, Special Issue, 45–63. 17 For a full account of the Aboriginal convicts in New South Wales, the Cape Colony in South Africa and New Zealand, see Harman, Kristyn (2012) Aboriginal Convicts. UNSW Press. This publication provides a detailed account of how and why Aboriginal prisoners were treated in the British colonies. This is also explored further in the subsequent chapter on Wadjemup.

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books, Henry Reynolds reflects that: we know that violence was ubiquitous, that it overwhelmed every other possible story. The evidence of this was abundant, various and incontrovertible. No article, no single book, could do justice to the great volume of evidence that came pouring out of the official government records, the newspapers, the travellers’ tales, the reminiscences.18 Even in the main centres, under the eye of the government, punitive systems and violent mechanisms of incarceration occurred. Cockatoo Island located in Sydney Harbour, under the management of the British Red Coats, would become a convict prison island from 1839 to 1869, and then again from 1880 to 1909, it served as overflow from the Darlinghurst prison. During its time as a convict prison, Aboriginal prisoners were also transported from around the colony and incarcerated at Cockatoo Island. This included Tallboy who was convicted for his involvement in the Myall Creek massacre where 30 Aboriginal people were murdered.19 Additionally, the exclusion of Aboriginal people from townships through direct policy such as the 1836 Vagrancy Act20 throughout New South Wales (and all the British colonies in Australia) also drove the incarceration rate of Aboriginal people up significantly. Historian and author of Aboriginal Convicts, Kristyn Harman notes that: for Aboriginal convicts, Cockatoo Island had a further claim to infamy. The mortality rate was higher than at Goat Island. Being sent to Cockatoo Island truly gave Aboriginal convicts cause to expect ‘death in its most horrible form’. The majority of Aboriginal convicts transported to Cockatoo Island died shortly afterwards, some on the island itself but many at the General Hospital in nearby Sydney.21 From 1871, the island was renamed Biloela, an Aboriginal word ­meaning Black Cockatoo after the birds that did, and do, nest there. The renaming was intended to distance itself from its convict past and initialise its new dual role as a reform school for girls and an industrial school 18 Reynolds,

H (1998) Why Weren’t We Told? London: Penguin Books, p. 102. (2012) Aboriginal Convicts. Sydney: UNSW Press, p. 135. 20 An Act for the Prevention of Vagrancy and for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Rogues and Vagabonds and Incorrigible Rogues in the Colony of New South Wales (6 Geo. IV. No. 6) 25 August 1836 (repealed by 15 Vic. No. 4, 1851). Full text of Act: The Public General Statutes of New South Wales from 1 Victoriae to 10 Victoriae, Inclusive (1836–1846) (Sydney, Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1861), p. 631. 21 Harman (2012) Aboriginal Convicts. Sydney: UNSW Press, p. 126. 19 Harman

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for boys and girls, both of which served disenfranchised minors from the colony. This process of eradicating the stains of the past through renaming was part of the institutional mechanisms of forgetting that became entrenched within colonial life. Yet, the past leaked and the conditions in the reform school for girls were reportedly outrageous and were not considered an improvement from the previous reform site at Newcastle. An early diary by Rosamond and Florence Hill observes and reflects on the role of Cockatoo Island in the colony: Cockatoo Island was chosen as the new location but this site was really no better than the old one. The building allotted to the school had obtained a terrible notoriety as a convict gaol. The home influences essential to the wholesome training of girls, the very lack of which had brought them to the school, are impossible of attainment within the gloomy walls of a prison… Not only did the evils described attach to the locality, but the Government dock, bringing necessarily large numbers of sailors to the spot, is upon the Island. Three hundred men, we heard, had been there a few days before our visit. The school premises are on high ground overlooking the dock, from which they are divided by a low wall or fence, and the presence of a policeman is necessary to prevent sailors and school-girls from crossing the boundary.22 The use of island geography by the British settlers, as evidenced in Sydney Harbour, was also used as a means of expanding the colony along the coast. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Australia was a series of separate colonies and much of the continent was largely unexplored and unclaimed by Europeans. French and Dutch presence in various parts of the South Seas was a constant threat in undermining the sovereignty of Britain. The Dutch had been there in 1642, and the second European boat arrived almost 150 years later in 1772 under the captaincy of Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne on his search for the southern land.23 Therefore, securing the island of Van Diemen’s Land in 1803 was crucial in preventing the French from colonising the island. From about 1660 onwards, various seafarers and explorers used Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen’s land) as a base. Whilst little was recorded or salvaged by way of records from this time, the information that does exist indicates that the peaceable relations with the Tasmanian 22 Hill,

F & Hill, R (1825–1902) What We Saw in Australia. London: Macmillan, p. 273. E (1992) The Discovery of Tasmania: Journal Extracts from the Expeditions of Abel Janzoon Tasman and Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne 1642 & 1772. Hobart: St. David’s Park Publishing/Tasmanian Government Printing Office. 23 Dukyer,

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Aborigines enabled seafarers to settle for months at a time. Tasmanian writer, James Boyce, writes that: two French expeditions spent the most time with, and had the greatest interest in, the Aboriginal people. The first, commanded by Bruny d’Entrecasteaux, visited Tasmania in 1792–93. D’Entrecasteaux’s official instructions included that he was to ‘seek to know the ways of life and customs of the natives’. The next French expedition, commanded by Nicolas Baudin, spent many weeks with the local people during 1802–03 and had an even stronger scientific and anthropological focus.24 To have regarded these lands as unclaimed was absurd. Aboriginal people had been settled in Tasmanian for more than 35,000 years. Home to nine language groups, the entire island had been carefully managed to ensure the regeneration and maintenance of pathways that connected various parts of the island.25 Ten million artefacts have been excavated from Kutikina Cave in the south-west of Tasmania, evidencing changing and developing technology in keeping with the varied climatic changes in Tasmanian during the same time frame.26 Black silica used in spearheads and knives as well as red ochre has been shown to have been in use for more than 20,000 years. After thousands of years of harmonious prosperity, and in contrast to earlier European visitors, it took only three months after the British arrival for the first massacre to occur. On 3 May 1803, a large group of Aboriginal people were seen at a distance by members of the New South Wales Rum Corps. It is likely that they were in fact on a hunt, aiming to hem in and capture (rather than spear) Kangaroos. Bruce Elder argues that: the Aboriginal people were oblivious to the danger. At around eleven o’clock in the morning, as they came within range, the troops started firing. Some of the Aboriginal people fell. The group suddenly became aware what was happening. They started yelling and shouting and running for their lives. The troops fired again. Four or six Aboriginal people fell forward with bullets in their backs. Children, lost in the melee, were crying. The wounded were moaning. Those who could run were racing towards the nearest undergrowth. No-one kept a record of how many were killed that day. (William) 24 Boyce, J in Perkins, R & Langton, M (2008) First Australians—An Illustrated History. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, p. 73. 25 Ibid., p. 67. 26 Murray & Williamson (2003) ‘Archaeology and History’. In Manne, R (ed.) Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Melbourne: Black Inc Press, pp. 319–320.

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Moore would claim that only three had been shot but other evidence, more reliable than his attempts at an official cover-up, would suggest that they figure was somewhere between thirty and sixty.27 This massacre was the beginning of some of the most horrific and state-sanctioned murders in colonial Australia. In 1828, martial law in Tasmania was implemented and settlers were ordered to shoot and capture all Aboriginal people. It is estimated that within a year, up to 60% of the Aboriginal population of Tasmania had been killed. By 1830, the government was offering a bounty of five pounds for all Aboriginal adults and two pounds for children. Although this reward system ended in 1832, things did not improve. The notorious government scheme, known as the Black Line, called for all able settlers to form a military line across Tasmania with the purpose of rounding up all remaining Aboriginal people in the Tasman Peninsula. This ludicrous task eventuated in only one capture. The government under Governor Arthur then drew up the plan to re-situate Aboriginal Tasmanians on the Bass Strait islands. What resulted would become one of the cruellest experiments yet. A number of islands were identified for use including Swan Island and Gun Carriage Island. Eventually, in 1833 the lagoons at the southern end of Flinders Island were chosen and placed under the management of George Augustus Robinson. This area was named Wybalenna (Black man’s houses), and between 1833 and 1947, 150 of the 200 Aboriginal people who were exiled there died from common diseases, which they had no defence against, such as influenza and pneumonia. They are buried in the Wybalenna Cemetery. Despite these fatalities, there was no question of moving the Aboriginal people back to Tasmania. The Chief Protector of Aborigines at Port Phillip noted in 1838 that, ‘respectable settlers would not hear of it. Property would immediately fall in value considerably’.28 Prior to the use of Wybalenna for exiled Aboriginal people, the area was an important mutton-bird rookery and the site of annual mutton-bird pilgrimages. It had been used by sealers for decades, many of whom captured and imprisoned Aboriginal women. As such, recorded 27 Elder, B (2003) Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatments of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788. Sydney: New Holland Press, p. 32. 28 Plomley (1987) Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement. Hobart: Blubber Head Press, p. 608.

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Aboriginal habitations of these islands date back to the late 1700s. It was noted during a salvage operation in 1797 that the islands contained bountiful seal populations. Consequently, ‘by 1802 at least 200 men were sealing in the Bass Strait islands. The taking of Aboriginal women had also begun. James Munroe, a notorious sealer in the area, stated that while the sealers first captured Aboriginal women for sex, they later found them to be essential companions, able to find food, hunt, and skin seal and wallaby’.29 However, the most common story of relations between sealers and Aboriginal women is one of barbarism and cruelty. Despite these women avoiding the horrific conditions and state control on Tasmania, they were generally considered as slaves to the sealers and sold and bought at will. Most of the sealers were ex-convicts looking to live out a life away from the eyes of the law. Many of these women would later be captured and placed at Wybalenna.30 Others remained on the islands, slowly gaining seniority and power over the course of generations. Today, it is estimated that almost 17% of the population on Flinders Island are Tasmanian Aboriginal people.31 In 1996, Wybalenna was given back to the Aboriginal people as part of a native title claim that also included Oyster Cove and part of Cape Barren Island.32 Between the years of 1821 and 1833, Sarah Island would become one of the most severe penal islands in the British colony, pre-dating Port Macquarie and Port Arthur penal settlements. Hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest European settlement and surrounded by treacherous cliffs, rocks and winds, the island was considered inescapable. Located on the south-west coast of Tasmania, 112 convicts did try and escape from this remote island, of which 62 died and the remaining 41 were all recaptured. Maria Island, on the south-east coast and closer to

29 Walter, M & Daniels, L (2008) ‘Personalising the History Wars: Woretemoeteryenner’s Story’. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 1 (1), 37. 30 Plomley, NJB & Henley, KA (1990) The Sealers of Bass Strait and the Cape Barren Island Community. Hobart: Blubber Head Press. 31 For more data on the breakdown of Aboriginal island populations, see Australian Bureau of Statistics. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/ 65f1ae55ef772f18ca2570ec001117a4!OpenDocument. 32 Ryan (2007) in Langton, M & Perkins, R (eds.) (2008) First Australians—An Illustrated History. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, p. 112.

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the settlement of Hobart, previously used and inhabited by Aboriginal people of the Tyreddeme clan from the Oyster Bay area, was also co-opted as a carceral island for a short period between 1825 and 1832. Sarah Island, like other penal settlements, was expected to recover the cost of operating. Consequently, the convicts underwent some of the most gruelling and menial work. Much of their labour was considered dangerous, such as the ‘pining’ of Huon pines that were grown locally. This gave way to the biggest boat building area in the colony and during its eleven-year history produced 113 vessels.33 However, Port Arthur would go on to become the most infamous and significant of the Tasmanian penal settlements. Located about 50 kilometres from the town of Hobart, the convict prison operated from 1830 to 1877, replacing Port Macquarie, Sarah and Maria Islands. The site was chosen largely for the timber resources in the area as well as its relative isolation. At its peak, 1200 prisoners were housed there. The prison was used for recalcitrant convicts who had reoffended after transportation, as well as for Aboriginal men.34 Situated in view from the Port Arthur cell block was a small island known as the Isle of the Dead. This small vegetated place was used to bury 1100 convicts and staff connected with the penal establishment. The graves are arranged according to status, and many of 800 or more convict graves are unmarked. Evident only are the remains of 90 bespoke head and foot stones of ‘notable’ persons. Those in the higher social classes were buried at the highest point of the island, leaving no above-ground evidence of the convicts who were also buried there. Point Puer boys prison located across the bay from Port Arthur also enjoyed views across to the Isle of the Dead. Point Puer was the first separate juvenile prison in the British Empire and would become an institutional model for other juvenile prisons such as Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight that from 1835 was a holding prison for boys being transported to Australia.35 Some 3500 boys would pass through this system— the main aim was to reform through education. Terry Newman writes that: 33 Brand,

I (1984) Port Arthur 1830–1877. West Moonah, TAS: Jason Publications. further reading Young, D (1996) Making Crime Pay. Hobart: THRA. 35 Parkhurst Children’s Prison would become a focus for British campaigners against the incarceration of children, in particular Mary Carpenter (1807–1877) who was a high profile social and educational reformer in Britain at the time. 34 For

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records (show) that some 165 boys out of 375 at Point Puer during June 1838 were from London districts. (Also) noted that 325 were only sentenced to 7-year terms, which meant that if they were well behaved their terms of incarceration there might cease within three years or less. Another 36 boys must serve out sentences of 14 years while just 14 boys were to endure life sentences; that is 14 years minimum.36

What the Port Arthur project reveals was an overarching attitude by the British Empire to remove and banish those that were not conforming to society, including children. Prior to the eighteenth century, public reprisals were the favoured means of punishments and incarceration was rarely used as a form of punishment. The transportation project is thus a reflection of a significantly changed attitude towards the criminal classes in Britain, influenced by, amongst others, people such as Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). His initial work on the Constitutional Code (1830) and later his writing on the panopticon prison were transformative. His prison design would: incorporate a tower central to an annular building that is divided into cells, each cell extending the entire thickness of the building to allow inner and outer windows. The occupants of the cells … are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen. Toward this end, Bentham envisioned not only venetian blinds on the tower observation ports but also mazelike connections among tower rooms to avoid glints of light or noise that might betray the presence of an observer.37 A number of prisons around Australia would be built according to these architectural principles, including the Quod at Rottnest Island Prison Settlement in Western Australia.38 However, most crucially, the conclusions that Bentham would arrive at shifted the perception of criminality and the role of the state. Bentham argued for the civilising potential of punishment, one that should be based on reward not fear. Yet, fear defined all the prison islands of Australia. Bentham’s influential theories incorporated what he believed as the important role of hard labour

36 Newman, T (2005) Becoming Tasmania: Renaming Van Dieman’s Land. Hobart: Parliament of Tasmania. 37 Barton, BF & Barton, MS (1993) ‘Modes of Power in Technical and Professional Visuals’. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 7 (1), 138–162, 139. 38 This is explored in more detail in the following chapter.

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or work into prison life.39 Whilst there is no doubt that his ideas for social reform improved previous conditions, it is unlikely that his intentions ever benefited those who endured Australia’s carceral island system. Indentured labour played a crucial role in the Australian prison. Convicts and Aboriginal people provided the workforce for the policies of colonialism to be implemented. In Queensland, the notorious killing fields (recently further revealed through the discovery of a memoir from the 1850s of Thomas Davies, a former convict and worker on Darling Downs) highlight the way native police were employed and used against their own people. Aboriginal people not able to be used for labour were simply murdered.40 Social historian Jonathan Richards argues that ‘settlers always justified colonisation, prompting newspaper editors and letter-writers to claim that settlers had to ‘exterminate’ Aboriginal people if they wanted to hold the country. One letter to the editor of The Queenslander, published on 31 March 1866, stated: “a war of extermination is the only policy to pursue, the alternative being an abandonment of the country, which no sane man will advocate for an instant”’.41 Convicts and Aboriginal people were either deemed useful in the project of empire or expendable. In Queensland, the expansion of the pastoralism also gave way to the process of ‘blackbirding’ which involved the kidnapping of Aboriginal peoples from islands off the coast of Northern Queensland as well as inhabitants of Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Sāmoa, Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Loyalty Islands. Occurring between 1863 and 1904, it is notable that it did not end until almost 100 years after the slave trade in British colonies was deemed illegal as a result of various legislation and public agitation, culminating in the 1807 Slave Trade Act.42 Indigenous populations from the islands in the South Pacific were often coerced and tricked, and in the first fifteen years of this practice, 39 Semple, J (1993) Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary. Oxford University Press. 40 The manuscript collected by Steele Rudd is housed at the University of Queensland. It can be viewed at http://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:216890. 41 Richards, J (2008) ‘The Native Police of Queensland’. History Compass, 6 (4), 1024– 1036, 1026. 42 Note that slavery did not become illegal until the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, whereas the slave trade was deemed illegal in 1807 in Britain.

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they were largely kidnapped with violence. This practice was very lucrative and formed the most significant slave trade in Australia’s history. The Queensland government, still operating as a separate colony, did very little to oversee or intervene in this practice.43 In 1992, the report, ‘The Call for Recognition: A Report on the Situation of Australian South Sea Islanders’, was undertaken by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.44 Some two years later, South Sea Islanders became recognised as an official m ­ inority group in Australia. Up to 20,000 descendants of these people who had been ‘blackbirded’ or who came to Australia as indentured labour live largely in Queensland today. One-third of the estimated 62,000 people who were blackbirded were forced to work under Queensland’s pastoralists. This practice examples the way in which the isolation of islands was, in this case, used as a way to covertly enable four decades of illegal slavery in Australia. In almost every instance of settler barbarity, the feature of remoteness was a crucial component of both undertaking cruelty and also in keeping it far enough away from large populations for things to be conveniently overlooked. Not long after the practice of blackbirding stopped, and on the other side of the country, the isolation of another small group of islands was utilised for terrible means. Dorre and Bernier Islands off the coast of Carnarvon in Western Australia, some 600 kilometres north of Perth, are low-lying reef outcrops that were used by fisherman. Around 1900, the government allowed a small number of farmers to lease the island for grazing. It is unclear whether this did eventuate in the end. However, what is well documented is that in 1907 the ‘WA Aborigines Department’ and the ‘Department of Public Health’ opened ‘lock hospitals’ on the islands for Aboriginal people who were suffering from venereal diseases and other contagious ailments inflicted on them by white settlers. 43 For further information on the legislation and policies surrounding the issues of blackbirding and indentured labour, see Mortensen (2009) in the Journal of South Pacific Law, 13 (1). Accessible online at http://www.paclii.org/journals/fJSPL/vol04/7.shtml. 44 More information on the history and contemporary implications of blackbirding and the South Sea Islanders populations today can be sourced at http://www.datsima.qld.gov. au/resources/multicultural/community/australian-south-sea-islanders/history.pdf. Also publications such as Churchwards, WB (2009) Blackbirding in the South Pacific or, the First White Man on the Beach published by Amberg Press.

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Women were placed on one island, the men on the other. Research by Jade Stingemore and Jan Frances Meyer into the documents surrounding this government policy reveals that: it is clear from historical documentation and oral histories that few of these individuals actually had syphilis, they were forcibly removed from their homelands, experimented upon and forced to live ‘naturally’ in an inhospitable and resource-deficient environment. Little is known of how the Europeans and the Aboriginal people caught up in this scheme lived and survived on the islands… historical and oral records describe (by Daisy Bates 1938) the place as ‘a picture of misery, horror unalleviated and the tombs of the living dead’.45 During this period, syphilis, in particular, was considered a major health problem around the world, including remote areas in Western Australia. However, as it was a highly stigmatised disease, few white people would admit to having it.46 Instead, Aboriginal people were blamed for its spread and policies to incarcerate Aboriginal people for fear of an epidemic justified the lock hospital scheme. The collection of Aboriginal people was sporadic and depended on funding, varied from year to year. In the beginning, only Aboriginal women were targeted. The collection methods were neither humane nor scientific. A man, unqualified except by ruthless and daring and helped by one or two kindred spirits, toured the countryside, raided native camps and by brute force “examined” the natives…the diseased were seized upon…chained by the neck…Marched through the bush in search of further syphilitics.47 Patients (who in fact were essentially prisoners) were left to fend for themselves on Dorre and Bernier Islands. They were responsible for collecting food sources themselves. Those Aboriginal people who were too sick to collect their own food were given infrequent rations by way of sheep or goats. Archaeological records suggest animals were likely butchered by the Europeans as cut marks on bone fragments do not reflect

45 Stingemore, J & Myer, JF (2009) ‘Surviving the Cure: Life on Bernier and Dorre Islands Under the Lock Hospital Regime’. The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, 3 (12). 46 Jebb, MA (1984) ‘The Lock Hospital Experiments: Europeans, Aborigines and Venereal Disease’. In Reece, Bob & Stannage, Tom (eds.) European-Aboriginal Relations in Western Australian History, pp. 68–87. 47 Watson, EJ (1968) Rottnest: Its Tragedy and Its Glory. Perth: Watson DL, p. 54.

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traditional Aboriginal dismemberment practices.48 Records from the Chief Protector of Aborigines suggest that turtle eggs, shellfish, iguanas and wallaby were eaten. Despite Aboriginal people being able to retain an occasional measure of independence, the notion of the islands being curative is farcical. The records of the kinds of medicines held on the islands indicate they were simply being treated for symptoms. Daisy Bates noted that the doctors commented that the medical treatments were known to be ineffective and painful.49 There is evidence that the women held on Dorre Island used the leaves from local quandong trees to fashion herbal remedies to treat introduced diseases. It is unclear as to whether the men isolated on Bernier Island would have had the traditional knowledge to do this. However, ultimately at least 162 of the 700 patients on Dorre and Bernier Islands died, 70% of which were not from their incarcerated ­diseases.50 Instead, the things that were killing Aboriginal people in the lock hospitals were conditions described as ‘general debility’, respiratory disease, heart failure and stroke. The 40% of those who left the islands failed to be returned to their homelands.51 By 1918, almost all the prisoners had left as a decision had been made to halt their use and transfer patients to Port Hedland. The closure came after reports from visitors such as Daisy Bates who described the conditions: There is not among all my sad sojourn among the last sad people of the primitive Australian race, a memory one-half so tragic and so harrowing, or a name that conjures up such a deplorable picture of misery and horror

48 Stingemore, J (2002) Treponemal Diseases and the Isles of the Living Dead: An Investigation into ‘Syphilis’ in Australia and Its Effects of Indigenous Australians. Unpublished Honours Thesis, University of Western Australia. 49 Bates, D (1938) The Passing of Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia. Melbourne: Heinemann, p. 99. 50 The Shark Bay local government with the Department of Environment and Conservation (of Western Australia) provide a fact sheet on the history of the islands which can be viewed at http://www.sharkbay.org/assets/documents/fact%20sheets/history%20 bernier%20and%20dorre%20v2.pdf. 51 Stingemore, J (2002) Treponemal Diseases and the Isles of the Living Dead: An Investigation into ‘Syphilis’ in Australia and Its Effects of Indigenous Australians. Unpublished Honours Thesis, University of Western Australia.

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unalleviated, as these two grim and barren islands of the West Australian coast that for a period, mercifully brief, were the tombs of the living dead.52 The islands are now A Class Reserves due to a number of rare and endangered species, some of which only live on the islands. Consequently, unauthorised access is not permitted. The nine years that Dorre and Bernier Islands served as lock hospitals is barely known or remembered, certainly by anyone living outside of this remote region of Western Australia. South of the lock hospital islands and off the coast of the City of Perth lies Rottnest Island. This is where my interest in islands and the unique role they play in Australia today, and in the making of the British Empire, began. Its role as a carceral island in the imprisonment of Aboriginal boys and men, and the subsequent forgetting of this history by settler Australians, is a microcosm of the forgetting of much of the history explored in this book. A more thorough exploration of Wadjemup’s prison history also demonstrates how these mechanisms remain evident in the contemporary use of prison islands in the Australian offshore detention policies at Nauru and Manus Islands. Neville Green and Susan Moon’s (1997) Far from Home: Aboriginal Prisoners of Rottnest Island 1838–1931 provides the most detailed information about the Rottnest Prison. More recently is Kado Muir’s (2012) comprehensive submission to the WA Heritage Council regarding the archaeological and cultural significance of Wadjemup to Whadjuk Nyoongar people and the ancestors of all of those from Western Australia who were imprisoned there. It summarises extensive information dating back to 30,000 BP through to the unsuccessful native title claim over Wadjemup in 1993. Oral stories from Nyoongar custodians such as Noel Nannup have been formative in my research, as well as work by other local historians such as Glen Stasiuk in his documentary drama Wadjemup: Black Prison–White Playground (2013). More recently, historian Katherine Roscoe has published research on the early twentieth century The Commission into Rottnest Prison.53 What follows is an analysis of Wadjemup, and the way it is located within the broader concerns of islands in the global south.

52 Bates, D (1938) The Passing of Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia. Melbourne: Heinemann, pp. 95–104. 53 Roscoe, K (2015) ‘Too Many Kill ‘em. Too Many Make ‘em Ill: The Commission into Rottnest Prison as the Context for Section 70’. Studies in Western Australian History, 30.

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Despite unsubstantiated claims that Wadjemup was never used by Aboriginal peoples, dreaming stories, colonial records and archaeological evidence confirm its significance for Nyoongar people prior to invasion and since. Early British settler colonist George Fletcher Moore recorded in the early 1830s a story told by an unnamed Nyoongar man describing how the offshore islands in the greater Swan Region were once connected to the mainland: The natives have a tradition that Rottnest, Carnac, and Garden Island, once formed part of the mainland, and that the intervening ground was thickly covered with trees; which took fire in some unaccountable way, and burned with such intensity that the ground split asunder with a great noise, and the sea rushed in between, cutting off these islands from the mainland.54 This ancient oral tradition, recorded in the first decade of the ­colonial era, and still known to Nyoongar people today, demonstrates the long, specific and integrated history of Wadjemup into the stories of Nyoongar people. It is evidence of not only the incorporation of Wadjemup as an island, but also a concept of ‘pre-island’ times some 6500 BP when Wadjemup was part of a physically connected ancestral landscape. Noel Nannup, senior Nyoongar elder, says his ancestors had always known Wadjemup would become an island and had planned for this eventuality. The birds and the whales would bring stories of the ancestors back to the mainland, reaffirming the connection to place and the people who once occupied that country, and continue to do so as ancestral spirits.55 To support these oral traditions, archaeological remains excavated at Wadjemup in 2003 by Charles Dortch demonstrate that it was inhabited by Aboriginal peoples up to 6700 BP.56 Further archaeological evidence proves settlement right up to the time before rising sea levels formed the island around 6500 BP. The naming of the island as Wadjemup (or ‘place across the water’) occurred after this time, after which Wadjemup became part of the epic creation stories of the Whadjuk Nyoongar people.

54 Moore, GF (1842) A Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language in Common Use Amongst the Natives of Western Australia. London: WS. Orr & Co., p. 8. 55 Nannup, Noel, interview with Author, 11 July 2012. 56 Dortch, C (2002) ‘Modelling Past Aboriginal Hunter-Gatherer Socio-economic and Territorial Organisation in Western Australia’s Lower South-West’. Archaeology in Oceania, 37 (1).

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It was not until the sixteenth century that the Dutch, who were the dominant power in Europe, were seeking to expand their colonies in the South Seas. At the time the Dutch East Indies Trading Company engaged with trading partners in what is now Indonesia.57 In 1658, fourteen Dutch sailors under the command of Captain Samuel Volkerson became the first known Europeans to set foot on Wadjemup, possibly at what is now called Geordie Bay.58 Their mission was to locate the ship Golden Dragon that had become wrecked, along with its treasure of gold, in the area eighteen months previous. Only seven known surviving crewmen of the Golden Dragon made it to the island of Java some 500 kilometres north of Wadjemup. The fourteen crew of Waeckend Boeij would make three such trips to Wadjemup. On the first two occasions, wreckage from the Golden Dragon was located but due to bad weather, the loss of all the ship’s lifeboats and the inability to land meant fourteen men were left behind and abandoned. After repairing their small boat with seal skin, eleven of them made it to Java eight weeks later. After walking the southern shore of Java, only four surviving men made it to a town where they were rescued.59 The site that would later be named Perth, would not be discovered until de Vlamingh’s voyage in 1697. He would name, the already named river Derbarl Yerrigan, the Swan River after the black swans he saw there. Wadjemup was mapped at this time by de Vlamingh and named ‘Rottenest’ after sighting the rat-like quokkas that were indigenous to the island. The current name, Rottnest, is an anglicised version of Vlamingh’s original name. The following description of Wadjemup was written in a letter by Nicolaas Witsen one of de Vlamingh’s crew a year after in 1698: Upon the Island near the coast have been seen Rats as great as Cats, in an innumerable Quantity; all which had a kind of Bag

57 For further reading see: Heeres, JE (1899) The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765. London: Royal Dutch Geographical Society, Section III.B. 58 Somerville, W (1976) Rottnest Island in History and Legend: Its Discovery and Development, Natural Beauties, Fauna and Flora. Perth: Rottnest Island Board, pp. 22–25. 59 Captain Samuel Volkerson’s reputation was called into question as a consequence of leaving the fourteen sailors on Wadjemup. Volkerson did not name Wadjemup after his ‘discovery’, which could have born his own name or that of the head steersman of the smaller boat, Leeman Van Santwigh. It is not noted why this did not occur other than to say it was left to the pleasure of the governor to name (Moran 2009: 11).

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or Purse hanging from the Throat upon the Brest downwards. There were found many well-smelling Trees, and out of their Wood is to be drawn Oyl smelling as a Rose, but for the rest they were small and miserable Trees. There were also found some Birds nests of prodigious greatness, so that Six Men could not, by stretching out their Arms, encompass One of them; but the Fowls were not to be found.60 The Dutch deemed the land unfit to claim for agriculture due to poor soil and no apparent freshwater sources and continued their journey south. It was not until later in 1827 that British Naval Captain James Stirling declared that the Swan River area was suitable for colonisation. Fearing the French may claim the land first, Stirling finally convinced the British government of its suitability and so the Swan River Colony was formed. Initially, the area was developed to foster a colonial settlement based on free enterprise and agriculture. In a bid to attract middle-class investors, large swathes of land were offered as a reward for the long and perilous journey to the great southern land. Some 250 British settler colonists laid claim to land in the first decade.61 Initial interactions with the Nyoongar Whadjuk populations in the Swan River Colony were uneasy. Due to what the settler colonists perceived as harsh conditions, as well as a complete lack of knowledge of the landscape itself, the fledgling colony was in a state of famine by the 1830s. Expanding land claims in search of agriculturally viable soil, and the constant threat to livestock from Aboriginal groups who had been forced off their lands, meant that Aboriginal people were considered a hindrance and an obstacle to the colony’s progress and prosperity. The next 100 years evidences numerous massacres and policies that undermined the potential for Aboriginal groups to sustain their own culture, land and family. Some massacres were sanctioned; others went unrecorded by colonial police.62 The public sentiments that are still held today—that Aboriginal peoples are somehow less than capable or 60 Nelson, CE (1994) ‘Nicolas Witsen’s Letter of 1698 to Martin Lister About a Dutch Expedition to the South Land (Western Australia): The Original Text and a Review of Its Significance for the History of Australian Natural History’. Archives of Natural History, 21 (2), 147–167. 61 Stannage, CT (1979) The People of Perth. Perth: Perth City Council, p. 7. 62 Elder, B (2003) Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatments of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788. Sydney: New Holland Press, p. 271.

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deserving of equal rights to the land—ensured that incidents involving Aboriginal people were belittled and marginalised in the maintenance of a fledgling settlement.63 The use of Wadjemup as an island prison arose in this context. For the most part, the establishment of the Rottnest Prison was largely premised on a mindset of out of sight, out of mind and out of the way of the settlement. This was evidenced in commentary from local newspapers such as the Perth Gazette that noted somewhat ironically that ‘some aspects of the fatal impact (of white settlement) could be quickly forgotten by the people of Perth. After the ‘successful’ establishment of the Rottnest Prison for Aborigines, the people of Perth no longer witnessed the melancholy exhibitions of these unfortunate creatures working in irons’.64 For Aboriginal peoples however, the realities of being relocated away from ‘country’, especially those who had been sent in chains from the Kimberley in the far north of Western Australia, suffered tremendous grief and ill health. This was noted on many occasions over the prison’s 100-year history. Governor of the Swan River Colony Henry Trigg noted in official correspondence that: the prisoners will sit down and weep most bitterly, particularly old men, or those who have left wives and children on the main: and when they see smoke from the fires at the place where they have been accustomed to meet when unshackled and free, memory wanders over the scenes of bygone days, they seem intensively alive to their lost Freedom, and lamentably bewail their captivity.65 In 1912, Daisy Bates, anthropologist and activist, visited Wadjemup and later wrote: Shipped in batches, sometimes 1000 miles from the tropic north, to their trial and sentence in Perth, chained in gangs on the island, in the heat and the wet weather and biting cold, they worked in the salt lakes, or at road making, and at tilling a small area for cultivation, the corn being reaped by hand and thrashed by an old-fashioned flail. From the terrible treadmill of a labour quite unnatural to them, they were shepherded at night into the clammy cells of a low-roofed stone gaol, cells filthy and fever-ridden, with walls many inches thick. In these vaults they existed on 63 For further reading on this, see Douglas, H & Finnane, M (2012) Indigenous Crime and Settler Law: White Sovereignty After Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan which ultimately claims that Indigenous people and settler Australians still live under the shadow of the empire and the residue of colonial law. 64 Perth Gazette, 29.01.1858. 65 Trigg, GGC/SRO, 11.02.1842.

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prison rations. There were no fires. Give a native a fire, and he will survive starvation itself. Feed him and clothe him as much as you like, and deprive him of his fire, and he will die.66 The implementation of prison protocols changed significantly depending on variances in policy and choices by reigning Superintendents. According to Neville Green and Susan Moon, the use of Wadjemup as an Aboriginal prison can be broken up into three periods. The first, 1838– 49, might be regarded as a humanitarian period, when the intention was not merely to punish but also to rehabilitate the prisoners into colonial society. The second stage, 1855–1902, was a grim period when more than 3000 prisoners arrived on the island. In the final stage, 1902–31, Rottnest Island became an annex of Fremantle Prison.67 In fact, the early years were seen as an experiment and the ‘Instructions for the Guidance of Superintendents’ stipulated that: As the establishment is only an experiment, the Superintendent is to keep the government fully informed of all the circumstances which may occur, suggesting such improvements as he may consider necessary, and pointing out wherein he thinks the arrangements may be better ordered to suit the tempers and dispositions of those under his charge.68 At this time, free settlers were still in possession of some land on the island. In 1831, Governor Stirling had named the town of Kingston on Rottnest and the Colony’s surveyor at the time, Benjamin Smythe, drew up a plan for the area that consisted of 4 hectares of farming blocks and smaller town blocks. Robert and Caroline Thomson, whose name the main settlement’s bay assumed, were amongst the first colonial settlers to take up the land offer. The Thomson family perhaps typified an increasingly influential upper class in the colony—monied, fearful of the perceived threat of Aboriginal peoples as well as the recently arrived convicts (Perth did not receive convicts until 1850), and able to influence the laws of the

66 Bates, D (1966) The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia. Melbourne: Heinemann, p. 11. 67 Green, N & Moon, S (1997) Far from Home: Aboriginal Prisoners of Rottnest Island 1838–1931. Dictionary of Western Australians, vol. X. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, p. 14. 68 Hutt, BPP, 15.05.1841.

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day. The Thomsons fled to Rottnest with their eleven children, most of whom were daughters, in order to escape the harshness of the mostly male colony.69 During this period, Governor James Stirling responded to growing conflict and mounting pressure from settlers near Pinjarra as they persisted in taking up new land and were losing their livestock to Aboriginal hunters. On 28 October 1834, a well-planned assault by police on horseback and led by Stirling himself ambushed around seventy Aboriginal people sleeping before the dawn had broken. Men, women and children were shot dead. It is estimated that at least thirty people were killed. Aboriginal peoples subsequently lived in fear of more governmentsanctioned murders. The influential historian J.S. Battye commented that, ‘this salutary lesson, which ought to have been given two years earlier, ended all trouble as far as the Murray River tribe was concerned’.70 So, whilst it was argued by the government of the day that the establishment of Rottnest as an Aboriginal prison was a humane response to the strictures of normal prison life, the general sentiment evident amongst settler colonists was that ultimately, they wanted Aboriginal people removed—dead or alive. Rottnest Prison provided an alternative to murder. However, it attempted to kill something far more irreplaceable than individual life—the culture, language and kinship of Aboriginal peoples. The prison system, as it does to this day, was meant to assimilate and reform Aboriginal people through punishment. Henry Vincent was one of the most notorious Superintendents at Rottnest Prison. He was a free settler, barely literate and with obvious social difficulties noted by many.71 Time and time again, complaints were made against him and evidence suggests he was reprimanded, and ordered to improve the circumstances of Aboriginal prisoners. However, he was able to continue in his position for decades and features far more 69 Stannage,

CT (1979) The People of Perth. Perth: Perth City Council, p. 7. JS (1924) Western Australia: A History from Its Discovery to the Inauguration of the Commonwealth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 122. James Sykes Battye (1871–1954) had a wing of the State Library of Western Australia named after him and his views on Aboriginal peoples of the colony, though well recorded, are little known. 70 Battye,

71 Green, N & Moon, S (1997) Far from Home: Aboriginal Prisoners of Rottnest Island 1838–1931. Dictionary of Western Australians, vol. X. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, p. 7.

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prominently in the known history of the island than the men who were imprisoned and died there, victims of his inhumane governance.72 Daisy Bates recalls after her visit when the Superintendent Vincent was in charge (1839–1867): These unfortunates died in appalling numbers. At one time there were 800 of them on the island, and twenty-four deaths were recorded in one day. Few returned to their own country when their sentences had expired. Several made the attempt to swim to the mainland, but fourteen miles of tempestuous seas made the island a fortress, and there is no evidence that one of them succeeded. The supply of fresh prisoners, however, continued unabated for years.73 In 1883, Governor Broome ordered an inquiry into the conditions of the prison. For decades, there had been discussions about the treatment of Aboriginal prisoners across the state including Rottnest and, in particular, the practice of chaining prisoners to one another by their neck and ankles. Neville Green and Susan Moon write that ‘in 1887, more than forty men and women of one group were arrested at Lagrange Bay, chained and walked the 700 kilometres south to trial at Roebourne. In the south Aborigines chained at Fraser Range, to the east of Norseman, would be marched to Albany via Esperance’.74 The chaining of prisoners in Western Australia continued into the twentieth century despite Governor Hutt calling for its abolishment in 1839. Alice Nannup describes the scene of twelve Aboriginal men chained and marching to their imprisonment as one of her earliest memories in the 1920s.75 Owing to the hundreds of kilometres Aboriginal prisoners were forced to walk, it was widely regarded to be more humane than handcuffing since flies required brushing away with hands. Finding alternative modes of transport or questioning the reasoning for the imprisonment, especially so far away, in the first instance was not a consideration. It was also argued by police that chaining avoided the necessary shooting of Aboriginal prisoners trying to escape.76

72 Ibid.,

pp. 17–31. D (1966) The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia. Melbourne: Heinemann, p. 11. 74 Ibid., p. 44. 75 Kinnane in Langton, M & Perkins, R (eds.) (2008) First Australians—An Illustrated History. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, p. 240. 76 Sydney Morning Herald, 25.01.1934. 73 Bates,

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Aboriginal peoples were rarely provided with warrants for their arrest and almost always were captured in surprise attacks by police. They were seldom offered the benefit of legal council. Aboriginal interpreters were used, but they were rarely from the same language group. The majority of the prisoners sent to Rottnest were convicted of stealing livestock or ‘cattle killing’. It was unlikely that in the early years Aboriginal people saw any connection between their incarceration and the alleged crime. The 1884 Commission into the Conditions on Rottnest conclusively stated that the prisoners deeply despised their prison home. The panopticon-style prison, which was initially built for 106 men, was in 1883 used to house 167 men, equating to five people in each cell, leaving as little as 60 centimetres in width for each prisoner to sleep. Visitors to the prison were shocked by the conditions that the men endured.77 Prisoners themselves were interviewed during the course of the commission. A man named Sambo from the Irwin River commented that ‘I do not like Rottnest because it is a bad place. I do not like it because I might get bad and die. I have not been ill here. I am very cold in winter. I have not enough clothes. At night it is very cold. My blanket is old and thin’.78 On arrival, prisoners were rarely given more than a light blanket, and only later in the prison period was clothing issued. Prisoners slept on the hard ground without bedding and large gaps under the cell doors to provide ventilation prevented the cells from generating warmth. Death rates were high, about 10%. Despite fluctuations in record keeping (e.g. there were no occurrence books either kept or archived between 1838 and 1849), it can be ascertained through Colonial Secretary’s Office correspondence that about 370 prisoners died, making Wadjemup the largest deaths in custody site in Australia. Five of these deaths were from the official hangings of men executed for their crimes of murder.79 The hangings took place in the prison Quod in front of the prisoner population. However, most deaths were from disease. Also recorded was ‘death from senility’, which in today’s terms may be 77 Report of a Commission to Inquire into the Treatment of Aboriginal Native Prisoners of the Crown in This Colony (1884). Retrieved from http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/_files/ archive/removeprotect/93007.pdf. 78 Ibid. (Appendix 3 transcribes all the prisoner statements provided in the commission). 79 Green, N & Moon, S (1997) Far from Home: Aboriginal Prisoners of Rottnest Island 1838–1931. Dictionary of Western Australians, vol. X. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, p. 64.

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regarded as depression.80 What makes the deaths at Rottnest notable was that they occurred under government surveillance, and importantly in all instances, the state was responsible for their burial. Notably, not one burial site was memorialised or even recorded as to its whereabouts, reflecting on the value attributed to Aboriginal lives at the time. With respect to the crimes that led to imprisonment on Rottnest, in most instances the punishments far exceeded the crime.81 Sentences ranged generally from one to four years. Those with longer sentences were at higher risk of dying during their incarceration. Of the prevailing documentation that exists, namely in the records compiled by Moon and Green (1997), the cause of death is more often than not listed as ‘unknown’ or ‘not recorded’. With the exception of less than a handful of prisoners, all those who died were sentenced to two or more years. One of the most infamous prisoners on Wadjemup was a man known as Lumbia, who was incarcerated in 1926 for killing a white pastoralist by the name of Fred Hay.82 In the month-long hunt to find Lumbia, 30–100 Aboriginal men, women and children were killed. This would later be referred to as the Forrest River massacre.83 It is no wonder that Henry Trigg saw the men weep. What he perhaps did not suspect was that the weeping was not only for being incarcerated, but from reflecting upon the brutal destruction of people, family and culture. This deep grief continues today. The resistance to remember these histories reinforces the trauma. Indigenous trauma specialist Judith Atkinson writes that ‘historical trauma is a type of trauma 80 Ibid.,

pp. 100–332. the five executions that took place between 1879 and 1888, all were sentenced to death for murder, of both white and Aboriginal peoples. From 1851, there were some twenty judicial hangings of Nyoongar people in the Swan River Colony. For further information refer to Harman, K (2012) Aboriginal Convicts. Sydney: UNSW Press as well as Douglas, H & Finnane, M (2012) Indigenous Crime and Settler Law: White Sovereignty After Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 82 There is extensive writing done on this case. For further reading, see Noel Loos (2007), Bruce Elder (2003), and Neville Green (1995) The Forrest River Massacres. One of the original reportages can be viewed at http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/ article/93651163. 83 See Auty, K (2004) ‘Patrick Bernard O’Leary and the Forrest River Massacres, Western Australia: Examining “Wodgil” and the Significance of 8 June 1926’. Aboriginal History, 28. Downloaded from http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p171001/pdf/ article06.pdf, 24.08.2018. 81 Of

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transmitted across generations. It is defined as the subjective experiencing and remembering of events in the mind of an individual or the life of a community, passed from adults to children in cyclic processes as cumulative emotional and psychological wounding’.84 In 1899, another Royal Commission was ordered into the accommodation for prisoners of the colony.85 At the time, there were only 55 prisoners at Rottnest. Despite the low numbers, which would have equated to two people per cell, conditions were still found to be alarmingly ­inadequate. The commission found that, ‘the cells were noted to have very dirty walls and the floors were kerosened once a week. Ventilation was inadequate. The unhealthy condition of the cells made them unfit for use by prisoners’.86 Despite these reports showing again how abhorrent conditions were at Rottnest, the general sentiment in the broader community was that Rottnest Prison was a holiday camp for Aboriginal prisoners. As Moon and Green explain, ‘throughout its long history, the critics of the prison claimed that a term on the island did no more than fatten prisoners and teach them to become more skilled at crime’.87 Prisoner experiences of Rottnest varied depending on the Super­ intendent, the results of various commissions and the number of prisoners and the length of their sentences, as well as broader changes in the expanding economic frontiers of the colony. When prisoners first arrived on the island in 1838, there were no buildings, and prisoners shared a cave south of Bathurst Point whilst their keepers lived in tents. Over the following decades, the prisoners constructed all the buildings on the island including the lighthouse, their own prison and all the accommodation. This was undertaken and mostly completed under the supervision of Superintendent Henry Vincent. Under the previous superintendent, the prisoners were required to work six half days; under 84 Atkinson, J (2013) ‘Trauma-Informed Services and Trauma-Specific Care for Indigenous Australian Children, Resource Sheet No. 21’. Closing the Gap Clearing House, p. 4. 85 The full report can be viewed at http://archive.aiatsis.gov.au/removeprotect/93044. pdf. 86 Royal Commission into Penal System of Colony (1899). Battye Library. 87 Green, N & Moon, S (1997) Far from Home: Aboriginal Prisoners of Rottnest Island 1838–1931. Dictionary of Western Australians, vol. X. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, p. 22.

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Vincent, they were given a far stricter regime throughout the week. This impacted on their ability to supplement their otherwise vegetable-only diet with fish and other game they could hunt. There is no doubt that the prisoners’ inadequate diet led to disease and poor health. Despite the rigorous labour, prisoners were given only two meals a day mostly consisting of cabbage, gruel and occasionally rice.88 In the 1880s, the judiciary in the colony took a hard-line approach with Aboriginal people who were hunting the settlers’ livestock. This was also a time when settler colonist land claims were expanding through the Kimberley region, and the murder and incarceration significantly increased due to their forced removal from traditional lands. Average sentences rose in this period from one year to four and numbers of prisoners doubled. Measles and influenza swept through the Rottnest Prison at various times. The strict sentencing did little more than intensify the relationship between settler colonists and Aboriginal communities. A crucial issue arose when prisoners were released. Prior to 1840, they were predominantly from the south-west of the state. There was therefore a link between language groups and cultures on Wadjemup, and when the prisoners were released, they travelled back across country. However, from 1840, the prisoners increasingly came from all across Western Australia, as far as Wyndham and Halls Creek, 1000 kilometres to the north. The policy was to facilitate the prisoner’s movement to the closest public transport station, either by boat, and later by bus or rail. Often, prisoners trying to get home to the north were provided with means as far as Geraldton, some 600 kilometres away and occasionally to Broome, almost twice this distance. From this point, they were required to make their own way by foot, or any other means they could secure. This journey was often treacherous, across country they did not share ties with. There is no record of how many men actually made it home. Green and Moon write that ‘by the turn of the century, prisoners from districts served by rail were given a second-class ticket from Fremantle to their home town, where they would be met by a local constable. Occasionally one hears of Aboriginal men who were turned out of prison at Fremantle and told to find their own way home. This was unlikely. It was possible, however, that a released prisoner might have been turned

88 Trigg,

GG, 11.02.1842.

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loose at the rail terminal or northern port and still have to find his own way across several hundred kilometres of alien territory’.89 As is evident from Neville Green and Susan Moon and their research on the Rottnest Prison, the processes of release are very sketchy and no clear policy ever existed. The Governor in 1860, Sir Arthur Kennedy, implemented a parole system for Aboriginal prisoners to serve time after release, working without pay essentially as slaves, for pastoralists and in the fishing industry. Unbelievably, this process supplemented a system of child slavery already known to the authorities that underpinned the pearling industry. ‘The 1904 Royal Commission into Aboriginal conditions in Western Australia, found that employers in the pearling industry were binding (Aboriginal) children as young as ten in apprenticeships lasting in some cases up to the age of twenty-one’.90 In considering all stages of the process, the initial reasons for incarceration at Rottnest Prison, the conditions of imprisonment and the ultimate ‘release’ of the prisoners, it is clear that Aboriginal prisoners were being assimilated as forced labour through removal and punishment. Many other Aboriginal prisoners were put into police service as trackers, assistants and interpreters on release. The desired aim at every level was for Aboriginal people to live in servitude to white employers and to contribute to the destruction of their own culture through forced labour in the invasion of their own country.91 These processes and policies ran parallel to other assimilation policies in Aboriginal communities. This included ‘residential’ schools for Aboriginal children who had been forcibly removed from their families, which would later be known as the Stolen Generations. Aboriginal peoples were also undergoing segregation in towns across Australia. Policies were introduced that restricted movement and interaction, and empowered police with ‘protector’ roles which ultimately led to an oppressive 89 Green, N & Moon, S (1997) Far from Home: Aboriginal Prisoners of Rottnest Island 1838–1931. Dictionary of Western Australians, vol. X. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, p. 56. 90 Haebich (2000) Broken Circles, Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, p. 212. 91 Much has been written on this topic which encompasses research into the Stolen Generations (Haebich 2000), The Native Police (Richards 2008) colonialisation of the Kimberly (Pedersen in Schissel 2006) and the role of state-sanctioned institutions and children’s homes (Haebich 1992).

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system of surveillance and punishment. The Rottnest Prison mirrored what was happening everywhere. Ultimately, the settler colonists believed and hoped that the ‘Aboriginal problem’ would die out and that measures to support Aboriginal peoples were merely prolonging the inevitable. Policy and public opinion reflected this in almost every instance. Enforced slavery was regarded as a gesture of kindness and generosity to a dying race.92 The legacy of these times is all around us—the cleared landscapes, the buildings and roads built with indentured labour. There was an unspoken and implicit relationship between settler colonists and Aboriginal peoples who were forced to facilitate the colonisation of their own land. Australian landscapes are layered with these quieted histories of oppression. The island of Wadjemup is an acute example of this overlooked history. Significantly, the way the land is now used betrays these attempts to forget, as the past continues to surface. The persistence of Aboriginal communities to memorialise their history ensures this. The past is buried just below the surface. In 1962, a groundskeeper discovered as many as 10 burial sites at Wadjemup. Again in 1972, when a water pipeline was being installed, a tradesman witnessed the disturbance of graves, which was not made public until 1984. In 1988, more graves were uncovered, and according to correspondence between Nyoongar elder Robert Bropho and Kado Muir, ‘it was the first time information had come out to the public in general concerning the unrecognised, unprotected and disrespected graves of our Ancestors’.93 In 1989, more remains were uncovered in the former prison when the leaseholder for the Lodge (which includes the Quod), Dall-hold Investments Pty, was attempting to install a swimming pool for hotel guests.94 The Rottnest Island Deaths Group (RIDG) was established in 1989 (and later incorporated in 1993) in response to these incidents and the frustratingly slow process of recognising and memorialising the history 92 Haebich (2000) Broken Circles, Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, p. 69. 93 Correspondence Bropho and Muir (2012), p. 2 provided to the author by Kado Muir. 94 This was Alan Bond’s signature company, which held 52% of Bond Corporation’s investments. A summary of its final demise as part of Alan Bond’s incarceration for Corporate Fraud can be read here http://www.smh.com.au/business/laid-to-rest-theleaking-flagship-of-alan-bond-20090614-c7cd.html.

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of Rottnest. In particular, this group sought to find a way to speak for the people whose family members had died there. The group was made up of Nyoongar elders as well as other key stakeholders from around Western Australia whose ancestors had been incarcerated. At a statewide meeting in 1994, members of the RIDG made the following recommendations: 1.  Wadjemup to be given back to the Nyoongar (sic) people; 2. An Official Aboriginal Cemetery be formally established; 3. The Quod be under the full control and custody of Aboriginal peoples; 4.  Further GPR (ground penetrating radar) take place throughout Wadjemup to fully record burial sites and other sites before any new developments take place or relocations of current buildings and tourist camping sites take place; 5. An area of land be set aside as a Meeting Camp for Aboriginal people from throughout the state; 6. Further research take place to record the true history of Wadjemup to ensure the past is known and not forgotten. In 1994, a land claim for Wadjemup was included as part of a combined Nyoongar Claim under the new Native Title Act. However, key evidence that was provided was not considered by the residing judge and the case failed at appeal in 1996. Findings listed in the judgement indicate the extensive dismissal of evidence provided. In Bennell vs The State of Western Australia, Justice Wilcox delivered the following judgement: My findings about the existence of a single Nyoongar community throughout the claim area (including the Perth Metropolitan Area) mean that, broadly speaking, some native title rights and interests have survived throughout the area that is the subject of the separate proceeding. However, it is necessary to refer, specifically, to two parts of the claim area: the off-shore islands and the land and water below low-water mark…the claim area contains Rottnest and Carnac Islands. However, no evidence was adduced before me about either of these islands. The islands were referred to in evidence heard by Beaumont J, but it was not claimed that any of them were inhabited at

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the date of settlement. …there is no evidence of pre-settlement use of any of the islands, or even of the existence of an oral tradition about such use.95 It is still unclear as to the full extent of the burial site at Wadjemup despite initial GPR surveys. The Rottnest Island Authority has shown no resolve in consulting in more than an ad hoc way with community and stakeholders. The Quod used for Aboriginal imprisonment on Wadjemup has been used for tourist accommodation intermittently since 1931. In 1988, Perth businessman Alan Bond was authorised to begin a private development that joined both the prison building and the adjacent boys’ reformatory (used for non-Aboriginal boys from 1881 to 1901), building four-star accommodation that would be known as The Lodge. The walls between the cells were knocked down so that two cells became one hotel room. The site continued to be used as a hotel until May 2018 when the lease expired. A consultation is currently underway to decide what to do with the area believed to hold the remains of Aboriginal prisoners. Green and Moon remark that ‘very few societies in the world would convert to tourist accommodation prison cells that an estimated 387 people died in miserable conditions thousands of kilometres from their homelands and families. It is comparable to transforming Auschwitz concentration camp into holiday cottages’.96 This is the conclusion of this miserable history—that the misery continues. Today, the Aboriginal Prison on Wadjemup still may go un-remembered. The loose area that has been cheaply fenced off and named ‘The Aboriginal cemetery’ perfectly highlights the disregard and inability to accord respect and show empathy for Aboriginal suffering by the broader community. Regardless of the arguments that can be made about previous policies, the current status of Rottnest Island reflects both where we have come from and who we are. History is not historical—it transcends space and time and lives on in all of us. We cannot distance ourselves from previous policies, because we continue to re-enact them at every turn. White families continue to frequent the island in record numbers. They are often aware, but unconcerned with 95 Native Title Tribunal (2006). Accessible http://www.msaj.com/Indian_Law_Cases/ Bennell%20v%20State%20of%20Western%20Australia%20(2006)%20FCA%201243.pdf. 96 Green, N & Moon, S (1997) Far from Home: Aboriginal Prisoners of Rottnest Island 1838–1931. Dictionary of Western Australians, vol. X. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, p. 83.

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the history of their beloved island. To remember correctly is to sacrifice too much of what has become their connection to place. This ability to disconnect with history can be evidenced throughout contemporary life. In the last two decades, new carceral islands have been created to house those claiming asylum. The following is not a quote from a prisoner on Norfolk 200 years ago, or an Aboriginal prisoner on Wadjemup. It is an excerpt from the 2018 novel written by writer, journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani imprisoned on Manus Island since 2013: I am disintegrated and dismembered, my decrepit past fragmented and scattered, no longer integral, unable to become whole once again. The total collection of scenes turned like pages of a short story, churned through with the speed of light. My god, prison is so horrific.97 The current system of offshore incarceration for asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australia is part of a lineage of detention, incarceration and punishment implemented by colonial and then federal governments since 1788. The almost 250 years since the formation of a penal colony in what became New South Wales has enabled over time a fine-tuned argument to develop that ignores or circumvents international human rights, denies media intervention and renegotiates legal frameworks. For example, in 1994, the time limit of nine months’ detention was removed from the Migration Act so there could be no legal impediment to indefinite detention for asylum seekers, including children.98 Understood within a history of convicts and violent invasion, the presumption of criminality underpins Australian identity and an approach to the perception of unlawfulness which is unrelenting. Coupled with the inability to ‘image’ what has been taking place on Australian prison islands in the Pacific over the last three decades, a veil of forgetting continues almost unchallenged. Prime Minister John Howard under the liberal leadership began the process of adapting the existing mandatory detention laws, previously introduced by the Paul Keating’s government in 1992. The Keating Labour government had changed the 1958 Migration Act to include

97 Boochani, B (trans. Tofighian, O) (2018) No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia. 98 Nethery, A (2009) ‘A Modern-Day “Concentration Camp”: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres’. In Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Canberra: ANU Press.

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mandatory detention for anyone claiming asylum. Thus, the policy of detention has always been bipartisan and has successfully cemented votes on both sides in numerous elections run on campaigns of fear and racism. A turning point in Australia’s response to those seeking asylum was the Tampa crisis in August 2001 in which the Norwegian merchant ship (Tampa) rescued 439 people from a sinking ship. Predominantly escaping war in Afghanistan, a war that also comprised of Australian troops, these refugees included over 100 children. After five days, the ship’s Captain (Rinnan), frustrated with Australia’s refusal to accept responsibility and enable safe passage, defied Australian orders and proceeded towards Christmas Island. This resulted in the Australian armed forces meeting with the vessel (notably, not displaying the Australian flag which enabled certain legal loopholes) and finally allowing the refugees entry on to Christmas Island. As this was all unfolding, the Howard government had attempted to pass the Border Protection Bill 2001 through the parliament. Rejected by the Senate, the government then sought to excise a number of islands from Australia’s migration zone, effectively meaning that the rescued people had not legally landed in Australia. This was supported by the Labour government. Those refugees on the Tampa would become the first people incarcerated on Nauru.99 Kleist argues that: Before the Tampa crisis refugees were treated like any immigrant, potentially belonging to or being excluded from politically imagined versions of Australia. During the Tampa crisis, this perception changed. Refugees came to be discussed in terms of border protection and of their legal relation to the Australian State. They were perceived as a threat to Australian sovereignty and were thus confronted at the border with powers apparently unrelated to sovereignty. The government denied that refugees were humans seeking protection.100

One of the main changes made under Howards ‘Pacific Solution’ Policy in 2001 was the excising of islands outside Australia’s immigration zone. 99 Kleist, O (2009) ‘Refugees Between Pasts and Politics: Sovereignty and Memory in the Tampa Crisis’. In Does History Matter: Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Canberra: ANU Press. 100 Ibid., p. 93.

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This was largely done in collaboration with Papua New Guinea. It meant that anyone attempting to arrive in Australia by boat to claim asylum was captured by the Australian Navy and imprisoned on islands that were not part of Australia. Various iterations of this policy have been part of Australia’s immigration policy ever since. The Australian government scoured the Pacific islands and Southeast Asia for potential sites for offshore detention centres, and Manus Island and Nauru were selected.101 The main aim of the 2001 Pacific Solution was to make the process of claiming refugee status in Australia so horrific that it became a deterrent for those claiming asylum, ‘encouraging’ them to seek asylum elsewhere. In 2013, in the short period that Kevin Rudd resumed his position as prime minister, it was announced that, ‘from now on, any asylum seeker who arrives in Australia by boat will have no chance of being settled in Australia as refugees. Asylum seekers taken to Christmas Island will be sent to Manus and elsewhere in Papua New Guinea for assessment of their refugee status. If they are found to be genuine refugees they will be resettled in Papua New Guinea… If they are found not to be genuine refugees they may be repatriated to their country of origin or be sent to a safe third country other than Australia. These arrangements are contained within the Regional Resettlement Arrangement signed by myself and the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea’.102 In a series of court cases, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea deemed the camp on Manus Island unconstitutional, and it also stated that the camp did not operate under PNG law as detainees had no intention of arriving in PNG and their destination was always intended to be Australia.103 Yet, they did not operate under Australian law either. In other words, no government has claimed jurisdiction. In 2017, the Manus prison facility was closed and ‘open camps’ were established. The prisoners refused to move camps, claiming they simply wanted to know what their future entailed. They held their ground for 23 days. The Australian government, in response to their protests, cut off power 101 Australian Senate, Report of the Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident, 2002, 293. Available online at https://www.aph.gov.au/binaries/senate/committee/maritime_incident_ctte/report/report.pdf. Accessed 28 August 2018. 102 http://www.dfat.gov.au/issues/rra-png.pdf. Accessed 3 December 2013. 103 Blackshield, T (2016) ‘PNG’s Supreme Court and Manus Island’. Australian Public Law Blog. http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/news/2016/05/png%E2%80%99s-supreme-court-andmanus-island. Accessed 28 August 2018.

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and water to them. Since 2013, 10 people have died on Manus Island, mostly from preventable and treatable illnesses. The main aim of Australian immigration policy was to fully control who, how and when people entered Australia regardless of Australia’s signature to the 1951 Geneva Convention which stated that ‘Governments (should) continue to receive refugees in their territories and that they act in concert in a true spirit of international cooperation in order that these refugees may find asylum and the possibility of resettlement’.104 In signing, Australia also declared its ‘profound concern for refugees and endeavoured to assure refugees the widest possible exercise of these fundamental rights and freedoms…and that…the unity of the family, the natural and fundamental group unit of society, is an essential right of the refugee’.105 In this moment of international agreement and moral fortitude, Australia was able to see that all people at any time may be displaced or found without a safe home. All the whilst, Aboriginal peoples in Australia were continuing to be displaced and had yet to be awarded the status of Australian citizens. The two conflicting positions of both recognising how the exercise of power can bring disadvantage and cultural destruction, whilst implementing policies that have led to the disempowerment of Aboriginal communities, highlights the irony and schizophrenia of Australian social policy. That Australia, a land invaded by the British, and subsequently populated by convicts, settlers and immigrants, then took such a hard-line approach to refugees is difficult to reconcile. Additionally, the refugees attempting to settle in Australia have largely come from places where either British or Australian troops have been instrumental in causing a global refugee crisis.106 Nauru Island has also been an instrument in Australia’s carceral island policies. Unlike Manus Island which falls under PNG Authority, Nauru is a small independent island nation in Micronesia, to the north-east of the Queensland coast. Somewhat ironically, the first Europeans to live on the island were two Irish convicts who had escaped from Norfolk Island prison, Patrick Burke and John Jones. More recently, Nauru has become 104 http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/3be01b964.pdf.

Accessed 3 December 2013.

105 Ibid. 106 Johns, G & Davies, G (2104) ‘Coalitions of the Willing? International Backing and British Public Support for Military Action’. Journal of Peace Research, 51 (6), 767–781.

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utterly reliant on the funding Australia provides.107 The original people of Nauru comprise of 12 Polynesian tribes and have been inhabiting the island for more than 3000 years. During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they were colonised by various European forces, causing a complex web of histories. In 1888, the Germans annexed the islands as part of the Marshall Island Protectorate. After 1923, Australia became a trustee over the island. During the Second World War, Japanese troops occupied the island. Since 1966, it has been an independent Republic, claiming sovereignty over the phosphate mining that the British had established. In 1989, Nauru took court action against the Australian government who had failed to resolve the environmental damage caused by phosphate mining.108 This European history on Nauru is completely absent in contemporary discussions on its role as landlord for refugees seeking asylum in Australia. It is therefore within a social and historical landscape, of imagining ourselves as a land of freedom and equality whilst harbouring some of the most inequitable human rights standards of the developed world, that the carceral role of isolated islands becomes normalised. The conditions on Nauru and Manus Island detention centres have raised serious concerns for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Richard Towle. Yet, the Australian government has, for two decades, been deaf to the international community. In a report to the United Nations, Towle described the facilities as ‘not appropriate for families and children to be transferred to Nauru or Papua New Guinea and the suggestions and proposals for transferring unaccompanied children for us is even more deeply concerning. Unaccompanied children are already very vulnerable and to place them in situations of uncertainty and tough physical conditions… could be very damaging to their health and well-being’.109 Mirroring incarceration policies for Aboriginal peoples at Wadjemup, these refugees are given no indication of when they will be

107 Fraenkl, J (2016) ‘Australia’s Detention Centres on Manus Island and Nauru: An End of Constructive Pacific Engagement?’ The Journal of Pacific History, 51 (3), 278–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2016.1233802. 108 McDaniel, C & Gowdy, J (2000) Paradise for Sale: A Parable of Nature. University of California Press. 109 http://unhcr.org.au/unhcr/images/2013-11-26%20Report%20of%20UNHCR%20 Visit%20to%20Nauru%20of%207-9%20October%202013.pdf. Accessed 3 December 2013.

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able to leave. It is likely that many of them will wait many more years to be resettled, and that this will never be in Australia. It seems that Australia is destined to perpetually repeat a system of carceral islands. The vigilance which is perceived to be required to police who is entitled to belong to the nation is evident across broad contemporary and historical policies. The 1908 Quarantine Act which established how people and goods entering the country must be decontaminated, the White Australia policy (aligning whiteness with goodness and cleanliness and specifically targeting people and goods arriving from Asia110), the establishment of Aboriginal reserves to ‘protect’ Aboriginal people from frontier violence on their own land, civilian internment camps throughout the twentieth century all testify to the pervasiveness of this thinking. Seen in this broader context, immigration policy in Australia ‘reveals a blind spot in public memory towards Australia’s own history of administrative detention’.111 What links these forms of detention is that all these people—refugees, Aboriginal peoples, ­ non-white people, Japanese and Germans—are linked not by what they have done, but who they are. Detention in Australia has always been about ­identifying particular races as threats to the nation and using policy to create mechanisms of exclusion. Australia is thus an island nation that has inherited a tradition of policing and enforcing notions of boundedness associated with the establishment and maintenance of a nation state. Through rigorously and systematically enshrining a policy of detainment through ‘island zones’ as an adaptable solution to any given question, Australia has rarified and co-opted the original mechanism of a penal colony into contemporary identity. These policies have almost always had sat in complete contradiction to what Australia remembers. This has allowed for the formation of an Australian identity as one that supports a ‘fair go’ and that is antiestablishment in nature. Yet, this remains at odds with how this identity is maintained. An example of this is former Prime Minister John Howard’s 110 Maglen, K (2005) ‘A World Apart: Geography, Australian Quarantine, and the Mother Country’. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 60 (2), 196–217. 111 Nethery, A (2009) ‘A Modern-Day “Concentration Camp”: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres’. In Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Canberra: ANU Press, p. 73.

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response to the Tampa crisis when he declared that: Nobody pretends for a moment that the circumstances from which many people flee are not very distressing. But equally, it has to be said that, in the last 20 years, no country has been more generous to refugees than Australia. After the Indochinese events of the 1970s, this country took, on a per capita basis, more Indochinese refugees than any other country on earth. We have continued to be a warm, generous recipient of refugees, but we have become increasingly concerned about the increasing flow of people into this country. Every nation has the right to effectively control its borders and to decide who comes here and under what circumstances, and Australia has no intention of surrendering or compromising that right.112 Similar sentiments were expressed across all sides of government. The co-option of certain facts, at the expense of others, enabled parliament to enact a remembering that defined Australian migration laws as humane and generous. Australians were denied the possibility, as they had in relation to first nation cultures, of seeing refugees as ‘belonging’. People who have been denied human rights, or the status of citizenship, are now being dictated to by the state about who is remembered, and how they are remembered. Far from dismantling the apron strings of the Motherland, Australia has created a twenty-first-century empire of its own defined by nineteenth-century concepts of empire and the barbaric carceral island regimes in the first penal colonies of Australia. The remainder of this book address the ways contemporary artists have refused state authorised remembering and forgetting. The research creates a new journey of unforgetting, resisting and creating methodologies of listening to the islands of the global south. Part of this resistance to forgetting has been to privilege other ways of imaging these islands of empire.

Bibliography Agnew, V (2003) ‘Pacific Island Encounters and Race’. In Edmond, R & Smith, V (eds.) Islands in History and Representation. London: Routledge. Atkinson, J (2013) ‘Trauma-Informed Services and Trauma-Specific Care for Indigenous Australian Children, Resource Sheet No. 21’. Closing the Gap Clearing House.

112 John

Howard, CPD, Representatives, 29 August 2001, pp. 30, 517–518.

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Auty, K (2004) ‘Patrick Bernard O’Leary and the Forrest River Massacres, Western Australia: Examining “Wodgil” and the Significance of 8 June 1926’. Aboriginal History, 28, 122–155. Barton, BF & Barton, MS (1993) ‘Modes of Power in Technical and Professional Visuals’. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 7 (1), 138–162. Bates, D (1938) The Passing of Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia. Melbourne: Heinemann. Battye, JS (1924) Western Australia: A History from Its Discovery to the Inauguration of the Commonwealth. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Boochani, B (trans. Tofighian, O) (2018) No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison. Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia. Boyce, J in Perkins, R & Langton, M (2008) First Australians—An Illustrated History. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press. Brand, I (1984) Port Arthur 1830–1877. West Moonah, TAS: Jason Publications. Burns, P (1989) Fatal Success: A History of the New Zealand Company. Auckland: Heinemann Reed. Campbell, C (2001) The Intolerable Hulks: British Shipboard Confinement. Tucson, AZ: Fenestra Publishing. Causer, T (2010) Norfolk Island Suicide Lotteries: Myth and Reality. London: Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College. Churchwards, WB (2009) Blackbirding in the South Pacific or, the First White Man on the Beach. Plano, TX: Amberg Press. Coldham, PW (1983) Bonded Passengers to America. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing. Dortch, C (2002) ‘Modelling Past Aboriginal Hunter-Gatherer Socio-economic and Territorial Organisation in Western Australia’s Lower South-West’. Archaeology in Oceania, 37 (1), 1–21. Douglas, H & Finnane, M (2012) Indigenous Crime and Settler Law: White Sovereignty After Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dukyer, E (1992) The Discovery of Tasmania: Journal Extracts from the Expeditions of Abel Janzoon Tasman and Marc-Joseph Marion Dufresne 1642 & 1772. Hobart: St. David’s Park Publishing/Tasmanian Government Printing Office. Elder, B (2003) Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatments of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788. Sydney: New Holland Press. Fieldhouse, DK (1999) The West and the Third World: Trade, Colonialism, Dependence and Development. Oxford: Blackwell. Fraenkl, J (2016) ‘Australia’s Detention Centres on Manus Island and Nauru: An End of Constructive Pacific Engagement?’ The Journal of Pacific History, 51 (3), 278–285.

72  K. McMILLAN Green, N & Moon, S (1997) Far from Home: Aboriginal Prisoners of Rottnest Island 1838–1931. Dictionary of Western Australians, vol. X. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Haebich, A (2000) Broken Circles, Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, p. 212. Harman, K (2012) Aboriginal Convicts. Sydney: UNSW Press. Hazzard, M (1984) Punishment Short of Death: A History of the Norfolk Island Penal Settlement. Melbourne: Hyland Publishing. Heeres, JE (1899) The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia 1606–1765. London: Royal Dutch Geographical Society, Section III.B. Hill, R (2009) ‘Maori and State Policy’. In Byrnes, Giselle (ed.) The New Oxford History of New Zealand. Australia and New Zealand: Oxford University Press. Jebb, MA (1987) Isolating the Problem: Venereal Disease and Aborigines in Western Australia. Unpublished Honours Thesis, History Department, Murdoch University. Johns, G & Davies, G (2104) ‘Coalitions of the Willing? International Backing and British Public Support for Military Action’. Journal of Peace Research, 51 (6), 767–781. Keneally, T (2007) The Commonwealth of Thieves. London: Vintage Books. Kinnane in Langton, M & Perkins, R (eds.) (2008) First Australians—An Illustrated History. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press. Kunitz, S (1994) Disease and Social Diversity: The European Impact on the Health of Non-Europeans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lashley, M (2006) ‘Remedying Racial and Ethnic Inequality in New Zealand: Reparative and Distributive Policies of Social Justice’. In Myers, Samuel L & Corrie, Bruce P (eds.) Racial and Ethnic Economic Inequality: An International Perspective, vol. 1996. New York: Peter Lang. Maglen, K (2005) ‘A World Apart: Geography, Australian Quarantine, and the Mother Country’. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 60 (2), 196–217. McDaniel, C & Gowdy, J (2000) Paradise for Sale: A Parable of Nature. Berkeley: University of California Press. McMahon, E (2010) ‘Australia, the Island Continent: How Contradictory Geography Shapes the National Imaginary’. Space and Culture, 13 (2), 178–187. Sage. Moore, GF (1842) A Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language in Common Use Amongst the Natives of Western Australia. London: WS. Orr & Co. Mortensen, R (2009) in the Journal of South Pacific Law, 13 (1). Accessible online at http://www.paclii.org/journals/fJSPL/vol04/7.shtml. Nelson, CE (1994) ‘Nicolas Witsen’s Letter of 1698 to Martin Lister About a Dutch Expedition to the South Land (Western Australia): The Original Text and a Review of Its Significance for the History of Australian Natural History’. Archives of Natural History, 21 (2), 147–167.

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Nethery, A (2009) ‘A Modern-Day “Concentration Camp”: Using History to Make Sense of Australian Immigration Detention Centres’. In Making and Debating Citizenship, Immigration Refugee Policy in Australia and New Zealand. Canberra: ANU Press. Orange, C (1989) The Story of a Treaty. Wellington: Allen & Unwin. Plomley, NJB (1987) Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement. Hobart: Blubber Head Press. Plomley, NJB & Henley, KA (1990) The Sealers of Bass Strait and the Cape Barren Island Community. Hobart: Blubber Head Press. Reynolds, H (1998) Why Weren’t We Told? London: Penguin Books. Richards, J (2008) ‘The Native Police of Queensland’. History Compass, 6 (4), 1024–1036. Roscoe, K (2015) ‘Too Many Kill ‘em. Too Many Make ‘em Ill: The Commission into Rottnest Prison as the Context for Section 70’. Studies in Western Australian History, 30, 43–57. Roscoe, K (2018) ‘A Natural Hulk: Australia’s Carceral Islands in the Colonial Period 1788–1901’. International Review of Social History, 63, Special Issue, 45–63. Ryan (2007) in Langton, M & Perkins, R (eds.) (2008) First Australians—An Illustrated History. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press. Semple, J (1993) Bentham’s Prison: A Study of the Panopticon Penitentiary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Somerville, W (1976) Rottnest Island in History and Legend: Its Discovery and Development, Natural Beauties, Fauna and Flora. Perth: Rottnest Island Board. Stannage, CT (1979) The People of Perth. Perth: Perth City Council. Stingemore, J (2002) Treponemal Diseases and the Isles of the Living Dead: An Investigation into ‘Syphilis’ in Australia and Its Effects of Indigenous Australians. Unpublished Honours Thesis, University of Western Australia. Walter, M & Daniels, L (2008) ‘Personalising the History Wars: Woretemoeteryenner’s Story’. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 1 (1), 37. Watson, EJ (1968) Rottnest: Its Tragedy and Its Glory. Perth: Watson DL. Wehi, PM, Whaanga, H, & Roa, T (2009) ‘Missing in Translation: Maori Language and Oral Tradition in Scientific Analyses of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK)’. Journal of Royal Society of New Zealand, 39 (4), 201–204. Young, D (1996) Making Crime Pay. Hobart: THRA.

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Digital Archives Aboriginal Island Populations: Australian Bureau of Statistics. http://www. abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/ 65f1ae55ef772f18ca2570ec001117a4!OpenDocument. Alan Bond’s and Bond Corporation’s Corporate Fraud can be read here http:// www.smh.com.au/business/laid-to-rest-the-leaking-flagship-of-alan-bond20090614-c7cd.html. An Act for the Prevention of Vagrancy and for the Punishment of Idle and Disorderly Rogues and Vagabonds and incorrigible Rogues in the Colony of New South Wales (6 Geo. IV. No. 6) 25 August 1836 (repealed by 15 Vic. No. 4, 1851). Full text of Act: The Public General Statutes of New South Wales from 1 Victoriae to 10 Victoriae, Inclusive (1836–1846) (Sydney, Thomas Richards, Government Printer, 1861). Australian Senate, Report of the Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident, 2002, 293. Available online at https://www.aph.gov.au/binaries/ senate/committee/maritime_incident_ctte/report/report.pdf. Blackbirding and the South Sea Islanders Populations. http://www.datsima.qld. gov.au/resources/multicultural/community/australian-south-sea-islanders/ history.pdf. Blackshield, T (2016) ‘PNG’s Supreme Court and Manus Island’. Australian Public Law Blog. http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/news/2016/05/png%E2%80%99ssupreme-court-and-manus-island. Accessed 28 August 2018. British National Archives. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/ research-guides/transportation-australia.htm. Hill, F & Hill, R (1825–1902) What We Saw in Australia. London: Macmillan, p. 273. Retrieved from https://archive.org/stream/whatwesawinaustr00hilliala£page/n1/ mode/2up. Hutt, BPP, 15.05.1841. John Howard, CPD, Representatives, 29 August 2001, pp. 30517–30518. Native Title Tribunal (2006). Accessible http://www.msaj.com/Indian_Law_ Cases/Bennell%20v%20State%20of%20Western%20Australia%20(2006)%20 FCA%201243.pdf. Perth Gazette, 29.01.1858. Royal Commission into Penal System of Colony (1899). Battye Library. Steele Rudd Manuscript: University of Queensland. http://espace.library. uq.edu.au/view/UQ:216890. Sydney Morning Herald, 25.01.1934. Trigg, GGC/SRO, 11.02.1842. The Forrest River Massacres. One of the original reportages can be viewed at http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/93651163.

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The full report can be viewed at http://archive.aiatsis.gov.au/removeprotect/93044.pdf. http://www.dfat.gov.au/issues/rra-png.pdf. Accessed 3 December 2013. http://www.refworld.org/pdfid/3be01b964.pdf. Accessed 3 December 2013. http://unhcr.org.au/unhcr/images/2013-11-26%20Repor t%20of%20 UNHCR%20Visit%20to%20Nauru%20of%207-9%20October%202013.pdf. Accessed 3 December 2013.

CHAPTER 4

Imaging the Island: Interrogating the Settler Colonial Experience

Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and g­ enerous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean, we must wake up to this ancient truth and together use it to overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us again, physically and psychologically, in the tiny spaces which we have resisted accepting as our sole appointed place, and from which we have recently liberated ourselves. We must not allow anyone to belittle us again, and take away our freedom.1 Hau’Ofa suggests above that the south is not a place constituting various island nations, but an intertwined web of connectiveness. In this context, the sea is not a void, but a territory of knowledge. He calls for a resistance and a truth-telling whereby power might be more evenly distributed. Therefore, the island may be reread within this context as a site where new ideas can intersect with ancient ones, away from the weight of European cultural history. The geographical vastness and remoteness of the global south has enabled the forgetting of many of the acts of empire, but it has also enabled a resistance from the totalising effects of the global north. In discussing Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the desert island, Tom Conley suggests that ‘the island is not a geographical representation but, rather, 1 Hau’Ofa, E (1993) A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands. Edited by Vijay Naidu, Eric Waddell, & Epeli, p. 16.

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a plot-point and a plateau for any of the philosopher’s lines of flight and of migration. The island becomes an enchanted space where concepts continually move in all directions and reinvents itself’.2 Deleuze gives pause for the incredible geographic and accidental forces that create these oceanic landscapes; he imagines them as ‘originary, essential islands: sometimes they are formed by corals, they offer us a veritable organism – sometimes they surge up from under the sea, they bring to the open air a movement from the lower depths; some emerge slowly, others disappear and come back, they can’t be annexed’.3 What is clear is an oscillation between the deeply embedded sense of place afforded to island sites by first nation cultures and the mystical imaginary places in European literature and philosophy. In imaging future islands and landscapes of the global south, I draw from both these things—the cohabitation and intersection of the imaginary and the real; the violent supposition by Deleuze that islands ‘are themselves at war with each other, and that the condition of possibility of a deserted island would be based on a truce in the ongoing conflict of land and water’4; and the gentle assertion by Hau’Ofa that there is no distinction between land and water—that they are one landscape connected together through webs of knowledges. For most artists, first nations and otherwise, we operate from both these places—ancient knowledges inflect more recent concepts—we are both isolated by our island homes and liberated by them. Here, I consider artists who have considered the act of looking from the south as a conceptual framework that seeks to undermine the colonial gaze, and to use the island, not as a site of instability, but as a place of strength and possibility. However, what the global south is as a concept is much debated. Anthony Gardner asks; Is it dictated by geography and limited to countries and cultures that lie below the equator? Is it defined by a supposed opposition between the ‘global north’—a term usually considered synonymous with what used to be called “the West”—and a “global south” that has come to connote so many different, often contradictory things: poverty and corruption (the ‘global south’ of uneven socio-economic development), 2 Conley, T (2005) ‘The Desert Island’. In Deleuze and Space. Edinburgh University Press. 3 Deleuze, G (2004) Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974). Translated by Taormina, Mike. Cambridge and London: Semiotext(e). 4 Ibid.

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the marvelous and the magical (the ‘south’ of Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges), the disorganised, the dispossessed, the lazy, the imaginative and anything else the “rational”, dominant North is presumed not to be? Is there a distinct discourse of the South, or a ‘Southern Theory’ as sociologist Raewyn Connell has advocated? Or is the South driven instead by a focus on past struggles and their persistent presence today: By the shared histories of colonialism, decolonisation and the postcolonial?5 Arguably, south-thinking is informed by not one, but all these things, and it is this multifarious space that provides rich pickings for cultural practitioners. Discussions around the global south are framed by interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary scholarship from geographers, political scientists, cultural theorists and artists. But for many of us located in the global south, it has been firstly a place of invisibility. A frontier beyond the equator—an ideological space that time forgot and where morality collapsed as the invading powers of empire drifted ever further from home. The very flavour of colonial invasion in these countries is marked by the veil that geography afforded. It has been a necessary ingredient in the formulation of forgetting what took place, and what continues to take place. In this chapter, I explore three artists—Lisa Reihana (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine, Ngāi Tū), Yuki Kihara (Sāmoan/Japanese) and two of my own projects. In various ways, we all situate the residue of colonial islands in the global south as a framework for interrogation. I would like to consider a theory of the south that emerges directly from these observations which I call the southern web. It links inherited island identities, recognising the ancient traditions of togetherness, mutual understanding and generosity—including those extended to colonial invaders—and situates the adaptive and modern, global world view of artists in the global south at the centre of new possibilities. Perhaps, I suggest, this geographic distance assists in a creative reappraisal distinct from practices of the north, as well as recognising the inheritance of violent oppression within our stories (Fig. 4.1). Hau’Ofa writes that ‘nineteenth century imperialism erected boundaries that led to the contraction of Oceania, transforming a once boundless world into the Pacific island states and territories that we know

5 Gardner, A (2013) Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations. Melbourne: The South Project.

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Fig. 4.1  Yuki Kihara, After Tsunami Galu Afi, Lalomanu, 2013 (Courtesy of Yuki Kihara and Milford Galleries Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand)

today’.6 But existing in parallel and often counter to these arbitrary boundaries of nationhood is a powerful undercurrent that retells journeys of belonging and invasion in different ways. My own memories of the South Pacific are inherited through the non-bloodline of my stepfather whose name I bear. He was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand, but I would never visit there until after he died. Six months pregnant with my third child, I undertook a pilgrimage to the places in Aotearoa he had spoken of all his life. There were so many unanswered questions after his death that I believed I could reconcile through understanding the landscapes of his childhood. His relationship with Aotearoa/New Zealand was troubled, and he had left for London as soon as he could, never living there again. But like most of us, the landscapes of his formative years defined him and his stories were full of longing and sadness. The fondest of his recollections centred around a holiday house on Lake 6 Hau’Ofa, E (1993) ‘Our Sea of Islands’. In Vijay Naidu, Eric Waddell, & Epeli (eds.) A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, p. 10.

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Tarawera/Te Wairoa not far from Rotorua. It was this landscape that I was drawn to and I spent a week exploring the area with my aunt who helped me connect his stories with the landscapes of their childhood. When we finally located the old holiday house, long since sold, and where his own father had suffered a fatal heart attack whilst mowing the lawn, I instinctively walked around to the garden which backed onto the lake. There, directly in front of me, was a small island. A small island, that despite all the stories of that landscape, Dad had never once mentioned. My aunt, however, had many stories to tell—of rowing out to it every summer, playing and imagining island worlds. It seemed this small overgrown landscape had been the centre of all their activities, yet Dad had never spoken of it. I am not sure why, but it felt and feels significant: this silence. I stood looking out to it for a long time. It was as if he was there with me, apologising for dying, for forgetting to mention this little island. At any moment, I can catapult myself back to this shoreline, looking out to this little island, and feel him standing next to me. One hundred and fifty years prior to my father’s connection with the lake, the nearby eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886 resulted in the villages around the lake being buried in the dead of night under thick ash and molten lava. A Victorian Pompei which claimed an estimated 150 lives. The bodies of the white villagers were excavated where possible, but the Māori inhabitants still lay buried in what has become a tourist site called the Buried Village. The landscape of my father’s stories and the story of this fateful night coalesced for me. It seemed that the people buried, never to be excavated, became conflated with my father’s suicide and the missing reference to the island that he had spent so much time playing on. The concealment of things had only magnified their absence (Fig. 4.2). I made a small installation from this research trip—the first time I had used a veil or curtain, which, unlike my later works, was not transparent and could not be opened or looked through. Printed on the front of it was an old photograph of the landscape the day after the 1886 eruption. The trees were all dead and the vegetation redundant trapped under many feet of ash. The photograph was of course in black and white, just like my memories of the months following my father’s death. It was the first time I had used sound in my work—a simple recording of a child’s spinning wheel. The work attempted to visualise this absence and concealment, to visually articulate histories that were masked by the landscape and the stories that surround it. The desolation of landscape was also the devastation of self.

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Fig. 4.2  Kate McMillan, History’s debris (and things you concealed and I tried to forget), 2006 digital print on polysynthetic fabric, sound (Courtesy of the author)

Aotearoa is then a landscape which is inside me without my having really spent a great deal of time there. I have inherited a feeling for place and people, and like Yuki Kihara’s sentiments on Moana (Oceania), it feels like an extended web of landscapes that I am connected to. The sea between us feels more like a bridge than a barrier. Landscapes are as much about the place we stand on, as the place we carry around inside us. I inherited a sense of this ‘sea of islands’ from my father, and, like him, I have spent a lifetime looking out to, and from, leaving and arriving at islands. The looking is important; because after some years, the ocean can be read. It has distinct features that bring reassurance and a sense of groundedness (Fig. 4.3). So too is the viewpoint from Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venice (infected) which was selected to represent Aotearoa/New Zealand at the 57th Venice Biennale. Titled Emissaries, the exhibition responds to perhaps the most catastrophic journey in the global south—the voyage

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Fig. 4.3  Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venice (infected), 2015–2017. Single-channel video, Ultra HD, colour 7.1 sound, 64 minutes (Courtesy of Lisa Reihana and New Zealand at Venice)

of Captain Cook. Emissaries refers to the role of the go-between or the diplomat—a person who can bridge separate worlds. The two characters who feature most prominently in the work are emissaries—Joseph Banks, the scientist on board Cook’s Endeavour, and high priest Tupaia who became an invaluable translator and navigational guide: both men from different worlds, but of high stature, would die on the shores of islands in the global south–Kealakekua Bay in Hawai’i and Batavia in Indonesia. Ideas for the work began in 2005 when Reihana viewed the Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Savages of the Pacific Ocean) (1804– 1805) in the National Gallery of Australia, a monumental wallpaper comprising of 20 drops of paper designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet for Joseph Dufour et Cie. The wallpaper depicted journeys of French explorers in the South Pacific and three of Cook’s voyages. Reihana was shocked by the highly imaginative and fabricated views, reflecting the then fascination with early Greek and Roman societies—islanders were depicted in togas in European-esque landscapes. Her interest, 200 years later, was to correct this image of Māori and Pacific people. The video component of the three-part commission is titled in Pursuit of Venus (infected), 2015–2017, named after the rationale behind Cook’s expedition—to map the transit of Venus in the night sky—and ‘point of view’ or POV in film-making lingua franca. Painstakingly researched over a decade, this single-channel panoramic cinematic projection reimagines the story told in the Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique through 70 vignettes of the island landscapes of Nootka Sound, Hawai’i, Tahiti, Tonga, Cook Islands, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, including Captain James Cook’s final demise. Using fact and fiction, Reihana imagines these early encounters through the eyes of Māori and Pacific islanders. The costumes, dance and landscapes arise from many years researching these early encounters. (Fig. 4.4)

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Fig. 4.4  Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venice (infected), 2015–2017. Singlechannel video, Ultra HD, colour 7.1 sound, 64 minutes (Courtesy of Lisa Reihana and New Zealand at Venice)

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Reihana fills in spaces that a historian can’t go—she allows us to feel the breadth of these moments, reflecting on the circular nature of time as the camera rolls gently from left to right as if we are witnessing a giant unfurling Chinese scroll. We are in fact engaging with a Pacific idea of time or Tā-Vā—what Albert L. Refiti calls ‘a place inhabited by the vā or sacred in-between space that allows entities/time/space to collapse together in an interconnectedness’.7 Rhana Devenport, Curator of Reihana’s Emissaries at Venice writes that: This is not a reconstruction of the past. It is instead a regenerative imaginative inquiry into a contemporaneous cultural present and future. Politics of memory come into play as Reihana challenges both the truth of the observations and the authenticity of events and appearance. The post-death dismembering of Cook which we see in In Pursuit of Venus [infected]—itself an act of reverence by the Hawaiians—is perhaps symbolic of the misconception of actions and the disillusion of memory. In twenty-first-century theoretical physics there is the idea of the multiverse, of parallel versions of time, which link back to Henri Bergson’s idea of varying intensities of time and infinite becomings.8 Lisa Reihana’s assertion on Aotearoa is that, like her work, it ­consists of many knowledges. Emissaries collapses disciplines and memories that have previously been considered at odds or in conflict with one another—Western and Indigenous science, maritime knowledge, the various accounts of the transit of Venus and then the technologies of making the work. I viewed this work three times: first in Venice for the 2017 Biennale, again in Perth in 2018 at the John Curtin Gallery and finally for the exhibition Oceania at the Royal Academy in London in September 2018. The John Curtin Gallery version (Fig. 4.5) included the cabinet that Joseph Banks had stored his botanical collections from the first voyage. Now in the collection of billionaire media owner Kerry Stokes, it was once at home at 32 Soho Square in London, where Banks lived for the rest of his life after his return to England. That it would then later return to the country where the genus ‘Banksia’ was named after him evidences the continuation of these voyages and the embeddedness of flows of knowledge. Oceania curator Peter Brunt writes that Lisa 7 Refiti, AL (2008) ‘The Forked Centre: Duality & Privacy in Polynesian Spaces & Architecture’. Alternative. Special Edition/Special Issue 2008, p. 88. 8 Davenport, R (2017) ‘Urges of Imperialism Unravelled’. In Contemporary Hum. https://www.contemporaryhum.com/emissaries.

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Fig. 4.5  Lisa Reihana, Emissaries, 2015–2017. Installation view, John Curtin Gallery (2018) featuring Sir Joseph Banks cabinets and recreation of Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (The Savages of the Pacific Ocean) (1804–1805) wallpaper (Courtesy of Lisa Reihana and photograph courtesy of John Curtin Gallery)

‘mines the archives of libraries and museums and employs living islanders to re-stage Charvet’s depiction of the epic encounter of Cook’s voyages with the cultures of the Pacific, restoring history to fiction and imagination to ethnography’ (Fig. 4.6).9 Modified antique telescopes were included in the John Curtin Gallery presentation, enabling the viewer to look through the lenses and see portraits of key figures such as a Chief Mourner from the Society Islands in Aotearoa.10 The glass telescopes, adapted in Venice using Murano glass, empowered the audience with the viewpoints of Cook, Banks and other 9 Brunt,

P (2018) Oceania. Catalogue. Royal Academy of the Arts, p. 31. role of the Chief Mourner was to enact terrible grief at funerals, dressed in elaborate costumes. The deceased person’s family paid respect by affording as many mourners as possible. Ten costumes are believed to have been brought back during Cook’s voyages. Images of associated items can be found in the Te Papa museum collection. https://collections.tepapa. govt.nz/topic/1105. 10 The

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Fig. 4.6  Lisa Reihana, in Pursuit of Venice (infected), 2015–2017. Single-channel video, Ultra HD, colour 7.1 sound, 64 minutes (Courtesy of Lisa Reihana and New Zealand at Venice)

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colonialists (Fig. 4.7). Yet in one image, we view a portrait of Banks, inverting the gaze. Also, central to the exhibition at John Curtin Gallery is the inclusion of an exquisite doll from the Pacific north-west coast of Canada. Reihana first viewed this figurine in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge in England. In the context of Emissaries, the doll is retitled Emissary 3—Nootka Ancestor, underlining the power of this symbolic object whose shamanic powers stretch to the north of the Pacific. The role of this beautifully delicate object in the context of the exhibition was to thread a connectedness across islands, oceans and cultures and demonstrate the possibility of exchange, echoing the powerful roles that Banks and chief mourners would have played at this time.

Fig. 4.7  Lisa Reihana, Emissaries, 2015–2017. Installation view, John Curtin Gallery (2018). Perspectival Tubes [I, II, III, VI, V + Yoke Holders], 2017, antique telescopes + digital photograph + LED driver. Cooks Folly (36000), 2017, Diasec printed on Canson Archival Rag. Emissary No. 1 Chief Mourner, 2017, digital photograph (Courtesy of Lisa Reihana and photograph courtesy of John Curtin Gallery)

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Like most first nation cultures, storytelling is a Māori tradition. The absence of written language ensures a complexity, a power and a significance of story that does not have a European equivalent. Reihana is a storyteller, and her work brings these traditions, aiming to narrate a full and embodied way of understanding colonial exchanges. Through her eyes, we visit the death of Cook as a possible misunderstanding, rather than the brutal murder by savages as depicted in British history. The subtlety and ambiguity of encounter mark every exchange in the film’s sequence. All the players in Reihana’s history-telling are therefore given equal opportunity and all the respect that entails. We are left with an incredibly delicate and nuanced glide through a remarkable moment in time. It is so generous and full. Reihana underscores the importance of ‘making from sincerity’ when she describes art-making as a process where one must ‘listen to where the discomfort comes from’; she argues that ‘this is the place where you need to speak to and from’.11 For first nation peoples, this is about establishing the residue of colonial oppression and violence and the experience of living outside the text of history. For Reihana, inserting her perspective is a way to overstep the historian’s and the ethnographer’s violence exacted through a single narrative. By teasing out the context around the image, such as the wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, Reihana articulates a complicated narrative and the ethnographer’s power is dissipated.12 It is not possible to go back to how we once remembered Cook’s encounters in the Pacific after viewing in Pursuit of Venus [infected]. Engaging with the imaging of history is crucial to usurping the colonial gaze since so much of what we might imagine to know about the ‘discovery of the global south’ is told through the voices of Europeans. For Reihana, the stories of Cook and Banks require a reappraisal, and the voices of her ancestors need inserting. However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was European artists who became the new colonisers, rather than earlier explorers. For Sāmoan/Japanese artist Yuki Kihara, understanding the residue of French painter Paul Gaugin has been crucial to the undoing of how her home exists in the visual world. Gaugin spent a decade in Polynesia, eventually dying in the Marquesas 11 Interview

with the artist. https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/learn/for-educators/teachingresources/venice-biennale/interview-lisa-reihana-representing. 12 Lisa Reihana discusses this further in a panel for the 2018 Art Basel public programmes called ‘Decolonising Ethnography’. http://www.inpursuitofvenus.com/artist-talks/.

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Islands, what was then known as French Polynesia. Gaugin’s depictions of Tahitian life would become instrumental to the development of the European movement Primitivism, which appropriated and sought out representations and motifs from non-Western cultures. Ironically, once Gaugin had arrived in Polynesia, Europeans had all but decimated traditional life through the spread of disease, alcohol and the exploitation of land. Yet, immersed in his own imaginary world, based, like the wallpaper Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, on myth and European fantasy, Gaugin did not paint what he saw. Instead, beautiful, semi-naked, sexually available women filled his canvas, congregating together in settings of paradise, thereby fulfilling the fantasies of European, mostly male, audiences. Like Lisa Reihana, Yuki Kihara is also interested in the way her traditions and histories of Sāmoa have been co-opted by Europeans. Born to a Japanese father in Sāmoa, she did her formative training in Aotearoa/ New Zealand. She is thus a manifestation of Oceania—a place she sees as a vast landscape rather than a series of distinct island states. Kihara’s worldview is both ancient and utterly modern—it is large and it gathers all the past, present and future imaginings so that she can ‘travel forward to the past and backward to the future’.13 Her practice as a film-maker, sculptor, costume designer and performer incorporates the interdisciplinary traditions of island cultures to both critique the presence of colonialism in Oceanic life and express a hopefulness about the presence of Sāmoan culture in the future. Like many artists, she uses the toolkit of tradition to arm herself with gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art). Her encompassing world of performance, song, story and artefact— the very thing Modernism tried to pull apart into bite-size specialisms divorced from the world of meaning—is a joyful act of remembering, resistance and decolonisation. In late 2018, Kihara presented a new work in San Francisco at the Fine Arts Museum for the exhibition, Gaugin: A Spiritual Journey. It included around fifty of Gaugin’s paintings, ceramics and sculptures, with an emphasis on his travels to the French colonies of the South Pacific. Kihara was commissioned to respond to the exhibition with a new work titled First Impressions: Paul Gaugin (Fig. 4.8). The work staged is a 5-part episodic talk-show where a number of copies of paintings by Gaugin are presented to the Fa’afafine

13 Interview

with the Author 22 April 2018.

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Fig. 4.8  Yuki Kihara, First Impressions: Paul Gauguin, 2018 Still; HD video; 16:9; 13-minute duration. 5-part episodic talk-show series. Commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen (Courtesy of Yuki Kihara, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen and Milford Galleries Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand)

community in Sāmoa, many of whom have never entered a Western museum before. Presented in the style of a reality TV programme, the camera focuses on their responses to the work, which are often humorous and honest. In doing so, Kihara inverts the colonial gaze, placing the emphasis on the silenced communities that Gaugin often portrayed as the voiceless Other. Kihara writes that: Although Gauguin never set foot in Sāmoa, there have been a number of artists who arrived in Sāmoa from Western countries who produced a variety of paintings that, like Gauguin’s works, envision a romantic life in a timeless village untouched by Western colonization. Gauguin’s life in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands—posing as a “noble savage” as a form of ethnic drag—was experienced from a position of privilege at a time when Tagata Māo’i (Indigenous peoples) were being exhibited, exoticized, and dehumanized in human zoos and world expositions across Europe and North America, including the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894 held at the Golden Gate Park—where the de Young is located—which exhibited Sāmoans and perpetuated many of the stereotypes Gauguin was portraying in his work.

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Gauguin’s legacy is intrinsically linked to the global art market being a beneficiary of colonialism in the Moana (Pacific).14 What Kihara’s work reveals is a far more complex framework for understanding identity than those present in imported European gender norms. Kihara’s identification as Fa’afafine, a Sāmoan identity that predates European and Christian colonisation, loosely translates as a ‘third gender’, something similar to transgender in the West, but with no real equivalent. It describes people who are assigned male at birth but later take on female identities. ‘Fa’a means ‘in the manner of’ and the word ‘fafine’ means woman. Fa’afafine can be found in other Polynesian societies, such as fakaleiti in Tonga, mahu in Tahiti and akava’ine in the Cook Islands. What is distinctive is the clear acceptance and incorporation of non-binary genders into Pacific island cultures, unlike the heteronormative restrictions of the West. Fa’afafine have special roles within family structures in Sāmoa and are considered essential and beneficial to the functioning of a healthy society. Kihara therefore uses her identity to question the impact of colonialism at every level. The colonised body is also the colonised landscape. Her work seems to ask, if the Pacific body is multiplicity, what then is the contemporary version of the Pacific island? It is certainly not what Gaugin presented to us, nor what poet John Milton wrote about. One of the most evident and contemporary impacts of colonial knowledge on the global south is climate change. Of all the landscapes, Oceania is the landscape of the Anthropocene—the first site of impact for climate catastrophes. It is not therefore just cultural loss that is effecting Sāmoa (although this is an inevitable consequence); the ocean is threatening to subsume the island. Sea levels have been rising 4 mm a year since 1993, larger than the global average of 2.8–3.6 mm. By 2030, they could be up to 15 cm higher than they are today, although scientists estimate this could be much higher still, given the unknown impacts of melting ice sheets in Antarctica.15 Many islands like Sāmoa have a mean elevation above sea level of only 0 metres.

14 Kihara,

Y (2018) Press Release. First Impressions: Paul Gaugin. Pacific Climate Change Initiative. Pacific Climate Change Science. Research conducted by the Pacific Climate Change Science Program builds on the findings of the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. For more detailed information on the climate of Sāmoa and the Pacific see: Climate Change in the Pacific: Scientific Assessment and New Research. Volume 1: Regional Overview. Volume 2: Country Reports. 15 International

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Could climate change result in the loss of landscapes before the global north even recognises the rich and varied histories of Oceania? Richard Flanagan writes that ‘when the first corals began to form of what we now know of the Great Barrier Reef that civilisation was already 50,000 years old. They had known unimaginable changes of climate, ecology and zoology. We stand as inheritors of a people whose languages, cultures and Dreamings are founded in that experience of deep time unknown to humanity anywhere else in the world’.16 It is therefore with a much broader and deeper notion of loss that Kihara’s work addresses the impact of colonialism. Her cinematic series of 18 photographs from 2013 titled Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? find the artist adopting the persona of a fictional nineteenth-century woman, posed in historic and iconic sites throughout Sāmoa following the tragic Tsunami Galu Afi (2009) and Cyclone Evan (2012). The character, who Kihara names Salome, is inspired by the photographs of Thomas Andrews from 1886 now held in the Museum of New Zealand/Te Papa Tongarewa in the book called Views in the Pacific Islands. The original image, titled ‘Sāmoan Half Caste’, is what Kihara re-appropriates in the figure of Salome. The title, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is named after Paul Gaugin’s 1897–98 painting of the same name. In this work, Gaugin depicted three women and a child inspired by his travels to Tahiti. Now owned by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the work continues the tradition of depicting the other, in particular the female other, as silent subject matter in colonial objectification. Through the adoption of these historical representations, Kihara is able to reclaim them, whilst marking them as absurdist metaphors. The figure of Salome in Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is unlike Gaugin’s semi-clad Tahitian women who appear to represent a ‘lost paradise’. Instead, Salome is dressed in Victorian mourning attire. She looks away from the camera and into the distance, as if contemplating a pending disaster, or considering the ghosts of the past. In this sense, Kihara’s working time-travels between the past and the present—they are not one or the other, but both. A ghostly reminder that the past is now, and the present is our future. This 16 Flanagan, R (2018) ‘Excerpts from a Speech Made at the 2018 Garma Festival’. Reprinted in The Guardian Newspaper, August 4.

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is an islander sense of time, which, like the Fa’afafine, does not have an equivalent in European knowledge structures. Kihara is empowered through her vast knowledge of colonial history, the research of which she employs to interrogate the residue of empire. Interestingly, more recent research on Thomas Andrew’s photograph ‘Sāmoan Half Caste’, once believed to be a Sāmoan-English woman, suggests otherwise. Cultural Historians Mandy Treagus and Madeleine Seys write that ‘a close examination of the composition, lighting, and details of the image within the context of Andrews work suggests that it was taken in the Marshall Islands rather than Sāmoa. The mat backdrop with its shadows, together with the wooden chair, is identical to those in two other portraits of women in the volume, both taken in Majuro. This, in combination with her tattoo, suggests that the subject of Sāmoan Half Caste is, in fact, Marshallese Sāmoan, not European Sāmoan, as has previously been assumed’.17 The knowledge of the gaze in the nineteenth century is shown to be flawed, even by the standards of Victorian observation and record keeping. Thomas Andrew’s project, like Gaugin’s, is at least partially a work of fiction. The reality that identity in the Pacific was far more fluid than European chroniclers were able to understand is the space that Kihara embodies (Fig. 4.9). In a recent interview with Kihara, she reinforced to me that this sense that islanders have of being contemporary, global and forward thinking people and always travelling to various islands across the Pacific and throughout the world is not new, but a continuation of tradition. But a different form of globalisation unfolds in Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? In particular, the photograph ‘After Cyclone Evan, Lelata’ which portrays Salome standing amid the devastation wreaked by the increasingly frequent and severe cyclones throughout the Pacific islands. The extreme events of tropical cyclones associated with El Nina Ofa (1990) and Val (1991) caused damage with costs estimated at four times the GDP of Sāmoa. Kihara manifests a lost paradise—the unintended outcome of the sins of the global north. Kihara’s images are a visual manifestation of the Anthropocene. This really is then the visualisation of John Milton’s 1667 ‘Paradise Lost’, the epic poem which recounted the repercussions of the sins of man as evidenced in 17 Treagus, M & Seys, M (2017) ‘Looking Back at Samoa: History, Memory, and the Figure of Mourning in Yuki Kihara’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?’ Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 3 (1–2), 86–109.

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Fig. 4.9  Yuki Kihara, After Cyclone Evan, Lelata, 1 of 18 in the series Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 2013 (Courtesy of Yuki Kihara and Milford Galleries Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand)

the biblical Garden of Eden. Nina Seja (2015) writes in her article ‘The Past is a Foreign Climate’ that: The impact of the cyclone meant she had to consider whether it was the most appropriate—and ethical—time to create. There was the loss of life, people living in emergency shelters, extensive failure of power and water supplies. But Kihara decided that the ‘ruins and the aftermath of the cyclone might add to the reality of what is actually taking place in Sāmoa’. By doing so, the series powerfully demonstrates art intersecting with climate change in real time. Kihara thus contributes to creating a new visual language of the aesthetics of the Anthropocene.18 This series highlights the historical and cultural occupation of this landscape and the challenges faced by the isolated island nation as it struggles to assert an independent presence in the world. Her work asks us to contemplate who is listening, as these worlds disappear, when Sāmoa’s 18 Seja, N (2015) ‘The Past Is a Foreign Climate: Shigeyuki Kihara Meets the Anthropocene’. Art Monthly Australia, 285 (Nov 2015), 28–32.

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population is less than 200,000. Yet, there is an optimism in Kihara’s work and an attitude towards working for solutions. The capacity she demonstrates to assert sovereignty and demand visibility is perhaps the toolkit of resilience we require. Yuki Kihara is a cultural leader in her community. Like her ancestors, she is a global traveller and storyteller; respected and it is with authority and insight that she, and her work, speak. In the last twelve months, Kihara has undertaken research in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Aotearoa/New Zealand and all whilst maintaining her cultural and familial base in Sāmoa. Her storytelling is an act of resistance and the intention to constantly reimagine the colonial histories of island nations, and to counter the fictional island of the European imaginary, is the central mechanism in unforgetting history. In Australia, stories that counter the dominant narratives have been slow to take hold. This is largely because of the geographic scale of the colonial project and the proportionately small population of first nation peoples, at less than 3% of the overall population. The work, both creatively and politically of Indigenous and some non-Indigenous artists, has been crucial in recovering stories of colonial violence. This has often begun with a reconsideration of Cook and the journeys of discovery. The experience of invasion is marked as a Day of Mourning for Aboriginal peoples, yet it continues to be marked as a national day of celebration. During the 150 years after Cook arrived, across the vast landscape of Australia, colonists were making land-based journeys equivalent to travelling the length and breadth of Europe. Largely tracing the island boundaries of the continent, colonists relied on Aboriginal knowledge for navigation, knowledge, water and food sources, just as they had and would in the Pacific. Although there were unique moments of mutual respect, Aboriginal people, if they could not be co-opted into the colonial project, encountered violent and cruel invaders. By contrast, Māori curator and writer Peter Brunt describe encounters in the Pacific (which he acknowledges were also oftentimes violent), as reciprocal exchanges of ‘trade, wealth, politics, technology, literacy, religion, knowledge and art’.19 In Australia, and as I have argued elsewhere in the book, the unequal power of exchange, despite the force of incredible Aboriginal warriors and resistance fighters, left a grotesque and horrifying residue through indigenous memory and place. Australia is an island founded

19 Brunt,

P (2018) Oceania. Catalogue. Royal Academy of Arts, p. 23.

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on barbarism, masked as heroism. It is from within this framework of thinking about the politics of place, my own journey to Australia and the landscape I occupied as a settler, that my own practice arises. In 2010, I had been given the opportunity to select a site on Cockatoo Island for the Biennale of Sydney. My research into the carceral island of Wadjemup had prompted the artistic director, David Elliott, to enable me to develop a work inspired by one of the first carceral islands in colonial Australia history, located in Sydney Harbour. However, in 2009 during research into massacre sites around Perth, I first learned of the Ludlow Tuart Forest massacre in the south-west of Western Australia. It was remarkable to me that I did not know this story at all, despite having frequented the area on numerous occasions throughout my life. In this sense, it came to parallel my relationship to the carceral island of Wadjemup, whose history I had also never known. The massacre became the basis of the work I developed for the 2010 Biennale of Sydney entitled Islands of Incarceration (Fig. 4.10), installed

Fig. 4.10  Kate McMillan, Islands of Incarceration, 2010. Cockatoo Island, Biennale of Sydney (Courtesy of the author)

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on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. The following is an excerpt from my visual diary, describing the work after it had been completed. I quote this at length to provide insight into my thoughts at the time; As you turn the corner and head towards the peak of Cockatoo Island, an old dis-used drying shed comes into view. It is an extraordinary building. Grey-brown timber slats line the walls and floor. Some walls are missing entirely and the southerly wind gushes through. At this point you notice movement on the top floor and it becomes apparent that a large elliptical shaped veil consumes much of the space, catching the wind as well as the light that penetrates through the slats. A sound, not unlike rumbling distant thunder, becomes audible. On a clear day, this seems incongruous. You feel the sound seep into you so subtly that you might even miss it if you were preoccupied. Newly constructed stairs take you to the top of building and it is here you can view the fullness of the veil – 41 running metres in length and almost 4 metres high. On the outside of it is printed the panorama of a forest. The strong vertical lines mirror the slats on the building. On a sunny day, the light casts shadows onto the fabric, reinforcing the presence of the forest and its relationship with the timber-drying shed. Both places a reminder of the landscapes we took down in order to build our civilisations here in Australia and elsewhere. But something even darker is going on. The viewer is confused because what we see is beautiful, elegant and poetic. But the sound we can hear emanating from beneath the floor shifts our visual queues. The floor has gaps large enough for a small child’s foot to fall through. Some people won’t stand on this floor. The sound we can hear has been taken from this forest. They are the low frequency noises from the Ludlow Tuart Forest in Western Australia. The site of the 1841 Wonnerup massacre. You know this dialogue, one of those white fella/black fella histories that divide communities. Almost every community, if you scratch hard enough in this country, has one. George Layman was the dominant white landowner in this area in 1841. His home is maintained on the Historic Houses Trust register to this day. The amateur historians that run the property deny the Wonnerup Massacre. They say George Layman was speared after trying to settle a rations dispute between two of his Indigenous ‘employees’. He died of his

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injuries two days later. My (more rigorous) research shows that George Layman was speared after he refused to give back a thirteen-year-old girl he had enslaved for domestic duties. The senior Wardandi Nyoongar elder who speared him, after dialogue became futile, was beheaded and his head was left for all to see on a stake at the entrance to the town of Busselton. Over the next five years between three hundred and a thousand Wardandi people were killed in the forest. This place is three hours drive from the city of Perth – back then it was days away on horseback. Justice was meted out according to whim. Landowners controlled local constabularies since they often had business or familial relationships with the Crown. The oral histories I have heard from the surviving Wardandi people about this massacre are still too horrific for me to write about. I recall driving through this forest in the back of my parent’s car as an eight year old girl. It was and is a ‘scenic route’ between Bunbury and Busselton not far from the famous Margaret River wine-growing region. As a small child, my sense was that the forest was utterly beautiful, but I couldn’t wait to get out of there and I certainly did not want to stop. This memory stayed with me and later, in conversation with others, many other people had had this feeling too. None of us, of course, new the history of this forest. Everything made sense when I later learned what had happened there. This is the land I occupy. As you stand within the elliptical veil, the image of the forest mediates your view of Sydney Harbour. The first site of white settlement in this country. I recall stories of the shorelines being strewn with bodies malaria, TB and the common flu decimating Indigenous populations in and around Sydney. I stand quietly in the work and think about what has come before me. This history shadows us. Every space we occupy holds stories like this. They are not overt, landmarked, excavated or memorialised. Yet they are with us always. We can feel them if we just pay attention. How can I, as a white artist in this country, ignore this? There is some kind of release of this when the wind grasps the veil and blows it. We can talk about this history here. We meet together in empathy, sympathy and disbelief. We also meet knowing the power and beauty of this land. How it holds us and informs us about who we are. As I observe people viewing this work I realise the power of making this space.

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100  K. McMILLAN I realise through conversation how the politics and anger can fall away and we can acknowledge history and love this place together. This has been an unexpected outcome for me.20 (McMillan 2010)

It became clear to me that the land was both the site of terrible acts of history but also a site for healing and remembrance.21 For the curator, David Elliott, art makes the connection between place and history and ‘gives us the opportunity to look back, to join up the dots, and to see more clearly what has been done both in our name and the name of others. Should we wish to make things better, the first step must be a willingness to grant a real, rather than token, equality that is related to neither price nor property’.22 The opportunity to produce Islands of Incarceration felt like a gesture aimed at opening up history, using the landscape as a common ground, thinking about journeys across seas and across time. That through remembering, we can forge new journeys perhaps. Peter Brunt writes in the Oceania catalogue, speaking about the work of John Pule, that ‘it also recalls us to the water as the memory space of broken fragments, part objects and half-remembered symbols and signs from which the task of re-making places and identities must begin’.23 The work of Lisa Reihana, Yuki Kihara and others, as well as my own struggles to visualise these ruptures, reminds us that ultimately the artist is an optimist, seeking to explore new pathways and to use the imaginary to counter and contend with some of the most pressing global issues of our time.

20 McMillan, K (2014) Contemporary Art & Unforgetting. Doctoral Thesis, Curtin University. 21 Whilst researching for this project I worked closely with Senior Wardandi Nyoongar Bill Webb who advised on what had taken place, the stories that had been handed down to him from his grandmother who witnessed the massacres, and how this information has and hasn’t been integrated into contemporary society. Many local stories and histories have been recorded and are accessible via the Wardan Aboriginal Centre situated south of Dunsborough in Western Australia. http://www.wardan.com.au/home.htm. 22 Elliott, D (2010) 17th Biennale of Sydney (Exhibition Catalogue), p. 55. 23 Brunt, P (2018) Oceania (Exhibition Catalogue). Royal Academy of the Arts, p. 33.

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Bibliography Brunt, P (2018) Oceania (Exhibition Catalogue). Royal Academy of the Arts. Conley, T (2005) ‘The Desert Island’. In Deleuze and Space. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Davenport, R (2017) ‘Urges of Imperialism Unravelled’. In Contemporary Hum. https://www.contemporaryhum.com/emissaries. Deleuze, G (2004) Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953–1974). Translated by Mike Taormina. Cambridge and London: Semiotext(e). Elliott, D (2010) 17th Biennale of Sydney (Exhibition Catalogue). Flanagan, R (2018) ‘Excerpts from a speech made at the 2018 Garma Festival’. Reprinted in the Guardian Newspaper, August 4. Gardner, A (2013) Mapping South: Journeys in South-South Cultural Relations. Melbourne: The South Project. Hau’Ofa, E (1993) A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands. Edited by Vijay Naidu, Eric Waddell, & Epeli. Suva, Fiji: School of Social and Economic Development, the University of the South Pacific/Beake House. McMillan, K (2014) Contemporary Art & Unforgetting. Doctoral Thesis, Curtin University. Refiti, AL (2008) ‘The Forked Centre: Duality & Privacy in Polynesian Spaces & Architecture’. Alternative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 4 (1), Special Edition/Special Issue, 97–106. Seja, N (2015) ‘The Past Is a Foreign Climate: Shigeyuki Kihara Meets the Anthropocene’. Art Monthly Australia, 285 (November 2015), 28–32. Treagus, M & Seys, M (2017) ‘Looking Back at Samoa: History, Memory, and the Figure of Mourning in Yuki Kihara’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?’ Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, 3 (1–2), 86–109.

PART II

Art, Memory and Unforgetting

CHAPTER 5

Art and Unforgetting: The Role of Art and Memory in Postcolonial Landscapes

The artist worked as if (s)he were bearing witness to the slow declension of an era, along with a whole category of people soon to be swept away by the forces of change.1 As Okwui Enwezor suggests here, the impetus to work is often a form of resistance to the overwhelming weight of colonial forgetting. In my own practice, and in many of those discussed in this book, the act of making art and the mechanisms of research undertaken to realise artworks have been done in an attempt to refuse the repression of history. Practising art has therefore become a form of memory work—of trying to make solid what is slipping away. What has become clear to me is that through writing and making, my interest in memory retrieval and loss is intertwined with the history of my own life. The patterns of forgetting that I observed living in Australia parallel the forgetting of events perpetuated in my own childhood. Whilst these autobiographical circumstances are not the content of the research for this book, they nonetheless situate the excavatory way I work and write—marking my practice with the intensity of my own experience. In many instances, the act of physically making work about broader societal forgetting has triggered an act of remembering personal moments. In 2011, I had been undertaking research and filming on the former prison island of Wadjemup. On this particular occasion, I 1 Enwezor,

Okwui (2008) ‘Documents into Monuments: Archives as Meditations on Time’. In Farr, Ian (ed.) Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art (2012). London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

© The Author(s) 2019 K. McMillan, Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17290-9_5

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had been gathering the silt from the bottom of Governors Lake—one of twelve salt lakes scattered across the island’s inland geography. I was standing ankle deep in the muddy shallows—a place said to contain the unmarked remains of many of the Aboriginal prisoners who had been buried on the side of the hill to the north. Although the landscape was visually beautiful, the stench of the stagnant water in the heat of summer was powerful, and I felt physically sick. The presence of this history and the smell I encountered coalesced. Holding my breath, I sank my hands down into the mud. I instantly recalled a moment and a landscape from my childhood that occurred more than thirty years earlier. It must have been the clingy texture of the mud, which formed within me an umbilical cord back in time to a naturally occurring clay field, next to where I had lived in Hampshire as a seven-year-old girl. Previously inaccessible to my conscious mind, I was suddenly able to recall running to this field on many occasions, away from the chaos of my family, to force my hands and arms deep down into the clay as far as they would go. The cold brown mud, had grounded me, providing a distracting sensation for my body. I had felt physically sick then too—a deep heavy weighted feeling in my stomach. Empathic connections between two very different histories had been found through the making of this work. The resulting bronze cast of the silt from Wadjemup (Fig. 5.1) became a convergence of my own bodily memory and that of the lives of Aboriginal prisoners whose remains may still exist at the bottom of Governors Lake. Haunted landscapes exist and operate through us in various ways, connected by links not always immediately apparent. Art—the making and viewing of it—can often tease out these complex relationships in ways impossible for other forms of text. It can also offer an empathetic pathway between people and places, essential to the process of remembrance. The relationship between art and memory goes back thousands of years in Europe and tens of thousands of years in first nation cultures. Mnemonic systems in Indigenous Australia helped keep knowledge, tradition and place remembered and intact. Memory systems in Indigenous cultures, particularly if there was no written language, are and were far more extensive than the Greeks. The Navajo in North America have a memorised classification system for over 700 insects. In Australia, the Yanyuwa peoples have a songline that stretches 800 kilometres and incorporates various rocks, trees and objects along the way which are used as memory triggers, reinforced and remembered through dance and song. Aboriginal cultures have relied on highly developed memory banks for over 60,000 years. Research into the comparative memory capacities

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Fig. 5.1  Kate McMillan, In the Shadow of the Past, This World Knots Tight, 2012 (Courtesy of the author and of the photographer, John Barrett-Lennard)

of Aboriginal children and their non-Indigenous counterparts shows differences, in particular, in visual-spatial memory, which is considerably more advanced in Aboriginal children.2 The remembering of place for Aboriginal peoples is extraordinarily complex and varies across the 250 or more language groups. Place is where Tjukurpa (often described as the Dreaming) is located and understood through, that identity is connected to, and the lore of all things is played out and located in. Remembering is therefore inexorably tied to place, as this is where all things worth remembering are. It is of course where the dead are buried, but more than that, Tjukurpa is where they continue to be activated and remembered through.3 Access to the complexity of these stories by non-Indigenous people is not possible, which 2 Kearins, J (1986) ‘Visual Spatial Memory in Aboriginal and White Australia Children’. Australian Journal of Psychology, 38 (3), 203–214. 3 McCulloch, S & McCulloch Child, E (2008) McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A Complete Guide. Melbourne: McCulloch Australian Art Books.

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has often meant that settlers have misunderstood the basic accounts told to children as indicative of Indigenous knowledge. This ignorance personifies Western interpretation of first nation knowledge. Harriett Whit writes about the Oceanic ‘wayfinders’ who navigated the oceans without charts or ‘science’, confounding European explorers who thought islanders might instead desperately cling to the side of islands for fear of falling off the edge. ‘Wayfinders are ignorant of our yardsticks and categories. They wear no Euclidean filters on their perceptions and they understand that “the sea is full of signs”. The Hawaiians developed 160 words for different kinds of wind and 138 words for different kinds of rain’.4 First nation cultures across the world continue and maintain mnemonic landscape traditions that the west has discarded in favour of science. Now deemed ill-fated in the light of climate change and the long-term impact of industrialisation, many of these ancient knowledges are being viewed in new ways. In Ancient Greece, often incorrectly referred to as the birth of mnemonics, a similar system of memory retrieval was developed. The invention of the Greek system is attributed to poet Simonides of Ceos (556–468 BCE). In this theory of memory, the role of the imaginary was interwoven into the act of remembering—two crucial elements in mimesis—the act of imitating nature, once thought to be the foundation of all creativity. Thus, these conceptions of memory were linked to the creative act. Frances A Yates, perhaps one of the first modern historians to analyse the development of European mnemonics, in her seminal book The Art of Memory (1966) situated writing by Plato (c. 428–347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) at the beginning of Western memory studies. According to Yates, Aristotle differentiated between memory and reminiscence. Reminiscence, or recollection, could be conjured up through a process of association to locate a particular fact or idea—a rudimentary law of association. Plato, however, believed that each person was born with something akin to a wax tablet inside their body, with imprinted knowledge and memories—memory images—which Plato associated with truth and justice. In both concepts, the image is central to the functioning of memory. For both Plato and Aristotle, and the Ancient Greeks more generally, the past was not something that could be 4 Witt, H (1991) ‘The Soft, Warm, Wet Technology of Native Oceania’. Whole Earth Review (Fall). http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=2072.

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lost, but something that accompanied us in the present and could always, somehow, be retrieved. In this sense, memory was not peripheral but part of the everyday and embodied within us. Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, first appears in Greek literature around the fifth century BC. She is called forth in epic poems such as The Odyssey and The Iliad to recite and accurately recall important plots and storylines. The gendering of familial memory evident in Greek mythology links all world cultures. It is, and was, often the women required to retain the immediate details of kin, and other community enhancing knowledges. The diligence required to keep memories alive is a form of memory work, particularly for those whose histories have been displaced. In contemporary, first nation cultures’ memory work is often taken up to address the loss of these memory systems. This has taken diligent and resistance in order to work against ongoing colonial systems that minimise particular histories, especially those pertaining to genocide, as well as the languages and stories of Aboriginal cultures that have been destroyed.5 The female artists explored in this book all engage in a form of memory work in order to underline not just what was lost, but how it was lost. The pace of contemporary life has made this task ever more urgent. John Scanlan argues in his book Memory: Encounters with the Strange and Familiar that it is only in the modern world that the past has become something distant and therefore able to be lost. As a consequence of the fast and extensive changes during industrialisation, the development of tighter academic fields and globalised pathways that emphasise forward movement, the past has become even more disconnected.6 The journey of Odysseus whose attempts to grasp and hold the future and the past situates the protagonist in a perpetual cycle of grief. Like Odysseus, our memory is our inheritance, and the fragile nature of it situates memory forever on the precipice of possible loss.

5 Efforts have been put into retrieving more than 250 Aboriginal languages in Australia at the time of invasion. Of the estimated 145 languages spoken in Australia today, 110 are considered at risk. For further reading, see the Indigenous Languages Institute http:// www.indigenous-language.org/ as well as the Federation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages (FATSIL) and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/. 6 Scanlan, P (2013) Memory: Encounters with the Strange and Familiar. London: Reaktion Books, p. 27.

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Questions of what is remembered and what is forgotten have come to define the field of memory studies. As Jessica Rapson and Lucy Bond (2014) contend in The Transcultural Turn: Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders, the ‘memory boom’ occurred partly in response to the historian’s debate over how we remember the Holocaust. As such, the field of cultural memory began in the 1950s, specifically with the writer and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs who developed links between individual and collective memory. This platform was later extended by theorists such as Pierre Nora in the 1980s and his research on memory sites. Nora argued that memory could be preserved through specific things—a place, a person, an object, a symbol or any form of cultural representation, which has been particularly important for understanding the role of place for displaced peoples. Paul Connerton expanded this thinking further by exploring the relationship between memory and power. His ideas incorporated the work of Michel Foucault to show how particular forms of remembering reinforce social order. But in postcolonial societies such as Australia and Aotearoa, the contestation over memory is particular. The challenge is not just to reframe and expand the story of history, but to reiterate the implications of forgetting when retrieval is not possible. Yet, much forgetting is not about things forever and accidentally lost, it is also about deep and systemic, deliberate forgetting. Consequently, the implications of remembering for rebuilding culture, history writing, land rights and addressing contested sites and histories are, as the Greeks would have argued, utterly present and central to community identity. Contemporary art is one of the few disciplines that stand witness to the colonial past. In this realm, the artist acts as documenter, examiner, image-maker, interpreter and archivist. The artist is interested in what is concealed and what others do not want to look at. Australian artist Susan Norrie writes that: In a small way artists can slow things down, remind people of an essential humanity that, somehow, seems to have been lost along the way. I feel that artists are often a barometer of events in the world: they can synthesise socio/political and environmental concerns with powerful visual encapsulations. Blurring the boundaries of fiction and fact, artists can deal with the overload of media information and misinformation with a certain clarity and poetic detachment.7 7 Noorie, S (2007) In conversation with MCA curator, Rachael Kent. http://www.mca. com.au/collections/work/200985a-b/.

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I propose that, amongst other things, creative practice can become part of a meaningful exchange of overlapping histories. That first nation histories are not a small and insignificant footnote as is often proposed by dominant readings of colonial landscapes, but do in fact form the bulk of post-invasion histories.8 Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes in Decolonizing Methodologies that ‘a thousand accounts of the “truth” will not alter the “fact” that indigenous peoples are still marginal and do not possess the power to transform history into justice’.9 Yet, there is an optimism perhaps that these thousands of tiny of truths explored through creative methods assist in troubling colonial accounts of the past. Historian Chris Healy proposes that a creative exchange between Aboriginal and settler colonial histories could provide an understanding of the past and enable us to reflect on the present. He writes, ‘it may be that the cultural and political ambitions for Indigenous art may depend, in part, on non-Indigenous people recalling their inheritance of this otherwise forgotten history’.10 It is therefore essential that first nation peoples are not left to do all the remembering. My research is both an excavation and depiction of something terrible in colonial history, but it is most importantly an argument for the interconnectivity of art and memory and how this relationship can and may result in a methodology for unforgetting . Curator, historian and Bundjalang/Ngaku man, Djon Mundine, in considering the massacres that have been enacted and forgotten within the Australian landscape, asks ‘is the challenge knowing who and where the dead bodies are buried? Is our memory about reclaiming things from “under the rubble”? A retrieval operation?’11 Certainly, this is part of the art of memory as it pertains to colonial histories, but it is also about identifying the mechanisms of destruction and in what ways they might exist today. Perhaps, the first goal though is to make the rubble visible.

8 New texts such as novelist Keneally, T (2007) The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Story of the Founding of Australia. London: Vintage Books; Haebich, A (2008) Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press begin to provide a counter to these persistent accounts. 9 Tuhiwai Smith, L (2012) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edition. London: Zed Books, p. 35. 10 Chris, H (2008) Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: UNSW Press, p. 227. 11 Mundine, D (2012, June) ‘The Ballad of Jimmy Governor’. Artlink, p. 37.

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Those who seek to minimise the impact of colonialism are often the descendants of that inheritance—convicts and immigrants who were awarded land and free passage to the colonies, and who no doubt worked hard to ensure their great-grand-children enjoyed the benefits of these opportunities. It is not unusual today to find that people of influence and power in Britain are the descendants of slave owners, or in Australia, descendants of pastoralists who ‘cleared’ the land and denied the rightful existence of first nation cultures. To talk about rectifying these past injustices today necessitates a discussion of loss for the powerful white families who do not consider themselves responsible for the misdeeds of their ancestors. How we might discuss the land, and what was and continues to be enacted upon it, is complex. It is not possible, for example, to use the term ‘landscape’ in colonial spaces without recognising the inheritance of modes of ownership and occupation. ‘Landscape’ refers back to a situated European knowledge tied to the view or vista. Simon Schama notes that ‘it entered the English language… as a Dutch import at the end of the sixteenth century. And landschap, like its Germanic root, Landschaft, signified a unit of human occupation, indeed a jurisdiction, as much as anything that might be a pleasing object of depiction’.12 ‘Landscape’ is something observed rather than experienced, a product owned and cultivated by ‘civilisation’.13 Settlers obtained ownership of the land around them as evidence of their cultural superiority. On the contrary, for first nation peoples, Bruce Pascoe writes that, ‘long occupation of particular tracts of land is evidenced in the geographically specific vocabularies and the ancestral stories of geological events peculiar to that soil. The relatively small size of each nation and language is witness to the ambition to care for a particular region and no other. The negotiation of that decision across an entire continent

12 Schama,

S (1995) Landscape and Memory. London: Vintage Books, p. 10. an examination of how perceptions of landscape have changed and differ today, see Layton, R & Ucko, PJ (1999) The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape: Shaping Your Landscape. New York: Routledge. And for a specifically Indigenous account of the perception of landscape, see Gard, Stephan & Bucolo, Salvatore (2005) Capturing Australian Indigenous Perception of Virtual Landscape. In VSSM Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia: Virtual Reality at Work in the 21st Century: Impact on Society, Ghent, Belgium. 13 For

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required (and requires) incredibly delicate and respectful diplomacy’.14 These songlines, complex kinships and the custodial care of special places continue today, often whilst the terrible battle scars of invasion are repaired. The imposition of another layer of reading, experiencing and demarcating place by Europeans creates an obstacle often completely at odds with first nation perspectives. Artists and memory workers have consistently used the terms site or place—activated terms that reinforce notions of connection, history and presence. They are used to localise particular places, with unique histories, providing a more knowing understanding of ‘being’ within a settler colonial framework. Site or place also suggests an attempt to incorporate memory and knowledge, and the active choice to ‘read’ place. Growing up in a colonial landscape, this also means the layering of all the post-invasion histories as well as attempting to retrieve what and who was there a priori. Rebecca Solnit ponders the increasing complexity of landscape; ‘I think we often forget that battlefields are one kind of landscape and that most landscapes are also territories. That is to say, they have political as well as aesthetic dimensions; on the small scale they involve real estate and sense of place, on the large scale they involve nationalisms, war, and the grounds for ethnic identity’.15 Many factors have contributed to how contemporary artists engage with place and landscape. As modernity evolved, it was artists and writers who provided the social critique of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the natural world. This came at a time when the redistribution of common land through policies such as the Land Enclosure Acts (1700–1845) in Britain was occurring.16 As populations increased 14 Pascoe, B (2008) Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal People Since 1788. Sydney: New Holland Books, p. 117. 15 Solnit, R (2001) As Eve Said to the Serpent. Athens: University of Georgia Press, p. 12. 16 For an overview of the impact of the Industrial Revolution, see O’Brien, P & Quinault, R (eds.) (1993) The Industrial Revolution and British Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whilst it does focus on Britain primarily, the chapter topics provide summaries on everything from art, those at the margins (such as women and the working class) as well as structural changes in parliamentary reform. There are a number of books that discuss these periods variously. Robert L. Herbert’s From Millet to Leger: Essays in Social Art History that considers Europe more broadly. Waite, I (2012) Common Land in English Painting 1700–1850. London: Boydell Press looks specifically at the politicisation of land through the loss of common land in Britain as a result of the Land Enclosure Acts and how this was depicted and negotiated by artists.

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and changed the way cities and countries were occupied, what was marketed as opportunities for the populous increasingly became an opportunity for the rich to consolidate power. In the colonies of European Empires, first people’s lands were irreversibly diminished and desecrated. Thus, the occupation of land within the colonies of Britain can also be understood as part of a larger class war.17 First nation communities have insisted on applying different value systems to land and culture. In Western Australia, Nyoongar communities have developed and extended existing cultures of dance, song and performance to record and document the great losses to language, culture and country. Historian Anna Haebich has recently documented the creative ways Nyoongar Whadjuk communities have sung through their pain, ensuring stories were not lost, and also to reinstate their sovereignty over country.18 Nyoongar people number 40,000 today, the largest language group of any first nation in Australia. Haebich underscores the resilience that performance, enacted in the shadows of violent colonial dispossession, has provided. Unable to be bought, sold or stolen, displaced and enslaved communities throughout the world have created songs, told stories and danced to remember, as well as to forget. For first nation peoples, loss of country and its connection to ancestral stories, language and sacred places has meant that the creative capital invested in performative expression has been a lifeline to cultural survival. Yet, we see the colonial impulse evident in landscapes everywhere. Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory argues that ‘when we too set off on the trail of “social memory” we will inevitably end up in places where, in a century (or centuries) of horror, we would rather not go, places that represent a reinforcement of, rather than an escape from, public tragedy. But acknowledging the ambiguous legacy of nature myths does at least require us to recognise that landscapes will not always be simple “places of delight”—scenery as sedative, topography so arranged to feast the eye’.19 As Schama notes, landscapes are not simple places where a retreat from culture can be realised, nor can they be for

17 Chambers, J (1953) ‘Enclosure and Labour Supply in the Industrial Revolution’. The Economic History Review, 5 (3), new series, 319–343. https://doi.org/10.2307/2591811. 18 Haebich, A (2018) Dancing in the Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. 19 Schama, S (1995) Landscape and Memory. London: Vintage Books, p. 18.

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first nation cultures whose violent dispossession has taken place in these landscapes. The last decades of cultural theory have opened up and developed languages around these experiences. Edward Said’s pivotal publication Orientalism in 1978 represented a shift in global discourse that impacted on discussions of colonialism, environmentalism and identity. His writing contributed to a new theoretical critique of colonial landscapes. Initially, whilst ‘the postcolonial’ was a term that described the time-period immediately after colonialism, cultural theorists like Said and Homi K. Bhabha insisted that this was no longer an historical term, but that the colonial still exists, and its inheritance has been a building block for global inequality and injustice. The resulting reappraisal that took place as a consequence of Said and other postcolonial historians, such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Sneja Gunew,20 led to a favouring of memory over history as a way to give space to the voices that had been ignored and unrepresented. Fundamental to this shift was a reconsideration of the role of representation and the voice of the author in countering contested memories. They sought to situate the myriad and complex subjectivities in new writing of the past and present. As Neil Lazarus contends in The Postcolonial Unconscious, Said’s most significant contribution was to ‘redirect the shift away from Euro-American perspectives’ in contemporary literature.21 The freeing up of the postcolonial enabled the underlying mechanisms of colonialism, manifest everywhere in contemporary society, to be held to account. The colonial project is therefore far from over, and colonial impulses reside not just in institutions but in memories of inheritance and privilege. Paul Ricoeur argued that history can only be memory—that it is impossible to distinguish between the two, since history is always written from a subjective, experiential interpretation of the past, the residue of which is then gathered up and transcribed.22 Scanlan argued that 20 For further reading, see Spivak, G (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press. For Gunew, S (1994) Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms. New York: Routledge. 21 Lazarus, N (2011) The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 189. 22 See Ricoeur (2004, p. 385) and his discussion on ‘within-timeness and the dialectic of Memory and History’. He argues that memory may be only a province of history and visa versa.

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‘memory and history share much, and the “shadowy boundaries” that separate them can often be difficult to discern. Even the sense that history, while still reliant on evidence that can be challenged, and unable to share memory’s apparent quality of immediate certainty does still not overcome the difficulties raised by the apparent autonomy of the historian’s gaze’.23 Performance, art and song, particularly in the absence of recorded histories, have become a crucial way of mapping what was almost lost and challenging this autonomy. Cultural theorist, Karen E. Till, is involved with a project called Mapping Spectral Traces that spans the globe and draws together numerous academics, architects and artists. Her writing reflects on the diversification of memory studies that have assisted in locating the specific conditions of colonial experiences globally. Till argues that, ‘more recent memory discussions, while including a diversity of viewpoints, methodological approaches and research agendas, has now shifted to the politics of public memory and official forgetting at national and international scales; the differences (or not) between individual and social memory; the distinctions between “types” of memory (cognitive, procedural, habitual, bodily, sensory, narrative, traumatic, to name a few); the intersections between memory, embodiment, representation, materiality and the psyche; and the dialectical relationship of memory and forgetting’.24 In the artworks that Till explores, she specifically focuses on artists who are drawing less on personal histories and more on creative practices that consider the impact of systems on oppressed communities and ideas. The important cross-disciplinary work that Till and her colleagues are embarking on highlights that ‘artistic and activist memory work has much to offer the emerging field of memory studies by challenging ontological assumptions that underpin much recent research on memory, including understandings of site, social and body memory, and the role of place in memory. More than this, artistic and political engagements with memory call us, as individuals and members of various

23 Scanlan (2013) Memory Encounters with the Strange and Familiar. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 35. 24 Till, K (2012) ‘Wounded Cities: Memory Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care’. Political Geography, 31 (1), 3.

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Fig. 5.2  Julie Gough, Observance (film still), 2012 video projection HDMI, H264, 16:9, colour, sound, 17:09 minutes edited by Jemma Rea (Courtesy of Julie Gough)

communities, to move beyond claims to interdisciplinarity within academia and consider how memory studies might develop more socially responsible research practices’.25 Till is also describing the impulse to effect change by many contemporary artists. Julie Gough, discussed in more detail at the end of this chapter, sees her practice as part of a broader struggle for sovereignty and a defiance against a culture of forgetting (Fig. 5.2). Till acknowledges the very real difficulties of retaining a connectedness between academia and community, suggesting that art has the capacity to bridge both spaces. An important distinction that has been made by Annette Kuhn is the use of the term ‘memory work’.26 Memory work (as opposed to memory studies) implies an active engagement with the retrieval of memory and helps to insert art and performance into

25 Ibid.,

p. 4. A (2000) Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media. New York: Berg Press. 26 Kuhn,

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scholarly disciplines. She writes that ‘memory work is an active practice of remembering that takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory. Memory work undercuts assumptions about the transparency or the authenticity of what is remembered, taking it not as “truth” but as evidence of a particular sort: material for interpretation, to be interrogated, mined, for its meanings and its possibilities. Memory work is a conscious and purposeful staging of memory’.27 This approach underscores the role that artists play in addressing the colonial histories that haunt us, and that have been deliberately forgotten. What precisely does it mean to forget in a settler landscape? To forget on the land that was invaded, the site where systemic genocide has taken place, takes a particular kind of commitment. Very few settler Australians know or acknowledge the extent of, or the mechanisms of invasion and the subsequent systems that were developed to control, ‘eradicate’ and provide obstacles for first nation people. When I was growing up, no one I knew ever spoke of it. The remembering fell almost exclusively to Aboriginal peoples. Anna Haebich argues that ‘it took only a few decades for the destructive forces of colonisation to wreak havoc and devastation, dispossession, disease and death (80 per cent of the Nyoongar population were dead by 1900)’.28 I want to know how these experiences and these genocidal social policies continue to occupy such a small space in the consciousness of non-first nation people. To answer this question, I have tried to conjure up what might be required to procure such deep forgetting. Nietzsche suggested that for something to be committed to memory, it must consist of great emotion—‘a thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something which continues to hurt stays in the memory’.29 Therefore, one must assume a large dose of ambivalence was necessary to forget the brutal hand of colonialism. It is hard to comprehend how anyone could be immune to such suffering. James Baldwin, in speaking about America, insisted that ‘White America remains unable to believe that Black America’s grievances are real; they are unable to believe this because they 27 Kuhn,

A (2000), p. 186. A (2018) Dancing in the Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance. Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, p. 1. 29 Nietzche, F (2006) ‘On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic’. In Pearson, KA & Large, D (eds.) The Nietzche Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 410. 28 Haebich,

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cannot face what this fact says about themselves and their country’.30 In Australia, it was believed, and perhaps still is by some, that Aboriginal women did not grieve like white women when their babies were permanently stolen from them under state policies. To not remember is to not value or recognise loss. For white Australia, the consequence of acknowledging the hatred and cruelty underpinning firstly the colonising strategies, and then the denial of the impact of them, is that they would have to reframe, rather dramatically, the national ‘character’ of Australia. How would contemporary Australia absorb nationwide eugenics programmes resulting in the Stolen Generations, or the blind eyes cast over pastoralists who shot, poisoned and raped Aboriginal peoples on ‘their’ land over generations and well into the twentieth century? White Australia has instead been happy to absorb the rhetoric of the government and pastoralists to help alleviate their guilt for doing nothing. In Aotearoa, the myth of Māori peoples displacing the Moriori when they arrived served to justify to European settlers that invasion was a neat succession of conquest by more able cultures. There are numerous examples of this kind of ‘mass-thinking’ that have lubricated the path of genocide. Stanley Cohen writes about Nazi Germany that ‘the creation of a genocidal state required more mass involvement than earlier historians recognised. Most of the public knew or figured out the nature of the extermination programme if not its precise details. This was a prototypical “open secret”. The extreme denial story is literally incredible: that a small group of fanatic perpetrators planned and carried out the killings whilst most of the public were a passive, distant, anonymous mass who knew nothing. “Open secret” does not mean collective responsibility, or that the secretary filing papers about confiscated Jewish property and the Nazi doctor at Auschwitz are psychologically identical. But it does imply graduations of collective knowing’.31 The nature of colonial invasion in the global south was never a small footnote to history, but part of the founding mechanisms for the establishment of the British Empire across the globe. The various ways these histories have been denied, made small or simply not remembered are also part of the colonial project. James Baldwin argues that dominant 30 Baldwin,

J (1985) The Price of the Ticket. New York: St. Martin’s Press, p. 536. S (2001) States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 79. 31 Cohen

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races tend to dispute, underplay or what Charles Mill’s described in The Racial Contract, secretly and quietly ‘agree’ to make certain histories small. In 2007, Mills also wrote in White Ignorance that in fact a sort of blindness occurs that makes it ‘possible to speak with no sense of absurdity of “empty” lands that are actually teeming with millions of people, of “discovering” countries whose inhabitants already exist’.32 It is possible to imagine a kind of doubling, or more precisely, a third space, disconnected from the landscape and the knowledge of history. A constant zone into which the self can escape to, unburdened by inherited privileges of colonialism. In colonial landscapes, it is not enough to simply not remember, it is also essential to ignore the triggers that are scattered across the landscape. A certain defiance frames this ambivalence: a conjuring up of a skein that acts as a protectant against certain truths; a hardening of the soul; a stiff smile that looks genuine to outsiders. Every time a history is not repeated, every time a memory is not recalled, events fade deeper into the amnesiac haze of the summer heat. I once arrived back in Australia at the beginning of summer after spending six months away in the northern hemisphere. I was struck by the dizzying heat and my inability to collect my thoughts. It felt as if the landscape was conspiring against my remembering. I felt disorientated and unable to order my thinking. Barbara Bolt queries the enlightenment concept of ‘shedding light on the matter’, arguing that in the harsh light of the Western Australian sun, ‘too much light on the matter sheds no light on the matter’.33 In her fieldwork as a painter, Bolt noted that ‘1. The glare was so intense that nothing at all was revealed. 2. The landscape was so fractured and messy that no form emerged. 3. It was impossible to use light to render form legible’.34 Whilst Bolt goes on to develop her theory of Methexis to reconsider how one might renegotiate European principles of painting in this different landscape, I want to take this observation somewhere else. ‘Sensing and moving with the rhythms in and through the ground’, which Bolt proposes, suggests it is more likely that this glare, which mediates life in Australia, is an obstacle to seeing it. It can then be understood as a metaphor for the lack of 32 Mills, C (2007) ‘White Ignorance’. In Sullivan, S & Tuana N (eds.) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press, p. 27. 33 Bolt, B (2000) ‘Shedding Light for the Matter’. Hypatia, 15 (2), Going Australian: Reconfiguring Feminism and Philosophy (Spring), 202–216. 34 Ibid., p. 207.

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focus, the natural response to turn one’s head against the glare of the sun, against the truth of the matter. We then only look downwards, not out and towards the horizon line. Unlike other places also negotiating the harshness of the sun, in the global south—particularly Australia and Aotearoa—we have instead insisted on maintaining the British rituals of the day. There is no siesta, no equivalent holiday over the summer months. It brings to mind a relative from England who visited me in Perth in the middle of summer. He was surprised to find people wearing suits on a 38-degree day in the city—as if we might have conjured up another costume to deal with the stifling heat—something less civilised was the insinuation. I was irritated at the time (we are civilised here too you know!), but in hindsight, he had revealed something I was not able to see—that we perform in Australia as if we are not there at all. In other words, we tolerate the heat and still impose the rhythms of the past. This tolerance enables us to survive the long summers, but not thrive in them. It enables us to become even more disconnected from place. In 2017, I wrote an essay for a book on Sidney Nolan and the photographs he took of the Queensland drought in the 1950s. I wrote about a landscape that had delivered an extreme response to European farmers and pastoralists, who had worked, and largely continues to work, against the rhythm and flow of Australia. Ignoring the extensive farming that had been taking place by Aboriginal peoples for tens of thousands of years, these drought-ridden photographs, seen in this context, signify much more (Fig. 5.3). The Birdsville Track where the drought had taken place had been established in the 1860s to walk cattle from Northern Queensland and the Northern Territory to the nearest railhead at Port Augusta, saving almost 600 miles on the previously used routes. This region was, and is, one of the driest areas of Australia with an annual rainfall of less than 4 inches. The 320 mile stretch of road, then just a dusty track, traversed three deserts and fourteen Indigenous language groups. Moving from north to south are Wangkangurru/Yarlunyandi, Yandruwandha/Yawarrawarrka, Dieri Mitha, Barngarla, Edward Landers Dieri, Kugani and Adnyamathanha peoples. It is telling that today (and then) the first peoples countries, on which this track is overlaid, are virtually absent from the travelling itineraries of those embarking on cultural tourism in the area, now largely replacing its use by

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Fig. 5.3  Sidney Nolan, Untitled (Calf Carcass in Tree), 1952 archival inkjet print (Courtesy of Sidney Nolan Trust and Art for Words)

pastoralists.35 What has become iconic over time is not the diverse knowledges and histories of the world’s longest continuous culture that are embedded in this landscape, but the role of this track in the pastoralisation of the continent. The stories that are missing from white Australia’s memorialisation of this landscape are also the mechanisms that the pastoralists used to ‘clear’ the land as they made way for the track and the stations in the area. For 35 Leader-Elliott, Lyn (2002) ‘Indigenous Cultural Tourism as Part of the Birdsville/ Strezlecki Experience’. Australian Aboriginal Studies, Issue 2, pp. 35–44.

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Aboriginal peoples, there are still numerous oral and recorded histories of settler violence, in particular against the Wangkangurru-Diyari peoples. Aboriginal stockmen Brian Marks recalls: I see a bone there, biggest heaps. Must have been four or five hundred. Well they done the wrong thing when the white man come out there. That’s years ago, travelling camels. They pulled up in this big waterhole where the people used to stop. Well one bloke went out shooting ducks see. And these blackfellers come along and they killed that other bloke, cut his head off and put him in a camp oven—them steel one y’know—boil the head there. And this bloke come back with the duck and that and he said ‘Where’s my mate? Gee my old mate got something cooking’. Well that (was) his friend. When he looked there’s his mate, dead. That’s what started it see. That’s why they shot them all there. They come with the rifle. Must have killed four or five hundred there.36 This atypical description of settler violence and the hundreds of massacres that took place as pastoralists moved across the country, particularly in Queensland and Western Australia, exemplify the harrowing retribution handed out to Aboriginal peoples when they defended their land.37 It was in fact rare, however, for such a large number of people to be massacred all at once. It is possible that Brian Marks was referring to the massacre of the Mindiri at Koonchera point, just south of Birdsville in the 1880s, known by white people as Lake Howitt. Many tribes were gathered there at the time for the Idigaru Ceremony. It is said only five of up to 500 people survived, their bodies burnt by the police afterwards. The story only endured through the survival of a man called Charlie Ganabaldi, an Aboriginal tracker who ‘played dead’ and lived to tell the tale.38 No official records exist of this massacre or many others. For some people and especially Aboriginal people, the landscape is a vessel of both belonging and culture, and also a container of sadness and loss. The ‘troubling’ that exists today is in part driven by the denial of what took

36 McMillan, K (2017) ‘Sidney Nolan and the Colonial Sublime: When History Fails, Myths Fill the Void’. In Daniels, R (ed.) Transferences: Sidney Nolan in Britain. Chichester: Pallant House Gallery, p. 55. 37 Shaw, Bruce (1995) Our Heart Is the Land: Aboriginal Reminiscences from the Western Lake Eyre Basin. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, p. 54. 38 Elder, Bruce (2003) Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788. Sydney: New Holland Press.

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place during the colonisation of Australia—we are left with a detached dis-ease, a sunny-disquiet. This sense of detachment from the horror of the landscape takes its tradition from the eighteenth century—in fact, Edmund Burke would write his famous treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756, just 32 years before the British claimed New Holland as a penal colony. Eight years later, Immanuel Kant wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime underlining the role of that which is terrifying as a critical ingredient in the experience of the sublime. For Immanuel Kant, the sublime symbolised a failure by humanity, and importantly, incomprehension of that failure, to fully reconcile and absorb that which is unimaginable. Nineteenth-century scholars believed that the ‘true’ sublime was inextricably linked between an unknowable metaphysical God and the corrupting nature of the world. However, the global south was often Godless—‘his’ eye did not always extend to the far-flung posts of the British Empire. In the colonial world, rules, morals and retribution were flexible terms. In Australia, as pastoralisation extended across the continent, the settlers were often days, if not weeks, away from the nearest town or city. It was a harsh place, defined largely by men (80% of the colony was male well into the nineteenth century) faced with choices of survival. It is not surprising that the oral histories of invasion still shared by Aboriginal peoples today, resemble something from Dante’s Inferno—literally hell on earth. The depiction of these new and treacherous spaces in romantic paintings helped to mythologise and civilise these experiences. The landscapes were often empty, devoid of first nation people and the violence enacted on them, supporting the myth of terra nullius in Australia and the benevolent colonialist. As generations passed, the descendants of the convict classes could afford to decorate their homes with these representations, assisting in the delusions of the behaviour of their founding fathers. The development of the theory of the sublime in nineteenth-century Europe and colonial Australia therefore parallels the development of myth-making and its relationship with nationhood and landscape. Just like Australia, a fragmented German Empire, only unified in 1871, understood that stories about a shared national heritage were crucial. The erasure of difference and the role of ‘place’, and particularly the purity of the forest, also corresponded to crucial themes developing in Australia and Aotearoa at the same time. For early colonial painters

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immigrating to the antipodes, a sense of the sublime already accompanied them on their journey from their previous training. Artists such as Eugene von Guerard (1811–1901) in Australia and Petrus van der Velden (1837–1913) in Aotearoa had developed their sensibility from earlier artists such as Casper David Friedrich.39 The role of the sublime in understanding these colonial perspectives is critical since the migration of British and European artists essentially defined many of the parameters of colonial painting and helped to extend the imperial hold over representation and identity. The terror that the ‘colonial sublime’ represented was not, however, the existential threat of man’s consciousness, but of man’s capacity for cruelty and detachment and the residue of those actions laying just beneath the surface of the land. This historical engagement with the landscape was not only instrumental in the nineteenth century, but remains foundational for many settler Australians today. The 1952 drought which formed the subject matter for the Nolan photographs was utterly emblematic of this experience—the rotting carcass of colonialism in miniature. The futility of the endeavours of empire, as well as the residue left from violent invasion, underpins the fondness and fears that settler Australians have always had for the landscape. Nolan’s photographs are an exquisite imaging of all these complexities. They speak back to a nation about itself and to Britain of its colonial legacy. Ross Gibson describes certain parts of Australia as ‘badlands’—places where terrible things have occurred over and over again. He writes that ‘you are haunted by fear and tragedy. For this stretch of country is an immense, historical crime-scene…old passions and violent secrets are lying around in a million clues and traces. Whatever colonialism was and is, it has made this place unsettled and unsettling’.40 Contemporary colonial forgetting is therefore about firstly needing to work hard to deny the foundations of the land you occupy, as to not do so would be to acknowledge its theft. The amnesia-inducing heat allows for the mirage of forgetting to be maintained. The colonial sublime reminds us, however, that no matter the beauty of the landscape, there is always something deeply terrifying under-step. 39 Bonyhady, Tim (1987) The Colonial Image: Australian Painting, 1800–1880. Australian National Gallery. 40 Gibson, G (2002) Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

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Artists have an acute sensory system that, I argue in Chapter 6, provides us with a methodology to think about place and memory differently. Worimi/Koorie artist Genevieve Grieves writes that, ‘I have long been concerned with memories of colonial violence in the Australian landscape; places that have witnessed harm and continue to hold these traumatic memories in the present. Their existence was something I was attuned to as a child constantly travelling regional New South Wales with my family, visiting places and people, connecting with kin, and hearing stories of our past. I have emerged from both sides of this history, with a strong grounding in my Worimi and Koorie cultural framework and in other Ancestors who arrived from far off lands in the early days of the colony’.41 Settler colonial Australians are unequivocally implicated in any measure of Aboriginal life since invasion. All the evidence indicates that the British knew and engaged with Aboriginal peoples immediately and, therefore, have always known that they were occupying someone else’s land. Artists such as Julie Gough use their practice to trouble accounts of invasion. Gough’s ancestry highlights the messiness of history and identity in Australia. Her paternal heritage is Scottish and Irish whilst her matriarchal Aboriginal family line traditionally comes from Tebrikunna, in far north-eastern Tasmania. Gough’s ancestor, Woretemoeteyenner, was one of the four daughters of east coast leader, Mannalargenna, born in the late 1700s. Woretemoeteyenner lived much of her adult life in the Furneaux Islands, where at least four of her children to then sealer/straitsman George Briggs were born, including Gough’s ancestor Dalrymple Briggs, c. 1808–1812. Gough writes that: My art shines a light on the dark past. It is a weaving, an attempt to demonstrate our reality, that good and bad cohabit here. This juncture between is a gap I aim to fill with something other than silence. The process of revisiting sad, sorry, forgotten, unresolved, angering stories to make new (art)work also often returns me to Country, and this can be the good. The return to terrain not walked sometimes for generations brings an awakening, energy, self reliance, a refusal to let it wear me down. This shines a light, brings impetus, keeps me going.42 41 Grieve, G (2018) ‘Connecting with Wounded Spaces’. Un-Magazine 12:1. http:// unprojects.org.au/magazine/issues/issue-12-1/connecting-with-wounded-spaces/. 42 Gough, J (2018) ‘The Traveller’. Un-magazine edition 12:1. http://unprojects.org. au/magazine/issues/issue-12-1/the-traveller/.

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Julie Gough’s art practice involves exhaustive research through archival records. This is coupled with an expansive material practice which, like many artists explored here, is carefully selected for each project. This investigative approach does not result in clearly defined positions or answers. Rather, it highlights the complexities of history and memory and contemporary identity. At times, it is self-conscious and unsure, revealing a kind of humour that makes space for the viewer to feel welcome (but not altogether comfortable). We share with Gough the realisation that we are all bumbling through the world trying to make the best of what we can make and find. What she reveals through her excavations is that the world is duplicitous, evasive and unclear. Between 2009 and 2017, Gough has made 24 video works. Her practice, however, began in sculpture and then photography. I am though, particularly, struck by her video works which seem to capture the enigmatic and haunting nature of her subject matter so precisely and uniquely. The videos have allowed her work to travel, for Gough to seek out new audiences, sometimes unburdened by the pressure to represent the contemporary challenges of being Indigenous in Australia. Before this, but particularly since 2007 when she was awarded a two-year Australia Council Fellowship, Gough has kept on the move whilst retaining her base in Tasmania. Gough’s research, like the human remains of Aboriginal people and the artefacts that gathered up, now exist across the globe in private and public spaces. Like a modern-day adventurer or detective, Gough reverses the role of colonial explorer and sets out to take back her history. The use of video as a methodology for memory work has enabled Gough not just a space to align the past with the present, but the space to sense and experience it. Additionally, the viewer, through empathising and experiencing the traces of history (as opposed to simply knowing history), becomes open to other histories not currently situated within mainstream accounts of the British invasions in the global south and elsewhere, resulting in a fuller understanding of the present. TJ Demos argues in his book The Migrant Image that moving image work can ‘resist the culture of simulacral vacuity, amnesia and mindless consumerism’ whilst also ‘defying postmodernism’s debilitating image regime and cultural amnesia’.43 Gough exemplifies Demo’s theses which propose 43 Demos, TJ (2013) The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 8.

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that artist such as Isaac Julian and the Black Audio Film Collective challenge dominant versions of national identity and collective belonging, using video to disrupt the purity of other mediums.44 Video differs from static art practices. Its capacity to dislocate the everyday, the things, rhythms and routines that may otherwise be overlooked or normalised, and to present it within the framework of the cinematic, provides for a heightened ability to reassess or newly understand what we are viewing.45 Curator Nat Trotman concludes that ‘although many have theorised the complex temporal states permitted by still photography, this sense of dislocation is uniquely potent within the mediums of film and video…for their access to what Frederic Jameson has called ‘the elegiac mysteries of duree and of memory’.46 Trotman also argues that ‘together these seemingly disparate elements (of sound and film) produce a temporal state that, again, hovers between the here/ now and the then/there, or in more psychoanalytic terms, between the mythic moment and the original trauma and its present manifestation as a symptom’.47 The metaphorical looping of film and video, functions to disrupt not just our memory of the moving image, but what it seeks to represent. Because video is not fixed, like a photograph or a sculpture, revisiting a precise moment in the work is difficult. Therefore, it functions like a memory—slippery, doubtable and difficult to pin down precisely.48 In a culture saturated by moving images, the audience attends to film with known tools. The suspended disbelief enacted through the viewing of single channel, popular film in a cinema environment has become

44 Ibid. 45 See Vivian Sobchack, who has argued that these mediums fall within the bounds of the ‘cinematic’ and the ‘electronic’, states of experience fundamentally divorced from the ‘photographic’ mode that preceded them. See Sobchack, V (2004) ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic “Presence”’. In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 135–162. 46 Trotman, N (2010) Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance. New York: Guggenheim Museum Press. 47 Ibid., p. 86. 48 For further reading, see Doane, MA (2002) The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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an everyday experience. This is quite different from viewing the static museum object, with less universally democratic rules for viewing and interpretation. If the goal of the work is to impart knowledge and experience, to engage in sharing and generosity, then film provides a unique set of circumstances in a museum context. Unlike the cinema, however, video-based contemporary art situates the viewer in a slightly different spectrum. It is often multi-channelled, involves sculpture, unfamiliar sound and an unclear viewing point. The audience becomes part of the work, moving through it, performing as viewers. The video in this context has the capacity to interact with the audience. The consequence of this experience is that the concepts portrayed in the work become more firmly situated, less distant, more felt. Gilles Deleuze discusses the affect of film as making the space between the self and the environment indistinguishable.49 The possibilities that this engenders argues Janet Baker highlight the ‘attempt to disengage the common sense logic on which dogmatic thought depends, (and) advances a radical approach to the idea of self (where)…a complete abandonment of any idea of coordinated selfhood’ exists.50 Thus, in considering Baker’s model, video provides a place where ideas and self can be constructed anew. Maureen Turim in her book Flashbacks in Film: History and Memory discusses the ways we appropriate the archives of the moving image to ‘give us images of history, the shared and the recorded past…memory surges forth, it strengthens or protects or it repeats and haunts’.51 In this sense, the video work creates a window or a frame through which ideas can be presented experientially, but safely. Time-based media has provided for a revisiting of what has and hasn’t been archived in recent times, as well as in colonial history. Mary Ann Doane argues that the archive is a form of protection against time and what might be lost. The accumulation of images, the reordering of them and subsequent possibilities for reinvention, allows for the past to be constantly re-understood and to refuse fixity.52 Gough’s work completes

49 Deleuze, G (trans.) (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image.. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 50 Baker, J (2016) ‘An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experiences in Art and Technology’. Contiuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 30 (2), 254–257. 51 Turum, M (2013) Flashbacks in Film: History and Memory. London: Routledge, p. 3. 52 Doane, M (2002), p. 82.

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the incomplete archive of colonial events and recreates new ones in the absence of information. Artists such as Gough, engaged with the retelling of history, are attempting to use the archive of the moving image as a form of protection against forgetting. However, Gough’s approach confronts the mechanisms of forgetting, as much as what has been forgotten. Gough and I met in Paris in 2016 when she was on a research trip to locate the provenance of sacred objects that has been claimed for the collection of Musée du Quai Branly during French exploration in Oceania. She had been provided with various conflicting snippets of information from collection staff, deliberate (it seemed) bureaucratic processes to ‘safe guard’ the collection, with a complete disregard for the deeply difficult and sensitive significance these objects hold for Indigenous people. The account of her journey to locate these objects is almost Monty Pythonesque and a poignant symbol of the ongoing mechanisms of colonialism that are intricately embedded within social systems. Told yes one day, no the next, partial documents offered up, but not their provenance—all of which defined the daily narration of her attempts to understand what in fact was held in the collection. Gough’s work highlights these processes of discovery and journey, as if conjuring up and mimicking the early travels of explorers as they ventured into places operating with entirely different rules and protocols. In discussing this research, Gough used the example of Lucille Ball in the 1953 film Long, Long Trailer as Ball’s character fills her caravan with ‘souvenir rocks’, making it increasingly hard to pull the trailer. It is never the destination that reveals the significance of Gough’s research, rather the tragic comedy of the journey. Traveller (2013) (Fig. 5.4) is a short video work that was originally shown at Contemporary Art Tasmania in the exhibition The Lost World (part 1). It loosely narrates a journey undertaken by Gough in response to George Augustus Robinson’s diary (ironically titled Friendly Mission), which records the period when genocidal policies were being implemented in Tasmania. In the video, Gough hitchhikes her way through Tasmania, stopping at Highfield House, the site that claims to be the first settlement of Europeans in Tasmania. For many people, including Gough, Highfield House is a contested site haunted by colonial violence and invasion. Gough retraces many of the pathways of Edward Curr, an early colonialist and businessman who was implicated in the 1827 Cape Grim Massacre, resulting in approximately thirty murders and the rape

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Fig. 5.4  Julie Gough, Traveller, 2013 HDMI video projection, 16:9, 8:43 minutes, colour, sound edited by Jemma Rea (Courtesy of Julie Gough)

of Aboriginal women.53 None of this is explicit in the film. Rather, the viewer follows Gough as she embarks on a journey which ends with her burying Robinson’s diary in a shallow grave. The past becomes, literally, barely concealed by a thin layer of earth and pine needles. The opening scene displays a quote from 1825 issued by the courts to encourage presumably white business and landowners to erect ‘wall or stockade both for the maintenance of order within and to prevent inroads from the natives or marauders from without’. This text stays on the screen for almost a minute, encouraging the viewer to really sit with the implications of this. It then cuts to Gough standing in the foreground on the side of the road hitchhiking, interrupted by passing cars.

53 Furphy, E (2013) Edward M. Curr and the Tide of History. Canberra: The Australian National University, ANU E Press.

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She is the itinerant marauder or native. In the background, we can see European-style fields. Hitchhiking is a common mode in Gough’s films. Increasingly an unlikely form of travel, it suggests itinerancy and precarity. One might resort to hitchhiking when no other options or help are available. A woman hitchhiking suggests an even more heightened sense of vulnerability. Gough’s androgynous appearance in Traveller is further confounded by a consortium of objects, many of which are found in her sculptural works. These include a series of spears stored in a gun case, which Gough screws together once she has reached her destination, and a kangaroo skin blanket and pillow. The fragile absurdity of all these elements results in a sort of humorous melancholy that runs throughout the film. The potentially autobiographical character embodies a sense of purpose that is simultaneously illogical and fundamental. This character is the past, future and present. Worlds collide. Stories unravel but do not come back together sufficiently. We laugh, worry and hold our heavy hearts. We learn new things and unlearn others. The title, ‘Traveller’, reads as ‘time traveller’ in this context, conjuring up feelings of possibility but also displacement. An earlier work, Observance, 2012, now held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria and the Cruthers Collection, more explicitly develops a dialogue between two protagonists. In this film, we never see Gough, but we look through her eyes as a group of nine ecotourists are secretly followed across Tasmania. Gough was inspired after she had been camping on country in north-west Tasmania, ancestral homeland to 95% of Tasmania’s Indigenous people, for over a decade. Gough began to camp in winter to avoid the ecotourists who traverse the beachscapes for seven months a year, twice a day. These tourists, often paying upwards of $2500 AUD for a three-day hike, come to unwind and be in nature. Just as Tasmania’s Indigenous populations were outnumbered during invasion, so too is Gough. In the video work, she secretly observes the violation of her maternal homelands. For many Aboriginal people today, they are no longer accessible due to the difficulties of travelling with complicated health problems inherited from settlers. The opening scene, again, uses archival text, this time from Robinson’s diary, lamenting the waste of land: ‘when I saw this country and other parts equally barren and never could be of use to the white man and abounding with game, I lamented much the unfortunate circumstance that prevented them from the peaceable enjoyment of this

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useless tract of land, so well suited to them’.54 Robinson, conciliator of Aborigines, had declared in 1831 that he would keep this land free and unmolested for Aboriginal people. Yet to this day, this is yet to be fulfilled. A series of silent empty landscapes are shown in the opening scenes— pristine places that then become violated by the group of tourists, their presence heavily referencing settler arrival. Gough sees them as trespassers—modern-day invaders entirely unaware of the burial grounds and sacred places they disrupt. They move through the landscape, observing but disconnected from their surroundings. Gough says that ‘they remind me of the zombie shoppers in George Romero’s film Dawn of the Dead, repeatedly going up and down escalators, trying to recall something, be something that is always just out of reach’.55 We never hear what they are saying and are prompted to think—‘what on earth are they doing?’ Observance suggests that colonialism is ongoing, that the present as well as histories remain contested—they simple manifest under different guises. Even so-called ecotourists can, with the best of intentions, complicate and disturb the fragile course of history. Text punctuates the image throughout. English words for objects— sheep, flour, for example—are intermingled with remaining Indigenous words from the language groups across Tasmania. What is heartbreaking is that the indigenous words are all used to describe British objects or actions (droethinner—hang by rope; ponedim—England). The predominant residue of the rich and complex language structures, lost through the genocidal actions of settlers and the policies that permitted this, are the names of the objects and actions used to ‘civilise’ the landscape. This quiet sadness typifies much of Julie Gough’s work. Her uncertainty and diligent enquiry permeates everything and makes space for the viewer to participate in the journey. We follow her, hopeful, that some ground may be gained, answers may be provided. We are not rewarded by these things of course—the gift is far greater in the end. Instead, we become empathic to the fragility of contemporary life and the delicate balance between insisting on restitution and remaining optimistic. In the work, Lost World 1 (2013), Gough departs from the lonely figure present in other works and embarks on a trip into the centre of 54 Journal of George Augustus Robinson, 2 November 1830, North East Tasmania quoted in Gough, J (2012) ‘Observance’. 55 Artist statement provided to the author (2012).

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Fig. 5.5  Julie Gough, The Lost World (part 1), 2013 HDMI video projection, 16:9, 13 minutes, colour, sound edited by Jemma Rea (Courtesy of Julie Gough)

Tasmania with her brother. What begins as a short-day trip to more rugged parts of the island becomes a saga of impossible return. The film documents them both on a 12-hour ordeal where the two get lost and are ill-equipped to deal with the terrain which is plagued by overgrown bush and wildlife which historically would have been farmed and managed by Aboriginal peoples.56 Gough and her brother find themselves struggling to deal with the landscape from which Aboriginal people were forcibly removed. They become entangled with overgrown, snake-infested scrub as increasingly frantic voicemail messages from police, their mother and family provide the only soundtrack to the work (Fig. 5.5). On the way to their destination, they drive in silence along increasingly smaller and smaller roads. They are thwarted by farming operations spraying chemicals, mining plants and private land holdings. The barriers to access, even in this remote area of Tasmania, are significant. Eventually, they make their way on foot across a farmer’s field, a large hill within their sites.

56 Pascoe, B (2014) Dark Emu: Black Seeds, Agriculture or Accident. Broome: Magabala Books.

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The film ends abruptly—providing an unsatisfying ending—a common technique in most of Gough’s films. There is also a nod to popular film—lost in an unknown place with a handheld camera, it is reminiscent of the 1999 indie film The Blair Witch Project. In conversation with Gough, she tells that after the end of the film, she and her brother, unable to conjure the strength to make it back to their car, rely on the occupants of a remote house to drive them 5 kilometres back to where they began their adventure on foot. Like all of Gough’s projects, they communicate an ordeal, presented to us to highlight the struggles of making one’s way through the world. Gough’s life and practice are therefore indistinguishable from one another. Gough is hesitant to call herself ill-equipped. Instead, she optimistically discusses the new things she has learned—how not to become covered in leaches and what footwear to use next time. She is learning all the time—rejoicing in the journey of discovery and is ambivalent about the outcome. Sometimes the ‘art’ is just a nice side effect of what she does. The art is also the generosity—the bit that is shared with us. This reluctance to make bold statements is what gives Gough’s work potency. What she is offering us is somehow more real and sincere—a reflection of a genuine struggle to trouble one’s way through a complex world. More recently, she has taken on a part-time role as Indigenous Curator at the Tasmanian Art Gallery. Excited and daunted in equal measure, she explains that there are hundreds of Indigenous objects with almost no provenance. No doubt this will form part of her next journey in some way. She is always looking for the holes in history to see what might be discovered and added, what Edward Said called ‘the archival gap’.57 For a descendant of peoples not considered to be quite human, writing oneself back into history is a political act. To locate that firmly within place, directly connected to the land that was stolen from you, underscores that behind Gough’s fragile and open processes, there is an unambiguous and defiant resolve. For Gough, the archival clues are in what has been left out or only partially recorded. What is missing reveals the practices of the collectors and official systems of colonial Australia. Gough writes that ‘I feel distanced in a western world where I walk seeking clues and directions from 57 Said, E (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage, cited in Genovese, Taylor R ‘Decolonizing Archival Methodology: Combating Hegemony and Moving Towards a Collaborative Archival Environment’. AlterNATIVE, 12 (1), 34.

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what has been omitted from the official records and in this distancing I recognise that the clues are in the absences, which has ironically provided me my way of seeing the world’.58 This sense of partial knowledge defines Gough’s experience of the world and also a method of working. One of the first ‘projects’ that Gough undertook was a return to her maternal country of Tasmania in the early 1990s just after graduating from art school in Perth, Western Australia, where I had first encountered her work. At that time, she was just beginning the ongoing process of learning her ancestral stories, which like most first nation peoples had been dismantled, displaced and almost lost. Moving first to Hobart, Gough began the ongoing research which traced her family back to Woretemoeteyenner (1790–1847) and the extraordinarily tragic story of genocide, her sale from one colonist to another for one guinea, five children and an unplanned journey through the Bass Strait islands, Albany; the prison-like island of Wybalenna for at least a decade, before being reunited with one of her daughters in Tasmania six years before her death. Woretemoeteyenne’s biography thus maps the treacherous and horrific encounters with colonists that Tasmanian Aboriginal people tried desperately to survive. The surrounding islands in Bass Strait, used for mutton-birding and the collection of shell for the beautiful maireener (green kelp) necklaces traditional to the women of the Furneaux islands off Tasmania’s north-east coast, are consequently places of turmoil and unrest for Gough, utterly severed from a sense of place and home as a result of violent invasion. The mainland of north-east Tasmania is where Gough feels most connected. Her ancestors go back perhaps 500 generations, so it is unsurprising that this is where she visits to piece together clues, memories and her genetic inheritance. She said on visiting there for the first time that it was like an extra valve had opened and she could suddenly breathe and sleep properly.59 This inherited trauma carried in the body, even in the absence of the details of the original events, is commonplace for first nation people across the world. It is perhaps this vulnerability mixed with determination that draws me to her film works. They evidence Gough in the landscape, surviving, resisting and piecing together the clues necessary for future existence. We see the edges of this island landscape of Tasmania—the sublime beachscapes where first encounters occurred, the ruthless and opportunistic methods of 58 Gough, J (2018) Fugitive Histories: The Art of Julie Gough. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, p. 12. 59 In conversation with the Author, August 2018.

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the sealers, the French and finally the British and their decided conviction to claim Tasmania and the surrounding islands as their own. The interior landscape in Gough’s films also function on many levels. It is the site where ancestral stories and culture are held—the land that has been stolen and desecrated (and continues to be through farming, logging and ecotourism) and now the places where scant clues leave traces of both these things. Gough is finding the almost lost, the deliberately forgotten and concealed, and she pieces it all together in what seems like a delicate gesture of creativity. Yet, it is also a force of will and intellect that insists that she has not forgotten and nor must we. Gough aims to displace ‘real history’ which accordingly inverts how knowledge is formed and transferred, dismantling what Frederic Jameson terms ‘historical amnesia’ where reality becomes part of a constant flow of perpetual presents.60 Jameson argues that: our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve. Think only of the media exhaustion of news: of how Nixon and, even more so, Kennedy are figures from a now distant past. One is tempted to say that the very function of the news media is to relegate such recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past. The informational function of media would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia.61 In this sense, Gough’s films knowingly attend to the amnesia of contemporary culture and its capacity for forgetting in favour of the new and immediate. The works then seek to occupy not only the historical space that has been active in removing other histories but also utilise the tools of the present-day media that perpetuate the silencing of settler-atrocities. This immersion, in both the presentation of the film and the broad spectrum of ideas within it, enables Gough’s work to highlight the possibilities of interdisciplinarity. History, art, anthropology, literature and cinema work together, providing a holistic and unforgettable experience. Art, however small its audience, allows for an un-forgetting in a way that very little else, other than the experience of the original trauma, does. 60 For further reading on this, see Storey, J (2001) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Essex: Pearson Education Limited, pp. 156–160. 61 Jameson, F (1985) ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. In Foster, H (ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press, p. 125.

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Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo describes this form of knowing as ‘sense memory’.62 This ‘sense memory’ is precisely what film can invoke for audiences. Like original trauma, film can portray the overwhelming, non-narrative displacement that occurs when the brain tries to make sense of it. Gough’s films provide access to her ‘sense memory’, the partial archive she has been able to put together despite the gaps in the archive, the institutional obstacles and ongoing resistance to remembering. History is not past, but it has been corralled, managed and selectively disseminated by those in power across my island.63

Bibliography Baker, J (2016) ‘An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experiences in Art and Technology’. Contiuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 30 (2), 254–257. Baldwin, J (1985) The Price of the Ticket. New York: St Martin’s Press, p. 536. Bolt, B (2000) ‘Shedding Light for the Matter’. Hypatia, 15 (2), Going Australian: Reconfiguring Feminism and Philosophy (Spring), 202–216. Bonyhady, T (1987) The Colonial Image: Australian Painting, 1800–1880. Canberra: Australian National Gallery. Chambers, J (1953) ‘Enclosure and Labour Supply in the Industrial Revolution’. The Economic History Review, 5 (3), new series, 319–343. Cohen S (2001) States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press. Delbo, C in Bennet, J (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Deleuze, G (trans.) (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Demos, TJ (2013) The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press. Doane, MA (2002) The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Elder, B (2003) Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians Since 1788. Sydney: New Holland Press. Enwezor, Okwui (2008) ‘Documents into Monuments: Archives as Meditations on Time’. In Farr, Ian (ed.) Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art (2012). London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 62 Delbo, C in Bennet, J (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, p. 25. 63 Gough, J (2018) Fugitive History: The Art of Julie Gough. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press, p. 64.

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Furphy, E (2013) Edward M. Curr and the Tide of History. Canberra: The Australian National University, ANU E Press. Gard, Stephan & Bucolo, Salvatore (2005) ‘Capturing Australian Indigenous Perception of Virtual Landscape’. In VSSM Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia: Virtual Reality at Work in the 21st Century: Impact on Society, Belgium, Ghent. Gibson, G (2002) Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Gough, J (2018) Fugitive Histories: The Art of Julie Gough. Crawley: University of Western Australia Press. Gough, J (2018) ‘The Traveller’. Un-magazine edition 12:1. http://unprojects. org.au/magazine/issues/issue-12–1/the-traveller/. Grieve, G (2018) ‘Connecting with Wounded Spaces’. Un-Magazine 12:1. http://unprojects.org.au/magazine/issues/issue-12-1/connecting-withwounded-spaces/. Haebich, A (2008) Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950–1970. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. Haebich, A (2018) Dancing in the Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance. Perth: University of Western Australia Press. Healy, C (2008) Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: UNSW Press. Herbert, RL (2002) From Millet to Leger: Essays in Social Art History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jameson, F (1985) ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. In Foster, H (ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press. Kearins, J (1986) ‘Visual Spatial Memory in Aboriginal and White Australia Children’. Australian Journal of Psychology, 38 (3), 203–214. Keneally, T (2007) The Commonwealth of Thieves: The Story of the Founding of Australia. London: Vintage Books. Kuhn, A (2000) Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media. New York: Berg Press. Layton, R & Ucko, PJ (1999) The Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape: Shaping Your Landscape. New York: Routledge. Lazarus, N (2011) The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leader-Elliott, L (2002) ‘Indigenous Cultural Tourism as Part of the Birdsville/ Strezlecki Experience’. Australian Aboriginal Studies, Issue 2, 35–44. McCulloch, S & McCulloch Child, E (2008) McCulloch’s Contemporary Aboriginal Art: A Complete Guide. Melbourne: McCulloch Australian Art Books. McMillan, K (2017) ‘Sidney Nolan and the Colonial Sublime: When History Fails, Myths Fill the Void’. In Daniels, R (ed.) Transferences: Sidney Nolan in Britain. Chichester: Pallant House Gallery, p. 55.

140  K. McMILLAN Mills, C (2007) ‘White Ignorance’. In Sullivan, S & Tuana N (eds.) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. Albany: State University of New York Press. Mundine, D (2012, June) ‘The Ballad of Jimmy Governor’. Artlink, p. 37. Nietzche, F (2006) ‘On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic’. In Pearson, KA & Large, D (eds.) The Nietzche Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Brien, P & Quinault, R (eds.) (1993) The Industrial Revolution and British Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pascoe, B (2014) Dark Emu: Black Seeds, Agriculture or Accident. Broome: Magabala Books. Ricoeur, P (2004) Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, E (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage, cited in Genovese, Taylor R ‘Decolonizing Archival Methodology: Combating Hegemony and Moving Towards a Collaborative Archival Environment’. AlterNATIVE, 12 (1), 34. Scanlan, (2013) Memory Encounters with the Strange and Familiar. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Schama, S (1995) Landscape and Memory. London: Vintage Books. Shaw, B (1995) Our Heart Is the Land: Aboriginal Reminiscences from the Western Lake Eyre Basin. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. Sobchack, V (2004) ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic “Presence”’. In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Solnit, R (2001) As Eve Said to the Serpent. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Spivak, G (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press. For Gunew, S (1994) Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms. New York: Routledge. Storey, J (2001) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Essex: Pearson Education Limited. Till, K (2012) ‘Wounded Cities: Memory Work and a Place-Based Ethics of Care’. Political Geography, 31 (1), 3. Trotman, N (2010) Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance. New York: Guggenheim Museum Press. Tuhiwai Smith, L (2012) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd edition. London: Zed Books. Turum, M (2013) Flashbacks in Film: History and Memory. London: Routledge. Waite, I (2012) Common Land in English Painting 1700–1850. London: Boydell Press. Witt, H (1991) ‘The Soft, Warm, Wet Technology of Native Oceania’. Whole Earth Review (Fall). http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition. php?iss=2072.

CHAPTER 6

The Art Object as a Memory Trigger

‘It is about the un-canny and what objects carry – the haunted past’.1 In 2014, Gough was invited to participate in a residency and subsequent exhibition at the site known as Skullbone Plains in central Tasmania. Despite some initial research, I was unable to find any clear reason why it was given such a foreboding name. Tasmanian Land Conservancy who manages the site, and hosted the residency programme, makes no reference to it. Like much of Australia’s history, it remains unspoken, undocumented and subsequently lost. Artists were asked to visit the site and make work in response to it. Gough, aware that she may have been charged with making ‘Indigenous art’, instead found an old shoe seemingly constructed using nineteenth-century European shoemaking techniques. This weathered object became the protagonist in Ode (2014), a short film which was produced as a result of the residency. Gough uses the shoe to imagine, like a detective, what partial histories it may point to (Fig. 6.1). The film begins with Gough’s mother and brother as they handle the shoe and speculate as to its histories. They discuss the story of a man who was living on Skullbone Plains in colonial times with his wife. On one occasion, they relay that he had come into town on his own, battered and bruised, declaring that his wife had left him. She was never 1 Gough, J (2015) Artist Statement for the work, ‘Inheritance’, exhibited in Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation curated by Gaye Sculthorpe at the British Museum, 2015.

© The Author(s) 2019 K. McMillan, Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17290-9_6

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Fig. 6.1  Julie Gough, Ode, 2014. HDMI video projection, H264, 20,000 kbps, 16:9, sound, colour, 5:00 minutes, edited by Jemma Rea (Courtesy of Julie Gough)

seen again. Could the shoe have been hers? And why would she have left with only one shoe, Gough’s mother asks? Had her husband murdered her? The presence of this single object suggests an unrecorded violence, which, like much of Australia’s early colonial history, has been conveniently forgotten. The shoe is a memory trigger to the badlands that Ross Gibson insists stain the landscape of Australia. Ode allows for an evocation of the past, rather than a retelling of it. Gough catapults the lost shoe through history, into the present, rescuing it from anonymity. Her films do not resolve these partial histories, but they speak of the process of loss, retrieval and the role of art in resisting national forgetting. This chapter explores this relationship between art and remembering. It specifically attempts to unpick how the physical art object enables the retrieval of otherwise lost histories. I focus on the practice of Kokutha/Nukunu woman, Yhonnie Scarce, and her embodied glass installations made from the post-atomic sand at Maralinga. By discussing the ways in which Scarce’s sculptures perform, I intermingle various ‘memory work’ histories. I trace the origins of post-enlightenment philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how these ideas have formed a relationship and a lineage between objects and memory,

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specifically in the writing of Marcel Proust. As explored in Chapter 3, mnemonic systems have existed for tens of thousands of years in first nation cultures. This chapter contributes to the creation of a global framework of unforgetting that arises from the global south. This is Proust reimagined in the antipodes. I want to argue for the importance of unforgetting via contemporary art—argue that it performs in very specific ways. I explore how the sensory reception of remembering history is enabled through art practice and the art object. Nadia Seremetakis asks ‘where can historicity be found? In what sensory forms and practices? And to what extent the experience of and the capacity to narrate history is tied to the senses? Is memory stored in specific everyday items that form the historicity of a culture, items that create and sustain our relationship to the historical as a sensory dimension?’2 However, in the absence of these everyday items, history is depleted and their potential to trigger associations to the past limited. Perhaps then, in the partial-absence of objects and evidence of the past itself, contemporary art can recreate a new form of memory trigger. Artists in modern times have often embodied the fragile and tumultuous role of stepping through places and memories that have been deliberately deactivated in a community. This is particularly true of artists working out of colonial spaces. Yet, the writing of art history does not situate these practices or imperatives. Instead, the movements of Dada and Surrealism which developed theories of the unconscious and repressed memory consume the canon. With the exception of a spattering of women artists, art history is also overwhelmingly male. Women have always been artists, but their stories are the exception; instead, their male counterparts have defined what has been remembered, critiqued and excavated. At the beginning of the twentieth century, artists were collaborating with thinkers and writers. Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was instrumental in linking memory with imagination and his influential In search of lost time resonated throughout Europe’s intellectual world. Proust’s observations were developed in parallel with Sigmund Freud’s (1836–1939)

2 Seremetakis

(1994) The Senses Still. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 3.

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writing on the unconscious.3 Used as a way to capture and develop the imagination, memory was no longer confined to the role of accurately recalling the past, but could also be used to recover lost worlds and create new ones.4 Memory and knowledge in philosophy and art were still bound to mnemonic systems and place, but in a much more radical unpicking of the past and its impact on the present.5 Proust was fully immersed in the Parisian art world. His taste spanned Italian renaissance paintings through to Impressionism which was emerging at the time. He idolised English art critic John Ruskin and spent many years translating his texts. He was friends with many of the art dealers, collectors and artists from the period. Eric Karpeles (2008) argued that ‘Proust’s transformative icons, a madeleine and a paving stone, are direct literary corollaries of the humble objects found in (JeanBaptiste-Siméon) Chardin’s still lifes’.6 Proust himself writes on a train trip between Paris and the coastal town of Balbec that ‘I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view and a continuous picture of it’.7 Proust painted his words, and he understood the power of conjuring an image. Importantly, he understood the weight of an object, that it could aid our memories and the intensity of our experience of the world. 3 Sigmund Freud was responsible for the idea of the uncanny or Das Unheimliche which examines the object that is at once familiar and unfamiliar, resulting in the uncomfortably strange/familiar. As this creates cognitive dissonance, the object is ordinarily rejected because it cannot be rationalised. Both the art object and the forgotten or displaced memory can be seen to fulfil the role of the Unheimlich—the opposite of Heimlich, which literally translates as ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’. For further reading, see Freud, S (1919) The Uncanny. Re-published (2003). Translated by McLintock, D. London: Penguin Classics. 4 For a history of the shift of mnemonics as a memory device to its role in recovering lost knowledge, see Hutton, PH (1993) History as an Art of Memory. Hanover: University of New England. 5 Despite centuries of artists depicting war, the twentieth century saw a different style of representation that was no longer commissioned or dictated by the government. Dada through to Expressionism are examples of this. Smith, B (1998) Modernism’s History: A Study in Twentieth Century Art and Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press provides an overview and points to more specific examples in this field. 6 Karpeles, E (2008) Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost time’. London: Thames and Hudson, p. 14. 7 Ibid., p. 26.

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He seemed to understand the glimpses that might form through loss and through the multiplicit views of another subjectivity or culture. In my own mind, I can easily re-situate him into the desert of Australia, or the coastal landscapes of Oceania. I think he might have imagined himself there too, and even travelled to the southern hemisphere, had the confines of his cork-lined room not been all he could bear. In Time Regained, the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past, Proust wrote: Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space.8 Two summers ago, we drove through the French countryside to Illiers-Combray, the town of Proust’s Aunt Léonie, where he spent his childhood summers. It was here that Proust experienced, forgot and then re-remembered tasting the infamous madeleine cake in her garden. Now a museum, this old French home functions like a repository of the past. I noted the peeling wallpaper in what would have been Proust’s bedroom, the texture of the wooden and worn benchtops in the kitchen that would have been at his eye height. On that day, the sun was capturing and refracting light through a stain glass window and onto the parquet floor. I tried to walk through the house in a state of observance, as Proust might have. For Marcel Proust, a ‘memory object’ could refer to the thing that sparks an otherwise forgotten moment. In his book, In Search of Lost Time, he excavated and activated his own childhood through what he called ‘involuntary memory’ or stream of consciousness. Proust argued that any object, landscape or even smell could evoke memory. He also believed that the art object could be used to trigger collective memories and histories. Unlike the popular version of the ‘Proustian moment’, the portal into memory was not instantaneous in Proust’s opinion, but something that required ongoing consideration, the initial experience simply opening a partial portal. These fragments conjure up the shoe in

8 Proust, M (1927) In Search of Lost Time, Vol 6: Time Regained. Translated by Mayor, A & Kilmartin, T. London: Vintage Books.

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Gough’s Ode (2015). There is enough for us to begin a story, but not enough to form a complete picture. For Proust and others, such as Walter Benjamin, the involuntary process of memory surfacing into consciousness was an indication and a signpost to the underlying ‘truths’ of existence. This belief framed much of Benjamin’s Die Passagenwerk (The Arcades Project), 1927–1940, which argued that the objects of contemporary life were simply traces that signalled our true desires, and could only refer to things past. John Scanlan writes of Benjamin that he ‘was convinced that the dead were all around us in the material stuff of modern life. This demanded a knowledge that could only be born of a telescoping of the past through the present’.9 In Aurelia (1854), French poet Gerard de Nerval called this ‘the ghosts of material things’.10 This notion that an object could be a pathway into the past provides a way to understand the things in our present. Proust argued that although there is a past that causes us to have memory experiences, we are not directly or immediately aware of the past. What we are directly aware of are the effects objects have on us— representations, or sense-data, of things past. Like Benjamin, Proust argued that the objects left behind, or things that invoke history, become a mediating representation of what we have failed to otherwise remember.11 However, Jerry A Flieger suggests that ‘Proust’s oeuvre is less a work of memory than a play of forgetfulness. Rather than establishing the primacy of regained memory in the work of art, Proust’s novel almost seems to function like a creative manuel d’uage on “how to lose presence of mind”. Rather than memory, Proust’s syntactical discourse bears the dispersive marks of poetry’.12 Memory in this sense is the exchange between remembering and forgetting. Flieger argues that for Proust, creative play can allow for the insertion of otherwise peripheral and forgotten knowledge. The works of Proust and Freud also intermingle theoretically at certain points. The role of place and the significance of objects feature heavily 9 Scanlan, J (2013) Memory, Encounters with the Strange and Unfamiliar. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 11. 10 De Nerval’s poetry would go on to influence the Surrealists. 11 Advocates of the Representative Realism were John Locke (1632–1704), David Hume (1711–1776), and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). 12 Flieger, J (1980) ‘Proust, Freud and the Art of Forgetting’. SubStance, 9 (4), Issue 29. Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, p. 66.

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in both philosophical repertoires.13 Focusing primarily on traumatic memory, Freud subsequently explored and provided insight into difficult remembering and wilful forgetting. Freudian psychoanalysis does not argue that the event is the cause of trauma but insists that it is the inability of the sufferer (or community) to create a story around that event that causes the trauma. As Mieke Bal describes, traumatic memories resist integration and cannot become narratives, ‘either because the traumatizing events are mechanically reenacted as drama rather than synthetically narrated by the memorizing agent who “masters” them, or because they remain “outside” the subject’.14 The art object in this context provides a skeleton outline for the re-building of a story. It facilitates an integration of knowledge and history. The artwork then provides a counter-framework to the process of forgetting outlined in Nancy Tuana’s epistemology of ignorance—a device that restores what is forgotten to the present.15 The art object understood in this way can be read as a mediator of place and time, both present and past. It also refuses impartiality. It can, where notions of history are in dispute, function as a reminder of trauma and, importantly, reveal the concealment, or wilful forgetting of histories. The art object is a present reminder of situated stories16 13 Freud himself collected small sculptural objects from previous civilisations and felt strongly that this idea of excavating objects from the past mirrored his work with the unconscious (London: Freud Museum, 2013). 14 Bal, M (1999) Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover, England: University Press of New England, p. 17. 15 Whilst the holocaust is not the focus of this thesis, there has been groundbreaking work in this field on trauma, memory and the role of art in remembering. The book by Alphen, AV (1997) Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, provides an examination of this research field. Alphen argues that it was art and literature, rather than the learning of history growing up in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s that caused him to understand what had happened and that the dichotomy between the historical and the imaginative is what attributes power to the arts. 16 The development of the idea of Situated Knowledges, and more recently Standpoint Theory, claims that the experiences and subsequent writings should come firstly from those who it seeks to make claims about. These ideas have been developed by postcolonial writers about all marginalised groups. For further reading, see Feminist scholars such as Dorothy Smith (1999, 1990, 1990, 1987, 1977), and Haraway, D (1998) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14 (Fall, 3), 575–599. For a summary of Standpoint theory, see Harding, S (ed.) (2003) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge with essays by Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose, Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar.

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and of the place where history was played out long after the memory of them can be clearly articulated. The artist ‘senses’ the past, using devices outside of the historian’s oeuvre. Proust understood this when he wrote: But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.17 Proust’s haunting text and the characters that embodied his narratives were often based on paintings and artists. Many times, his novels would conflate different historical figures and his own semi-autobiographical life. In considering this, I wonder what characters he would have created if he were able to view and discuss the artists viewed in this book. What story would he write about forgetting in the global south? How would he respond to the contemporary challenge of information superhighways? Neuroscientists argue it is not so much that we forget information, rather that we forget how to find the links to access it. Daniel Schacter (2001) believes that our brains constantly reconfigure memories based on how often we recall them, how important they are to us and external factors of suggestibility. Viktor Mayer-Schonberger in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age posits that this is a benefit to the human mind, arguing that ‘using generalisations, relying on conjecture, emphasising the present, and respecting subsequent experiences, helps us to reason swiftly and economically, to abstract and generalise, and to act in time, rather than remain caught up in conflicting recollections’.18 Thus, what we recall reflects what we will go on to retain. Remembering is also costly. It requires energy and time and resources. Unintentional forgetting is efficient. The brain recalls those things that expedite the actions of the everyday—how to get to work, where the car keys are. The memories that are considered obstacles to immediate needs or that require time (through storytelling or rote-learning) 17 Proust, M (1914) In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, edited and annotated by William C. Carter. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 63–64. 18 Mayer-Schonberger, V (2009) Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 21.

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are effectively given diminished roles.19 Actively avoiding and forgetting traumatic memories are then also ways to successfully navigate the world. The getting on with the everyday and the possibility of living in the present, rather than being immersed in the past, which one must constantly do to be able to ‘practice remembering’, ensures that those things that do not benefit or affect us directly become lost. The ethical implications of forgetting something that is terrible, in case it undermines the benefits of the everyday, are a function of modernity. Repairing colonial violence must involve a critique of this behavioural model.20 The recollection of colonial violence is crucial to the survival of first nation people so that they may be able to understand their present. This position is in direct conflict with non-Indigenous people who are trying to eliminate guilt, or responsibility in order to benefit from the present, and to seamlessly inherit the legacy of stolen lands. Yet, this only partially accounts for colonial forgetting. It is not only a personal and private process of forgetting, although this must be a part of it, but a systematic process of diminishment, concealment and neglect at all levels. The bystander denial of history continues today in comments such as ‘it happened too long ago’; ‘the facts are open to interpretation’; ‘I didn’t really see it myself’; ‘it is hard to know what happened and what didn’t’; and most often, ‘I just didn’t know’. At an institutional level, these histories are also denied their place in curriculum, history books and mainstream media. The way that this sort of systemic institutional bias operates says Stanley Cohen is that it ‘is less the result of a planned campaign than a gradual seepage of knowledge down some collective black hole’.21 He also notes that this type of forgetting is far 19 In cultures where oral language is privileged over written language, memory functions are vastly higher. This is true of Australian Aboriginal cultures. For research that explores oral memory in Aboriginal Australians, see Will, U (2008) Oral Memory in Australian Aboriginal Song Performance and the Parry-Kirk Debate: A Cognitive Ethnomusicological Perspective. Ohio State University. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252502040_Oral_memory_in_Australian_Aboriginal_Song_Performance_and_the_ Parry-Kirk_debate_a_cognitive_ethnomusicological_perspective. 20 Paul Connerton makes a correlation between memory and silence and discusses the three ways he believes silence is implicit in forgetting: narrative silences, traumatised silences and terminological silences. His discussion situates the ethics of forgetting as a chosen and systematic series of processes. See Connerton, P (2009) How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 21 Cohen, S (2001) States of Denial: Knowing Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 12.

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more likely to occur in democratic societies where the freedom to recall some things and not others is considered a democratic right. It is notable that post-war Germany is the only country that has been required by the international community to remember the Holocaust, and this enforced position has provided the benchmark for remembering atrocity. Former colonial outposts instead take up the tacit agreement of blindness that Charles Mills referred to in The Racial Contract whereby whites agree to minimise the impact of colonisers.22 Contemporary art practice serves to query and explore why some histories are recalled and some things are not, and what this might tell us about contemporary life. It can create and search out the physical residue of these things and elevate their status. Art can slow us down and ask us to remember and incorporate the things we only partially recall. As Proust argued, the playing involved in creative practice can also generate strings of remembering that help the artist and audience grasp what was almost lost. Artists such as Yhonnie Scarce challenge the gatekeepers of history by refusing the colonial parameters of what is remembered and what is forgotten. When I first came across the work of Yhonnie Scarce, this is precisely what was brought to my mind—a powerful and unavoidable testament to remembering both the pain of the original trauma and the ongoing violence of forgetting. Scarce belongs to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples in what is now called South Australia. She was born in Woomera, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide. Woomera is now a closed area that makes up part of the Australian Defence Force land operated by the Australian Air Force. Woomera village was established in 1947 and was one of the most secret allied locations during the Cold War. Within the 122,000 square Woomera kilometre testing range is Maralinga, a British Nuclear Testing Site between 1956 and 1963. Maralinga is home to the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara Aboriginal peoples, and although there were attempts to relocate people before the testing, it was largely unsuccessful and the rates of leukaemia and lymphoma in Indigenous populations were and are significantly elevated. The resettlement and denial of access to homelands has also resulted in enormous social disintegration, which still effects many descendants today. Domenico de Clario writes of this landscape that: just as I reach the outskirts of

22 Mills,

CW (1997) The Racial Contract. New York: Cornell University Press.

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Dimboola something in me has changed, I have no idea what shifts, but what I feel in me and around me is no longer the same. The light in the sky and the shape of clouds, even their colour has been transformed and as I cross the state line I realise that my sense of time is now different. This sudden silent spaciousness gets me thinking as I glide along the black ribbon, which after all, is only a thin thread, unknotting itself along the ridges and gullies of an absence. A void filled with the absence of time—that further on and long ago spread across the flatness I have not yet reached. The speech and song of Nukunu and Kokatha people, Yhonnie Scarce’s people, would have entwined itself around the sound of thunder and fire and rain thudding on leaves and skin and on the sound that all living beings make as they listen to the echo of their speech. Swimming in time between them, between the heartland that becomes them, in turn itself becoming memory of rain and thunder and fire.23 Scarce’s work is an umbilical cord back to place, so eloquently transcribed by de Clario. The timeless power and reservoir of knowledge, poisoned by colonialism and environmental destruction, create a haunting that is both compelling and terrifying. The ‘badland’ to which Ross Gibson refers to is the perfect epitaph to Scarce’s oeuvre. What De Clario describes is a feeling of irretrievable longing, of the things that were lost (Fig. 6.2). Scarce’s grandfather grew up just near the Maralinga bombsite. After the detonations, the heat from the explosions caused the desert sands to become glass beads called trinitite. The residue of these glass shards is still evident at Maralinga today. That Scarce works with glass, often made from sand gathered on country, speaks to the transformative capacity of creative practice, not just to remind us of the stories we forgot or didn’t want to tell, but to bring them elegantly back into the present so we can hold and consider them. Scarce’s sculptures are fragile memory triggers that speak to past and present trauma—her breath literally creates the form of each blown object. Recognising her own power, her objects attempt to give a voice to the stories of her ancestors that were never heard. In 2015, Scarce created Thunder, Raining, Poison exhibited at the Art Gallery of South Australia (and now in its permanent collection) for Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial. Made up of 23 de Clario, D (2009) ‘Gone in No Time: Gone in No Time’. Exhibition Catalogue, Australian Experimental Art Foundation.

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Fig. 6.2  Yhonnie Scarce Thunder, Raining, Poison, 2017. Blown glass yams, dimensions variable (Courtesy of Yhonnie Scarce)

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2000 individually blown glass objects in the shape of ‘yams’, a vegetable that is a core first nation dietary component in arid areas throughout Australia. The land around Maralinga, still uninhabitable and toxic despite continued, albeit delayed, attempts to clean the area up, remains barren of vegetation, birds and other wildlife (Fig. 6.3). Installed in the museum, suspended, like a giant mushroom cloud above the viewers, the objects appear as ‘ghost yams’ from this now barren place. The fragility of the work, and the possibility that it may fall onto the viewer, is potent. Scarce’s work—so delicate and beautiful—is also like a truthsayer, cutting through the bullshit. Telling history like it is. Often mistaken for a chandelier by viewers, the deception that 2000 glass yams made from the toxic soil of Maralinga hang above you is extraordinarily powerful. When I talk with Scarce about this work, I feel it heavy in my stomach; when I write about it later, I can still locate that heaviness. Her work sticks; the objects remain inside you, resistant to the silencing of genocide that has defined Australian history-telling. Maralinga’s landscape is unable to recover from this brutal destruction by the British-Australian defence alliance. Aboriginal people will not go back there and remain continually dislocated from country and culture. To the Cold War leadership of Churchill and Menzies, this place would have been seen, much like Australia during invasion, as an empty land without significance and meaning. As a consequence of these nuclear tests, Britain was able to secure its place as the third most powerful nation after the USA and the Soviet Union. Scarce’s role is to examine how this exchange of power continues to live on and to highlight the consequences of global politics through creative practice. The scale of producing Thunder, Raining, Poison meant that Scarce needed to develop a team of glass technicians from the world-leading glass studio at Jam Factory in Adelaide, many of whom accompanied Scarce on the ten-hour drive to Maralinga to witness the landscape and stories first hand. They gathered the red sand that would create the distinctive patina on the glass yams. This sense of generosity, and collaboration, informed by an inheritance of community, visual expression and story, is indicative of all my discussions with Scarce. Her willingness to engage and pull apart history, and to do so in collaboration with audiences, technicians and writers like myself, is an emotional labour that needs acknowledging and gratitude. Sarah Scott describes the glass yams strung from the ceiling as ‘fragile, yam-like forms (which) also recall embryos and point to the

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Fig. 6.3  Yhonnie Scarce Thunder, Raining, Poison, 2017. Blown glass yams, dimensions variable (Courtesy of Yhonnie Scarce)

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continuing impact that these nuclear tests have had on Aboriginal people. Stillbirths, as well as the births of generations of children with severe deformities, have been the outcome of the tests at Maralinga, and outcome denied by authorities such as the Department of Veterans Affairs’.24 Scarce sees the embryonic forms as an extension of her creative self.25 There is an incredible irony that the food used to sustain Aboriginal peoples for so many thousands of years also stands in for the dead— each a hollow symbol of the people claimed by colonial violence. This doubling is a clever ploy by Scarce who lures her audiences through the beauty of her work, to then be delivered the harsh reality of the notso-distant past of Maralinga and its impact on first nation peoples. Like the colonial sublime discussed in Chapter 4—the beauty of the work is a mask for a terrible truth. In this sense, Scarce’s work joins a long lineage of post-invasion artists who are mesmerised and terrorised by the landscape in equal measures. In 2014, Scarce created a smaller project titled The Silence of Others (series of six). Using blown glass, this work incorporates nineteenth-century glass domes used to display and present objects of curiosity, often in museums. It includes a black or white opaque glass yam mounted inside each case and presented on a simple black table. The shiny reflective surfaces, operating like a siren, seduce the viewer and then deliver the hard blows of colonial violence and its continuing inheritance. For many first nation artists, the relationship with the museum and the archive is duplicitous—the cultural acknowledgement that arises from entering the archive and the potential this provides for Indigenous knowledge is tainted by the systemic violence and erasure propagated by the practices of museology. In Silence of Other’s (series of six), symbolic remains are displayed in the museum domes, acknowledging that actual remains of ancestors continue to be housed by museums across the world. Refusing the silence of the museum, these abstract forms speak back to the viewer in defiant and unapologetic terms (Fig. 6.4).

24 Scott, S (2017) ‘Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial’. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 17 (2), 251–255. https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.201 7.1450064. 25 Scarce, Y (2018) ‘Recorded for “Fieldwork” on Radio Public’. Episode 3, Indigenous Trauma with Yhonnie Scarce. https://radiopublic.com/field-work-G2wV0y/ep/s1!f86df.

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Fig. 6.4  Yhonnie Scarce, The Silence of Others, 2014. Blown glass, archival photographs dimensions variable (Courtesy of Yhonnie Scarce)

What is also remarkable about Scarce’s work is the significance of process. Often taking days in a hot glass studio, adorned with suffocating safety equipment, the method of making is physical and exhausting. These light-as-air objects are the result of an intense and heavy ordeal— for Scarce the making of them mirrors the emotional labour that the finished works seek to represent. Her breath literally forms a space for the stories which have been deliberately forgotten and overlooked. The work underlines that the British Empire did not just enact its violence in 1788, or even in the twentieth-century testing at Maralinga, but in the continuation of the disregard and indifference towards first nation people which has resulted in gross inequality and injustice in every aspect of contemporary life. The glass yams in many of Scarce’s works are shaped uncannily like bombs, creating a shiny surface—a mirror for ourselves and a lens to look through. I imagine holding one of them and for Scarce’s magic to work through me—to imprint on me something I should know. They are vessels for stories, extending Scarce’s own family history to speak more widely about the mechanisms of forgetting that remain with us today (Fig. 6.5).

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Fig. 6.5  Yhonnie Scarce, The Silence of Others, 2014. Blown glass, archival photographs dimensions variable (Courtesy of Yhonnie Scarce)

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The form of the bomb is more explicitly referenced in a series of small works from 2015 called Breakaway (Fig. 6.6). A clear glass bomb-shaped object containing within it small grey yams, like a mother carrying her embryonic babies within her womb. Except this ‘mother’ will destroy her children rather than protect them. A reference perhaps to the unthinkable disregard Aboriginal mothers are given in the ongoing atrocities of the Stolen Generations. It also makes reference to Mother Country—Britain, the benevolent landlord who was supposed to protect its citizens. It is as if Scarce is offering us a different mnemonic system that reminds us, not what existed for 60,000, but how it was destroyed. She has adapted the traditions of storytelling to claim this contemporary truth. Her approach to making enables otherwise unexplored and/ or unconscious material to be incorporated. The actual creative process then sits in addition to the memory object, creating a twofold dynamic between process and object. This forms a critical and distinctive nature for creative research and for the work of many contemporary artists interested in retrieving and unforgetting the past. Without a reliance on writing, stories have to be detailed and accurate. Memories must be trustworthy. That is why only some elders are trusted with stories, as to remember them incorrectly would change knowledge irreparably. Knowledge is therefore restricted and precious. The post-invasion knowledges which artists such as Yhonnie Scarce add to this lineage are crucial. The epic songlines that were forever disrupted when people were unable to access country have been adapted and captured in art objects with the intention of never being forgotten again. An antipodean Proust might stumble across a gathering of Scarce’s yams and reflect on the hollow vessels, and how these ghosts of fruit form portals back to an ancient time. Carried around in the aprons and baskets of Scarce’s ancestors—a lifeline for the harshness of desert life. Through these cold glass forms, we may also be able to smell the fruit, conjuring up inside us a forgotten memory from childhood; or perhaps, we can hear the desert wind echoing shell-like when we hold it up to our ears. Most certainly, we would hear the terrifying cries of ancestors as Operation Butler and Operation Antler distributed atomic bombs across the desert. In the making of them too, does Scarce imagine the high point of summer heat as the glass furnace’s burn at 1400 degrees? As we handle each yam, do we feel its heat, or the atomic explosion on the hot desert sand?

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Fig. 6.6  Yhonnie Scarce, Breakaway Blue Danube series, 2015. Blown glass 60 × 25 × 25 cm (approx.) each, unique works (Courtesy of Yhonnie Scarce)

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There is a heightened intensity of place and objectness in the antipodes. Things carry weight. All food needs to be preserved, from the heat, from distances travelled. The objects of daily life and those we inherit from the past are rarified and precious. Therefore, Proust in the antipodes is not a dreamy, romantic place, lulled by the long summer dusks, but a harsh, unforgiving place where the fruits of your labour are hard won. So too are the outcomes of the artist’s labour. Existing despite a cultural malaise, fighting to be heard. The objects presented to us by Scarce, Gough and others resonate deep in our bellies. They remind of things we had forgotten, chose to forget and found hard to remember. They tell us that even, despite the amnesiac propensities of contemporary life, the past follows us. The past is in our pockets and inside our nostrils. The past seizes the moment when the threads knit together and refuse a forgetting, when it builds up in our throats and we are compelled to cough it out. I propose that the work of Scarce and others is not simply a gesture of making that occurs at the periphery of the global south, but that it is a response to a pervasive worldwide preference for forgetting. As such, contemporary art in colonial spaces is an art of our time. It proposes a strategy for social and political engagement, something that is increasingly sidelined as art markets colonise the art world.

Bibliography Alphen, AV (1997) Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bal, M (1999) Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present. Hanover/England: University Press of New England. Connerton, P (2009) How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, S (2001) States of Denial: Knowing Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge: Polity Press. Flieger, J (1980) ‘Proust, Freud and the Art of Forgetting’. SubStance, 9 (4), Issue 29. Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press. Freud, S (1919) The Uncanny. Re-published (2003). Translated by McLintock, D. London: Penguin Classics. Gough, J (2015) Artist Statement for the work, ‘Inheritance’, exhibited in ‘Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation’ curated by Gaye Sculthorpe at the British Museum, 2015.

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Haraway, D (1998) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies 14 (Fall, 3), 575–599. Harding, S (ed.) (2003) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge. Hutton, PH (1993) History as an Art of Memory. Hanover: University of New England. Karpeles, E (2008) Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’. London: Thames and Hudson. Mayer-Schonberger, V (2009) Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mills, CW (1997) The Racial Contract. New York: Cornell University Press. Proust, M (1914) In Search of Lost Time, vol. 1, edited and annotated by William C. Carter. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, pp. 63–64. Proust, M (1927) In Search of Lost Time, Vol 6: Time Regained. Translated by Mayor, A & Kilmartin, T. London: Vintage Books. Scanlan, J (2013) Memory, Encounters with the Strange and Unfamiliar. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Scarce, Y (2018) ‘Recorded for ‘Fieldwork’ on Radio Public’. Episode 3, Indigenous Trauma with Yhonnie Scarce. https://radiopublic.com/ field-work-G2wV0y/ep/s1!f86df. Scott, S (2017) ‘Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial’. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 17 (2), 251–255. https://doi.org/10.1080 /14434318.2017.1450064. Seremetakis (1994) The Senses Still. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Smith, B (1998) Modernism’s History: A Study in Twentieth Century Art and Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press. Will, U (2008) Oral Memory in Australian Aboriginal Song Performance and the Parry-Kirk Debate: A Cognitive Ethnomusicological Perspective. Ohio State University. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252502040_Oral_memory_in_Australian_Aboriginal_Song_Performance_ and_the_Parry-Kirk_debate_a_cognitive_ethnomusicological_perspective.

PART III

Art Practice as Resistance

CHAPTER 7

Art Practice as Resistance/Defying Forgetting

Increasingly, Indigenous people on this continent are shifting away from the politics of acknowledgement and reconciliation. We need something other than just remembering. We assert our being in ways that continue to weave on, both despite white contact, and without it.1 As Alison Whittaker suggests, remembrance does not adequately reconcile what has happened and continues to happen in colonial landscapes. Simply inserting histories and experiences into a system that has engaged in genocide and systemic abuse can never be adequate. Centuries of voices, calling for recognition, have not supplanted the stories of the heroic empire and the resilient settler. To remember is not enough. Throughout, I have used the term ‘unforgetting’ which attempts to more adequately refer to the deliberate and institutional attempts to minimise and discredit Indigenous histories. To identify and change the mechanisms of forgetting is critical. Many artists recognise that this is a core function of their creative life. In April 2018, I was home in Perth, Whadjuk. As I was walking through the harsh urban city in the heat, I suddenly realised what it had meant to choose to be an artist, that it was an act of resistance against a culture that I did not identify with. I don’t think my experience is unique. The social discontent expressed by artists through their practices 1 Whittaker, A (2017) ‘Acknowledgement’. Overland Journal (Summer). https:// overland.org.au/2017/01/acknowledgement/.

© The Author(s) 2019 K. McMillan, Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17290-9_7

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is endemic in contemporary art. Corrupt governments, a total disregard for climate change, an art market that simply caters for the rich and privileged and a wider society that displays utter indifference to Indigenous and refugee abuse, provide a point of focus for what many artists work against. Every artist explored in this book and the hundreds of other artists I could have discussed are knitted together through a sense of urgency for an alternative future. Most changes arise from acts of defiance. Through resistance, one finds their voice, their story and the sustaining reasons for making art. Growing up in a dysfunctional family, it was not surprising that I was able to quickly identify these qualities in contemporary Australian society. The familial structure, like the carceral island of Wadjemup, is a microcosm for larger concerns. Each artist I have researched can tell a similar story of being able to identify local and national systems of oppression. They are part of a lineage of activists who have resisted the ongoing mechanisms of colonialism and the succession of their lands, as well as the structural challenges this poses in their daily lives. In the last decade, institutions have finally begun supporting the politics of Indigenous artists. Once considered art-world outcasts, their work has been recognised through major exhibitions and commissions. In 2017, Tracey Moffatt was the first Indigenous artist to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale as a solo artist (Lisa Reihana was the third Māori artist to represent Aotearoa/New Zealand). This mood of change includes notable curated exhibitions such as Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia in 2018 curated by Tina Baum; With Secrecy and Despatch at Campbelltown Arts Centre, New South Wales, in 2016 curated by Tess Allas and David Garneau; Sovereignty at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne also in 2016, curated by Paola Balla and Max Delany; and TARNANTHI held annually at the Art Gallery of South Australia. Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Triennial was perhaps the most defining of these exhibitions, marking the 50th anniversary of Indigenous people being awarded the vote. In 1967, this significant milestone did very little to change the conditions for Aboriginal people, but it did amount to an optimism or a hope that progress was a possibility. It is generally celebrated that almost 91% of Australians voted to have the exclusion of Aboriginal peoples lifted from Section 51 of the Constitution in 1967. Yet if the breakdown of the vote is analysed, the racial divide expressed 50 years ago in particular parts of Australia

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reflects contemporary inequalities. In 2017, the Western Australian Museum presented the exhibition Right Wrongs ’67 Referendum—WA 50 years on. It found that ‘while all states, including Western Australia, returned a ‘Yes’ vote, there were varied responses across the nation. WA returned the lowest ‘Yes’ vote at 80.95%. Typically, regional and rural areas recorded higher ‘No’ votes than city areas. Kalgoorlie recorded the highest ‘No’ vote in any electoral division at 29.04%. Across the subdivisions, the highest ‘No’ vote in WA was Murchison (in the division of Kalgoorlie) with 42.6%. In New South Wales and Queensland, there were some areas that saw a ‘No’ vote of over 60%’.2 Yet, this is not the story Australia tells itself. These rights were not easily won and it was Aboriginal people who were at the forefront of shifts in policy and community attitude. Resistance movements have been at the centre of many Aboriginal communities for over a hundred years. From 1937, the Aborigines Progressive Association fought for political and social advancement along with many other individuals and groups throughout the twentieth century. I argue in this chapter that many Aboriginal artists working in Australia during the last three decades can be more closely situated as descendants of this history of protest, rather than the traditionally exclusionary practices of the euro-centric art world. This chapter attempts to draw an arc of history that makes links between these revolutionary protest movements and the work of Aboriginal artists today. Any number of contemporary artists could be examined as part of this—people like Richard Bell, Vernon Ah Kee, Brooke Andrews, Fiona Foley, Destiny Deacon, Brenda Croft, all champions of political protest, have been, in many ways, founding members of this approach to practice. I have chosen to look at the practice of Wiradjuri women Karla Dickens. In the first instance, I had wanted to explore an artist whose work could testify to the multiplicity of oppression and resistance. Karla Dickens epitomises this resistance, and she notes the civil rights movement in Australia as part of her lineage. (Fig. 7.1)3 When most people think about the civil rights movements, the significant and enduring century of struggle in the global south is overshadowed by the celebrated histories of the American Civil Rights 2 Right Wrongs ’67 Referendum—WA 50 years on, see http://museum.wa.gov.au/referendum-1967/referendum-day. Accessed Friday 14 September 2018. 3 In conversation with the author, July 2018.

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Fig. 7.1  Karla Dickens, Looking at You VII, 2017. Inkjet Print, 100 × 100  cm (Photograph courtesy of Karla Dickens and Andrew Baker, Art Dealer, Brisbane)

Movement. Yet, these battles were being played out in countries all over the world. In Australia, during the mid- to late twentieth century, they were being driven by Aboriginal people and their causes were taken up by larger organisations such as the Australian Labour Party, the Communist Party, the Union of Australian Women and various civil liberty and university groups. Many of these organisations protested the treatment of Aboriginal people on the basis of wage discrimination as, particularly in pastoral communities, Aboriginal people were often only

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given food and board, in exchange for their labour. This focus on wage exploitation meant that ‘communist policy now emphasized the exploitation of Aboriginal people as workers’.4 Criticism from the British Anti-Slavery Society, the United Nations and the International Labour Movement saw the Australian Federal Government under increasing international criticism. Ann Curthoys writes that in 1960 at a meeting of the UN General Assembly, Nikita Khrushchev, then leader of the Soviet Union, declared that ‘everyone knows in what way the aboriginal population of Australia was exterminated’.5 The international anti-apartheid movement was also drawing attention to the hypocrisy of white Australian anti-apartheid protestors: not only because of the lack of rights of first nation peoples, but also because of the White Australia policy, which did not end until the Whitlam government passed the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975. Prominent human rights campaigner Jessie Street (1889–1970)—the first female delegate to the establishment of the United Nations—at the time living in London and working for the Anti-Slavery Society, was one of the first to point out that constitutional restrictions were the biggest impediment to Aboriginal equality. In 1956, she moved back to Australia to campaign for constitutional reform. The challenge ahead was substantial; Robert Tickner noted that in 1951, ‘Paul Hasluck (who) became Minister for Territories and thus responsible for Aboriginal policy in the Northern Territory, “could not find any senior officer in Canberra who was personally interested or officially concerned about Aborigines”’.6 The association with the Communist movement, criticism from women’s rights groups and African liberation movements, further branded those advocating for Aboriginal rights as troublemakers. There was significant resistance from the general population too. Henry Reynolds recalls in the 1960s on a speaking tour in Western Queensland where he was trying to garner support for the removal of the White Australia Policy, that the prevailing attitudes in the local papers were that ‘the (adult) Negro is a child and with children nothing can be done without the use of authority and that even though the African had a brain cavity which was 15 cubic centimetres smaller than the average 4 Curthoys,

A (2002) Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers. Allen & Unwin, p. 7. p. 14. 6 Tickner, R (2001) Taking a Stand: Land Rights to Reconciliation. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, p. 7. 5 Ibid.,

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white man’s, they were intellectually far above the Australian full-blood Aboriginal, who was quite unable to cope in competition with the white man and could never become an equal citizen of the country’.7 With substantial parts of the population believing Aboriginal people were fully human, it provides a revealing insight into the psyche of people in areas of Australia that voted No in the 1967 Referendum. This attitude towards Aboriginal people had begun at the moment of invasion in 1788. Australia was regarded as terra nullius, an empty land, bereft of people. Consequently, the right for recognition operated on many levels and parallel to this was the struggle for recognition of Aboriginal nations prior to British Invasion. In the 1960s, there were two key moments that progressed Aboriginal priori—the 1966 Wave Hill walk-off led by Gurindji man Vincent Lingiari and the tabling of the 1963 Yirrkala bark petitions in parliament. Wave Hill had been a cattle station since the late nineteenth century. In 1914, it had been bought by a British conglomerate owned by Baron Vestey (whose descendant is currently a peer and member of the House of Lords). The use of land for cattle meant that waterholes were fouled, and food such as kangaroo was shot so as not to compete with cattle. The delicate ecosystem of the desert was disrupted. People were also routinely dispersed and murdered, not just at Wave Hill, but throughout pastoral Australia. In 1928, the Coniston massacre, located south of Wave Hill, meant that Aboriginal people knew well the consequences of resistance. The Vestey’s were ruthless in their treatment of Aboriginal people under their employ. In 1918, an ordinance was established for the payment of an Aboriginal minimum wage, substantially less than their white counterparts. In 1945, a quarter of a century later, Aboriginal men were entitled to five shillings a day, or 30 shillings for a six-day week, almost a third of the non-Indigenous minimum wage (which was £2.00 a week). Unsurprisingly, pastoralists favoured the cheap labour of Aboriginal stockmen and women, and also because they were far more capable, resilient workers who understood the country better than anyone. Australian explorer Thomas Mitchell wrote about his Indigenous guide, Piper, that ‘in most of our difficulties by flood or field, the intelligence and skill of our sable friends made the “white-fellows” appear

7 Reynolds,

H (2000) Why Weren’t We Told? London: Penguin, p. 45.

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rather stupid. They could read traces of earth, climb trees, or dive into the water, better than the ablest of us. In tracing lost cattle, speaking to “the wild natives”, hunting, or diving, Piper was the most accomplished man in the camp’.8 The falsehood that white settlers fought and civilised the land has been entirely reliant on the exclusion of the pioneering role of Aboriginal people in almost every industry in Australia, from pearling to exploration. The economic success of modern Australia could only have been realised by the free labour provided by the very people whose presence in the land was not even officially recognised. In 1966, almost 200 years since invasion, Vincent Lingiari led a walkoff from Wave Hill where he was employed as a stockman. What had originally begun as a protest about wages turned into an eight-year protest about land rights. Finally, in 1975, Gough Whitlam handed Lingiari the deeds to his land. The iconic photograph by Mervyn Bishop, of Gough pouring sand through Lingiari’s fingers and onto the paper deed, captures this symbolic moment (Fig. 7.2). In far-north Queensland during the same period, the Yirrkala peoples were fighting a similar battle with mining company Nabalco who were extracting minerals from the Gove Peninsula. Leases had been granted to mine bauxite throughout the peninsula, encompassing significant expanses of their traditional lands. The state and federal governments were (and are) heavily reliant on the resource sector for income. Australia, which contained the second largest supply of bauxite in the world (using highly invasive strip-mining, which includes almost all forms of mining except tunnel mining), continued to ignore the importance of country to Aboriginal communities. Twelve signatories were contained on the two beautifully and carefully constructed barks, which were then presented to the Australian Parliament. They included eight points transcribed in Yolngu and English. Four of the eight claims stated that: 1. The procedures of the excision of this land and the fate of the people on it were never explained to them beforehand and were kept secret from them. 2.  When welfare officers and government officials came to inform them of decisions taken without them and against them, they did

8 Mitchell,

T in Reynolds, H (2000) Why Weren’t We Told? London: Penguin, p. 233.

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Fig. 7.2  Photograph of Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and Vincent Lingiari by Mervyn Bishop (Courtesy of Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Commonwealth of Australia)

not undertake to convey to the government in Canberra the views and feelings of the Yirrkala Aboriginal people. 3. The land in question has been hunting and food gathering land for the Yirrkala tribes from time immemorial; we were all born here. 4. Places sacred to the Yirrkala people, as well as vital to their livelihood, are in the excised land, especially Melville Bay (Fig. 7.3).

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Fig. 7.3  Petitions of the Aboriginal people of Yirrkala 14 August and 28 August 1963, Parliament House, Canberra (Photograph courtesy of House of Representatives, Commonwealth Parliament of Australia)

Ultimately, the petition failed, and in 1971, the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, under Justice Richard Blackburn, invoked the notion of terra nullius to invalidate the Yolngu people’s right to native title. Yet, this loss was significant, as it spearheaded the energy required for decades of land rights claims, which were then furthered under the Whitlam government and through the establishment of the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission in 1973. The photographs of Whitlam’s symbolic exchange with Lingiari as he poured the soil from the land he fought over, into his hands, and the carefully and beautifully inscribed bark petitions, belie the power of the image in commemorating the

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Aboriginal civil and land rights movements. Perhaps most powerfully, they signify the patience, generosity and resilience of Aboriginal people against institutions that have, for hundreds of years, tried to undermine them at every turn. It is within the context of these battles that a number of Australian students and human rights activists who, inspired by the American Civil Rights Freedom Rides in 1961, organised a bus ride through regional New South Wales in early 1965. The bus ride focused on three key issues—local laws banning Aboriginal children from swimming in public swimming pools; the ban on Aboriginal servicemen to attend the Return Services League club in the town of Walgett (although this rule applied throughout Australia); and the living conditions of Aboriginal peoples across the country. As the group moved through each town, they encouraged discussion and attempted to confront the racism that was rife in rural areas. In a town called Walgett, a group of 200 or so white men tried to confront the Freedom Riders. The platform they provided for local Aboriginal people could, at times, be transformative. On this day, a number of Aboriginal women came forward and approached the crowd. Charles Perkins records this altercation in his diary. Suddenly a black woman came out of the crowd, followed by a few other Aboriginal women. They called back to most of the vocal white men: ‘Listen! You whites come down to our camp and chase our young girls around at night! You were down there last night. I know you!’ And she called out some names. ‘I saw you last night! It’s no good you tellin’ me how good we treat Aborigines. All you do is chase Aboriginal women in the dark. Why don’t you go back and tell your wives where you’ve been? They’re over there in the crowd! Go on, tell them’. She kept on yelling, ‘Yes, and you! And you! You were there a week ago! You have been going with my sister for two years in the dark! What about tellin’ your wife about her? Tell her about the little baby boy you’ve given her! The crowd dispersed in minutes as a result of this Aboriginal woman’s revelations, and Walgett would never be the same again.9 The 1965 Freedom Ride brought international focus to the cause of Aboriginal people in Australia. The New York Times reported on their reception in regional towns. Charles Perkins, then only 19, would go on to become one of the most important leaders in Australian history.

9 Perkins,

C (1975) A Bastard Like Me. Sydney: Ure Smith Books.

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Within Australia, the ride generated debate in newspapers, church groups and the Aboriginal Welfare Board paid particular attention to the towns they had visited, which had revealed the atrocious conditions and restrictions on Aboriginal people. Ann Curthoys discusses in detail various press reports from Burma to New York, most of which were not so quick to blame benevolent neglect, as the government at the time had claimed. One report in the NY Herald Tribune read ‘Sydney: Smug Australians who like to believe that the colour bar is something applied exclusively by White Americans against Negroes have received a rude awakening’. The Freedom Riders had ‘proved it may not be such a long way from Australia to Alabama as some of their countrymen would like to think’. The Freedom Riders had ‘found reported examples of what the Press has called “Dixie-style” segregation in country areas’.10 In 1992, Charles Perkins, one of the original Freedom Riders, was featured in a documentary made by his daughter Rachel Perkins. Titled Blood Brother, the intent was to ‘restore, in popular form, the history of Aboriginal activism from this key period when Indigenous subjects gained citizenship, voting rights, and visibility as legitimate social actors with claims on the Australia state’.11 These are just some of the histories of protest that Aboriginal artists acknowledge and refer to in their practice. Richard Bell’s infamous Embassy, 2013, was inspired by the 1972 protest that took place on the lawn of Parliament House in Canberra where four men set up an Aboriginal Embassy calling for Land Rights. Constantly restaging the work, Bell covers his military-style canvas tent with protest signs reading: ‘White Invaders You Are Living on Stolen Land’; ‘…Why! Preach Democracy’ and ‘…We Wuz Robbed’. Yet, the work is also an invitation to talk and, in each iteration, includes a series of panels, readings and film screenings. Bell’s raison d’être follows the aesthetic and conceptual tradition of Aboriginal struggle and evidences the strong creativity and connection to Indigenous protest (Fig. 7.4). Bell, whilst being one of the most visible Aboriginal artists, is certainly not alone. Artists have had to use their voice and platform to make new claims, as well as retrieve the voices of their ancestors whose stories 10 Curthoys, A (2002) Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, p. 221. 11 Ginsburg, F & Myers, F (2006) ‘A History of Indigenous Futures: Accounting for Indigenous Art and Media’. Aboriginal History, 30, 95–110, p. 99.

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Fig. 7.4  Richard Bell, Embassy, 2013–present, at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, September 2016 (Image courtesy of the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane)

have not been remembered. Faye Ginsburg and Fred Myers write that ‘the painters, the musicians, the media makers – in short, the cultural activists who are shaping, through their cultural labour, possibilities for Aboriginal futures outside the defining limits of law and policy. Through their cultural production, the Indigenous artists and intellectuals whose work we study and support are creating – in a range of media from dot paintings to feature films – an Indigenous presence for themselves and as a force with which others must reckon’.12 In 2014, the exhibition Hereby Make Protest was presented at Carriageworks in Sydney to honour two important protest movements in Australia: the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (est., 1924) and the Aborigines Progressive Association (est., 1937). This was first time I had encountered Karla Dickens’ practice. Dickens had created a large installation called Assimilated Warriors. The title of which,

12 Ibid.,

p. 97.

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was taken from a speech made to mark the 150-year anniversary of the invasion of Australia. The 1938 speech enshrined the Day of Mourning and the following statement was read by the Aborigines Progressive Association: WE, representing THE ABORIGINES OF AUSTRALIA, assembled in Conference at the Australian Hall, Sydney, on the 26th day of January 1938, this being the 150th Anniversary of the whitemen’s seizure of our country, HEREBY MAKE PROTEST against the callous treatment of our people by the whitemen during the past 150 years, AND WE APPEAL to the Australian Nation of today to make new laws for the education and care of Aborigines, and we ask for a new policy which will raise our people to FULL CITIZEN STATUS and EQUALITY WITHIN THE COMMUNITY Resolution, 26 January, 1938

This speech highlights one of the most powerful moments in more than a century of protest in Australia. Hundreds of Aboriginal, and also non-Aboriginal people, assembled together in Sydney to petition the Australian nation to provide care, education and opportunity for Aboriginal people. The human rights movement in Australia, almost completely absent from mainstream consciousness, was in fact part of a global, organised and enduring petition for self-governance. Aboriginal people, despite all their obstacles, a relatively tiny population and limited access to education and other basic rights, had developed networks around the world to advocate for a future for their people. One of the most poignant examples of this global spirit is that, not even 100 metres from my current London office on the Strand, Anthony Martin Fernando famously sat outside the Australian Embassy in London in 1928 wearing a cloak covered in small skeletons with a sign saying, ‘this is all Australia has left of my people’. Fernando sat there for three years. Yet, like so much of Australia’s early history of resistance, there are no known photographs of this powerful protest. I ask, where are these stories and why aren’t they celebrated? It is left to first nation peoples to insist on their remembrance. There are thousands of stories of resilience from across the country, many of which are now being retold by artists. Resistance began in the place that is now called New South Wales. It was home to 70 different Aboriginal languages: only ten of which survive today well enough to function in everyday parlance. As the first site of invasion, the experiences of these first nation peoples testify to the brutality

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of the invaders and the legacy of this today. It is not surprising then that the most powerful and impactful activist organisations emerged from here, and the people of the Eora nation, where the city of Sydney was established. Some of the most well-known Aboriginal figures from history, such as Woollarawarre Bennelong (c. 1764–1813) and Colebee (c. 1770–1806), leader of the Cadigal people, come from the Eora nation, as do many of the first nation words that have become part of the English Australian vernacular such as ‘dingo’, ‘boomerang’ and ‘wallaby’. Yet, most of the spoken language—Dharuk—has been lost. David Collins, an early settler, described the language as ‘extremely grateful to the ear, being in many instances expressive and sonorous’.13 And this is something we know and can hear, as in 1793 Colebee (also the first Aboriginal person to hold a land grant) and Bennelong performed a love song in a London townhouse in Berkeley Square which was recorded and can still be heard.14 In coming across these moments of connectedness and the residue of early encounters, I like to imagine a songline that stretches beyond the shores of the Eora nation, to the other side of the world, and then back again. It is no doubt that these early encounters in London would have also had a significant and long remembered impact on the Europeans who witnessed them. The creative act has always been part of the defiance against erasure and has been used as a bridge to reconciliation by Aboriginal peoples. For twelve years after the arrival of the British invaders, Pemulwuy (c. 1750–1802), was based in the area now known as Botany Bay. He waged a war of resistance, largely through crop burning and killing livestock and was finally shot in 1802. It is believed that his remains, in particular, his head, were shipped back to England with Sir Joseph Banks.15 They were never found. There are countless examples of Aboriginal Warriors whose remains were displaced around the world. The destruction of culture became a form of scientific curiosity. In Western Australia, the remains of Nyoongar elder Yagan (1795–1833) were held in the Liverpool Museum until 1997, and the severed head of Bunuba man Jandamarra (1870– 1897), from the Kimberley, was allegedly shipped to Britain (but has never 13 Collins, D (1798) An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales. London: T. Cadell, W. Davies. 14 The song can be heard here http://nationalunitygovernment.org/content/ bennelong-and-yemmerrawanyea-singing-england. 15 Zeppel, H (1999) ‘Who Were Bennelong and Pemulwuy? Museums in Sydney and Interpretation of Eora Aboriginal Culture’. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 5 (3–4).

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been found). Despite the many stories of resistance, there continues to be an assumption in settler Australia that Aboriginal cultures were passive and lacking in character, thus unable to counter and fight against the ‘civilising’ forces of the British. Quite the contrary was true, the frontier wars, which lasted well over 100 years in various parts of Australia, involved strategic battles wherever the British tried to claim more land. It was these battles that provided the foundations for twentieth-century forms of activism. It wasn’t just men who resisted the British presence. Along the Derbarl Yerrigan/Swan River in what is now Perth lived a Whadjuk Nyoongar woman called Fanny Balbuk (1840–1907). The fledgling Swan River Colony was daily under siege from Balbuk as she refused to alter her songlines—often meaning she stormed straight through the rooms of people’s homes which had interrupted her path. Her grandmother had been buried on what would become the site for Government House. Daisy Bates recorded that her ‘favourite annoyance was to stand at the gates of Government House, reviling all who dwelt within. To the end of her life she raged and stormed at the usurping of her beloved home ground. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms’.16 Imagining her presence is also to recognise the loss of ecological memory of this landscape, now an urban city centre, but one that was full of dense swampland providing sustenance and a framework for an ancient culture. Ninety years later, Karla Dickens continues the tradition of resistance and storytelling through her objects. Assimilated Warriors is a complex reference to the struggle to operate within a system that does not recognise Aboriginal sovereignty. Each sculpture is made from the meshed mask of a sword fighter, concealing and protecting the eyes from the opponent. The surfaces are stitched and embroidered in elaborate ornamentation. They are beautiful, cared for things, reminiscent of a sacred ceremonial item. Installed on dark wall, under dim lighting, each object carries a weight of seriousness and intent—a memento mori from the fallen soldiers of Australia’s frontier wars (Fig. 7.5).

16 Bates, D (1966) The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray, p. 60. For more on Fanny Balbuk life, see http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1038.

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Fig. 7.5  Karla Dickens, Assimilated Warriors, 2014 (Photograph courtesy of Karla Dickens and Andrew Baker, Art Dealer, Brisbane)

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In 2013, Dickens was awarded the prestigious Parliament of New South Wales Aboriginal Art Prize. The award brought attention from insidious social commentator Andrew Bolt, whose divisive and reductive politics have plagued Australia for a generation. Because of his comments, Dickens was trolled by right-wing fascists. It was at this point that she realised that her work could have real impact, that her art was her voice and it had resonance. This call to arms is evident in the poem she wrote for Assimilated Warriors. Smart as a fox quick as a whippet Wise man works like a dog Dressed to the nines tools of the trade Clean-cut armed with words Frocked-up flesh suits of armour clever man power hung dry Swinging by meat-hooks branded like cattle Social dress civilised Never knowing behind doors

Karla Dickens emerges from a national history of resistance and strength, able to outdo the coloniser and to adapt to the oppressive forces of invasion. Born in the year that first nation people were given permission to vote in Australia, her destiny to fight for Indigenous justice seems foretold. Her works function as memory objects, remembering this long struggle marked by futility and incremental change. Each sculpture is a reminder of what has come to pass, and what has not changed, for Aboriginal women in particular. Dickens’ identity is intersectional, and each aspect of her gender, sexuality and race contributes to her complex works.

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Like a bower bird, she picks through the remains of the local rubbish tip. At first, a cost-effective means to source materials after she graduated from the National Art School in Sydney, but increasingly a recognition that the present is littered with the residue of history. Her studio and home, a cabinet of curiosities, is a memory palace to the past and present. This mnemonic system constructed by Dickens allows her to assert sovereignty over what is remembered and what is not. The complexity of Dickens’ intellectual oeuvre is often played out through a practice of poetry. The appropriation of white man’s language to knit together the chaotic and contradictory elements of contemporary identity and experience become linguistic mirrors to her sculptural works. She uses the process of writing to help articulate the intent of each piece as its developing, as well writing about the work once it is completed. When I asked her about her process, she simply emailed me a poem: My process feels like a flu you slowly come down with it Everything hurts then it hits you hard All you can do is - ride it out Once you get back on your feet You feel like a new person17

Her short and intense text, loaded with energy and nuance, is not dissimilar to her artworks. The punchiness of it seems to be held together by a fragility of a constantly performing resilience and resistance. Her poem Wounded Warriors from 2016 also highlights this tension between strength and exhaustion. WOUNDED WARRIORS There are many wounds some as deep as the cliffs were high when the natives were rounded up and pushed to their ends some as toxic as the poisons to die for

17 via

personal correspondence with Dickens, August 2018.

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finely-laced gifts to warm and feed Scars lingering from the past few have healed some still-open sores weeping when poked by another black death in custody maybe just ‘that’ look black-faced drunks on Australia Day The wounded still fight reaching deep for a voice speaking with never-heard tears which feed the soil limping to the next battle supported by a crutch or stick Standing proud

In coming to understand Dickens’ work, the poetry provides a portal into her thinking. Rarely forming part of the work itself, lines from the poems often become titles and occasionally inscriptions on objects. Language weights the objects down even further—conjuring the sense of despair that drags the body, back into trauma. To emerge at the end of the poem is to gasp for breath. That these stories are finding themselves inside institutions supported and celebrated as vital voices of today is extraordinary and optimistic. Dickens is well aware of the privileged platform she has found herself in. The museum has served as a depot for the hierarchies of memory, collecting what has been deemed significant and worth remembering. For first nation artists, these methodologies are suspicious, since collecting practices are situated in a violent ethnographic approach that sought out human remains and the thievery of precious cultural artefacts. Placing such difficult stories of oppression, told through collected objects, displayed within museum frameworks, feels uneasy. Yet, this is a gift from Dickens—the act of trust that despite everything, the storytelling is being shared, and the objects are being entrusted to us. My heart feels heavy thinking about this. But first and foremost, collecting and making is what drives Dickens. She is compelled to heal through her work. Making, owning, collecting, hoarding, it is what one might do when so much else has been stolen.

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This ‘archival impulse’, a term coined by Hal Foster, arises from a place of no control and a justifiable paranoia of the memories of what has been taken.18 Dickens’ earlier life is reflective of this—a troubled youth marred by homelessness and drug addiction. Her objects saved her, a life raft full of the detritus of human existence, from which she has cobbled together her own story. Over many decades, Dickens has grown this narrative of collecting into a powerful account of resistance and creativity. Dickens herself performs what Diana Taylor argues is a form of ‘cultural memory which, among other things, is a practice, an act of imagination and interconnection’.19 For Taylor, and also for Dickens, the act of collecting and remembering becomes as important as archival documents. In this sense, the processes of archiving takes on the role of ‘activist remembering’ and the ‘body functions as a site of convergence, binding the individual with the collective, the private with the social, the diachronic and the synchronic, memory and knowledge’.20 The artist’s body is a storehouse of knowledge and a memory archive. An ongoing theme in Dickens’ work is the mask. One of the earliest forms of human personification, it has also been appropriated by Europeans throughout the last century in Western art. Dickens takes back ownership of this iconography. In her hands, the materials are transformed into sculptures more akin to warfare, disguise and trickery. They are menacing and urgent, sometimes morphing into hoods. The trans-cultural nature of the mask underlines the ambiguity and fluidity of contemporary bodies. Activists from across the political spectrum have also used them to conceal their identities. Like all the materials Dickens selects, they are pregnant with meaning. In the 2014 Tarrawarra Biennale titled Whisper in My Mask curated by Natalie King and Djon Mundine, Dickens produced a series of five masks titled Guardians (Fig. 7.6). To create this work, Dickens collaborated with a group of people suffering from homelessness in northern New South Wales. They were connected through a soup kitchen located at a pub called the Winsome Hotel. At the time, Dickens had been thinking not just about homelessness, but also about notions of home and how the introduction of 18 Foster,

H (2004) ‘An Archival Impulse.’ October 110, 3–22. D (2003) Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 82. 20 Ibid. 19 Taylor,

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Fig. 7.6  Karla Dickens, Guardians, 2014 (Photograph courtesy of Karla Dickens and Andrew Baker, Art Dealer, Brisbane)

alcohol had destroyed this for so many Aboriginal people. For her, this community, threaded together through a soup kitchen, became a nest, a safe place where people could eat and gather. Dickens arranged for a series of workshops where each person could construct their own mask. Displayed on their own, the masks appear frightening and aggressive—yet held up by their makers, they also become camouflage to assist with the vulnerable experience of homelessness. The duplicity of the final, slightly terrifying mask and its starting point as a nest is indicative of the internal conflicts explored through Dickens’ works.

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Dickens was born into a generation of artists who had already forged links between their creative practice and the fight for Aboriginal justice and opportunity. The Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Collective was formed in Sydney in 1987, just as Dickens was emerging into adulthood. Now more than thirty years strong, it is the longest surviving Aboriginal arts collective in Australia. The founders understood the power of cultural practice to fight oppression, existing at a time that Aboriginal art was becoming highly prized on the international art market. 15% of artists in Australia are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders, and it remains one of the most likely ways to overcome the alarming conditions for Aboriginal peoples in Australia today.21 Yet, for most of the 1980s and 1990s, it was the highly prized desert paintings of Papunya Tula and Western Desert artists who emerged into the international stage—who Ian McLean calls the ‘remote masters’.22 It has only been relatively recently that Indigenous artists working in the tradition of Dickens have found international opportunities and audiences. Boomalli did much of the work in laying the foundations for artists working today. Founding artists included Brenda L. Croft, Tracey Moffatt and Fiona Foley—women who powerfully articulated the institutional racism that permeated through the art world, museum and education sectors and have gone on to become leading artists, curators and academics across the country. In addition to providing economic opportunities for their artists, Boomalli recognised the role of culture in leveraging social and political justice. In a statement on the role of Boomalli, member artist Bronwyn Bancroft says: we remember those who went to war, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, and hold those memories close to us. Let us not forget the struggle of NSW Aboriginal people in their own lands – first the fight for survival against the voracious appetite of new lords of the so-called ‘empty lands’ and their vicious henchmen, then the continuing struggle to eke out an existence on patches of land deemed not suitable for non-Aboriginal but fine for the original peoples. Coupled with the brutal banning of the use of languages and cultural activities and conscription to domestic servitude.23 21 Statistic from Australia Council for the Arts. http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/ workspace/uploads/files/arts-nation-final-27-feb-54f5f492882da.pdf. Accessed 10 August 2018. 22 McLean, I (2016) Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art. London: Reaktion Books, Chapter 6, pp. 147–207. 23 Bancroft, B (2011) https://www.boomalli.com.au/about-1/. Accessed 10 August 2018.

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Thus, the context of claiming a creative space in inner city Sydney, to show and support Aboriginal artists, can be understood as part of the history of resistance since 1788. Moving from the periphery and artist-led groups such as Boomalli, first nation artists are now situating themselves at the centre of cultural institutions. In 2018, Indigenous artist Brooke Andrews was appointed Artistic Director for the 2019 Sydney Biennale, providing an opportunity to centralise the stories and experiences of Indigenous artists. Therefore, not only are the artists being represented shaping the cultural landscape, but the conversations around contemporary art are shifting significantly. Perhaps, this is most clearly articulated in the seven themes Defying Empire curator Tina Baum developed for the National Indigenous Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia—Asserting Presence; Bearing Witness; Defying Empire; Disrupting Invisibility; Forever Memory; Recounting and Revival; Resistance and Refusal; and Rising Passion. Defying Empire included the work of thirty Indigenous artists whose works directly connect with the attitudes of resistance. Presented in the 50th year since the 1967 Referendum, the exhibition commemorated and recognised the role of artists as warriors in the fight for equality. The curatorial framework implicitly recognised that protest is part of Indigenous inheritance and legacy. Karla Dickens’ work Assimilated Warriors was included in the exhibition. She writes: To protest as an individual, art is my voice—yet walking and standing alongside others smooths the powerlessness. There is a power in asserting objection shoulderto-shoulder—and disapproval of the obvious injustices, pains and truths of the unheard. It is an action that holds the hope that once a story is told, a change in the unacceptable will be born and grow. I’m not a politician; I’m an artist, a storyteller. With my art, I talk about my personal experiences. I don’t set out to make political statements. I am political, simply because I am who I am—a single mother, a lesbian, a first Australian. I am at a point in my life where I have a hell of a lot to say. Art is my voice—art is how I protest.24 It is possible to believe that in the face of all the world’s problems— that the persistence and the spirit expressed by first nation artists could

24 Dickens, K (2017) ‘Artist Statement’. Defying Empire, National Gallery of Australia. https://nga.gov.au/defyingempire/artists.cfm?artistirn=18896.

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be the methodology of resistance we all require as we fight to transform global futures.

Bibliography Bancroft, B (2011) https://www.boomalli.com.au/about-1/. Accessed 10 August 2018. Bates, D (1966) The Passing of the Aborigines: A Lifetime Spent Among the Natives of Australia. London: John Murray. Collins, D (1798) An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales. London: T. Cadell, W. Davies. Curthoys, A (2002) Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Dickens, K (2017) Artist Statement. Defying Empire, National Gallery of Australia. https://nga.gov.au/defyingempire/artists.cfm?artistirn=18896. Foster, H (2004) ‘An Archival Impulse.’ October 110, 3–22. Ginsburg, F & Myers, F (2006) ‘A History of Indigenous Futures: Accounting for Indigenous Art and Media’. Aboriginal History, 30, 95–110. McLean, I (2016) Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art. London: Reaktion Books. Perkins, C (1975) A Bastard Like Me. Sydney: Ure Smith Books. Reynolds, H (2000) Why Weren’t We Told? London: Penguin. Taylor, D (2003) Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. Tickner, R (2001) Taking a Stand: Land Rights to Reconciliation. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Whittaker, A (2017) ‘Acknowledgement’. Overland Journal (Summer). https:// overland.org.au/2017/01/acknowledgement/. Zeppel, H (1999) ‘Who Were Bennelong and Pemulwuy? Museums in Sydney and Interpretation of Eora Aboriginal Culture’. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 5 (3–4), 182–187.

CHAPTER 8

Listening as Practice: Methodologies in Settler Societies

Nungarrayi, to use her Warlpiro title, described the catalogue of sounds which are encoded as far more extensive than just the call of birds and other animals. For example, she described the way her people were able to identify trees and bushes and grasses by the sound in a breeze. I found this hard to believe, but was assured that if I gave it a try I would discover that it was possible. That afternoon I sat in the bush and listened. What I would have described as silence, on a day with very little wind, was anything but. I became aware of the bird sounds fairly quickly, but before long I became of the sounds of the plants. The eucalypt to my left, the acacias in front and the grasses to the right all made distinctly different sounds.1 Lynne Kelly describes a practising of learning from listening, something that first nation cultures have been practising for many thousands of years. This chapter seeks to build on this and articulate an ethical practice of listening to histories that have been left unheard and overlooked. It arises from a decade of sound research and collaboration in my own practice and broader discussions on recognition of first nation injustices. More recently, it has been inspired by increasingly urgent changes in the Anthropocene. These ideas pay tribute to the important research undertaken on the recording of oral histories in the global south, to both preserve and learn stories that have been and are being destroyed. 1 Kelly, L (2016) The Memory Code: Unlocking the Secrets of the Lives of the Ancients and the Power of the Human Mind. London: Atlantic Books, p. 13.

© The Author(s) 2019 K. McMillan, Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17290-9_8

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The approach I propose here privileges the non-written and the nonvisual and underscores the vital challenge of listening to the quiet voices of place and people. Non-Western societies, un-burdened by the printing press and the visual-centric perspectives this engenders, have instead privileged sound through oral/aural communication and knowledge production.2 Elsewhere, sound as knowledge has been suspect, despite the tacit knowledge of sounds that scientists and knowledge makers rely on. Karin Bijsterveld writes that during scientific excavation work into the presence of a vast underwater ocean in the earth’s deep layers, ‘geologists knew they had in fact found water when they sent sound waves deep into the earth’ but journalists and reporters wrote that ‘their findings had not been proven, because the phenomenon had not been seen’.3 Bijsterveld argues that listening is in fact deeply embedded into specialised knowledges through sonic skills and sensory practices. Whilst Bijsterveld is speaking specifically about the sciences, I argue that developing a language around how artists listen, not only reflects what artists always actually do, but most importantly, how we can think about future-making. These ideas began to emerge via my collaborations with composer, Cat Hope.4 Cat has first and foremost taught me to listen. My most compelling memory of this was sitting in the Ludlow Tuart Forest in Western Australia in early 2010, the site of the Wonnerup Massacre and listening to the forest. Initially, we could hear the wind, birds and leaves rustling, and after a few minutes, we were able to hear distant cars and even planes. We then noticed how sounds were operating tonally very differently to each other, and also the gaps between sounds and their frequencies became apparent. After days of doing this, I came to really know the forest. It is probably the most ‘in place’ I had ever been up to this point. It reminded me of the ‘deep reading’ I do with students to teach them how to look closely at an artwork. Cat and I grew up in the historically conservative City of Perth, Western Australia. The sounds of this regional location, on the edge of 2 Bailey, P (1996) ‘Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise’. Body & Society, 2 (2), 49–66. 3 Bijsterveld, K (2019) Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s–present). Palgrave Macmillan, p. 2. 4 For information on Cat Hope’s practice as a composer, musician and academic, see http://www.cathope.com/.

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Western Australia, developed in us a resistance to mainstream noise and an interest in Indigenous and feminist justice for most of our careers. It has been the quiet voices that we’ve both worked hard to hear. In this chapter, I discuss in detail projects that Cat and I have worked on since 2008. This decade of working together and increasingly the significance of sound in my own practice has helped me to develop a theory I describe here as listening with our feet. For a number of reasons, I frame listening with our feet within a gendered narrative of remembering—firstly, as a result of thinking in my own practice and then through observing and discussing how other artists work, such as Megan Cope who I discuss herein. It is also part of a counter to the national narrative of myth-making which has privileged the male voice in the frontier colonies of the global south. Like cultural memory theorist, Maureen Moynagh states, I also ‘want to ask what it would mean to stage an act of cultural memory in which unjust sexual power is indeed attributed to the nation and where the identity at stake is both national and diasporic’.5 I want to name and identify a different sound, and an empathic and gentle way of engaging with place and people. As I have argued throughout, the artists in this book work in particular ways, often engaging with ideas that can be understood through ‘listening with our feet’. First nation cultures have almost always approached the world in these ways, not just within frameworks of cultural production, but in broader engagements with place and knowledge. Developing listening with our feet acknowledges that white settlers and those living outside settler societies have much to learn from ancient cultures and that these ideas can provide instructions for better futures. First nation cultures are global and ancient and have ownership over the first ecological movements in human history. Bill Gammage writes that in Australia prior to invasion ‘there was no wilderness. The Law – an ecological philosophy enforced by religious sanction – compelled people to care for all their country. People lived and died to ensure this’.6 I argue that to

5 Moynagh, M (2002) ‘This History’s Only Good for Anger: Gender and Cultural Memory in Beatrice Chancy’. Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (Autumn, 1), 97. 6 Gammage, B (2011) The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. London: Allen & Unwin, p. 2.

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not embrace methods of listening is to perpetuate colonial engagement with place that presupposes superior knowledge, ignores the needs of country and people and seeks to supplant existing ecosystems with ideas unfit for purpose. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that we have less than twelve years to react; yet, governments and international agencies drag their feet and insist on setting goals that are catastrophically limiting.7 Could creative work offer strategies for being in the world? The mindful act of listening brings both artist and viewer in closer contact with the experiences and histories that the work is pointing to. In my work, the visual and audible oscillate—heightening meaning and the experiential aspects of knowledge formation. Pioneering sound researcher Raymond Murray Schafer distinguished between an ‘outward looking eye’ and an ‘inward looking ear’.8 Thus, the visual is founded on objectification and distance, and the audible on closeness and proximity. In Salome Voegelin’s Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a philosophy of sound art, she observes that: Seeing is believing. The visual ‘gap’ nourishes the idea of structural certainty and the notion that we can truly understand things, give them names, and define ourselves in relation to those names as stable subjects, as identities … By contrast, hearing is full of doubt: phenomenological doubt of the listener about the heard and himself hearing it. Hearing does not offer a meta-position; there is no place where I am not simultaneous with the heard. However far its source, the sound sits in my ear. I cannot hear it if I am not immersed in its auditory object, which is not its source but sound as sound itself. Consequently, a philosophy of sound art must have at its core the principle of sharing time and space with the object or event under consideration.9 Voegelin suggests that sound is inescapable, that it is in place, no matter where we stand in relation to it. Applying this idea to a colonial context suggests the possibility of Gibson’s ‘badland’s’ singing to us— that all these stories could rise up regardless of how far away we position ourselves from them. The echoes trickle in and nuzzle into our bodies 7 To

download the full report, see http://www.ipcc.ch/. Accessed 29 October 2018. RM (1994/1977) The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books. 9 Voegelin, S (2010) Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 7. 8 Schafer,

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and auditory spaces, sometimes unconsciously. Our body is responding even when our mind is not. What is the land saying to us? What are our instructions? Cat Hope first inspired me to think about sound in this way. In particular, her research on low frequency and sub-audible sound. During sound recordings in various landscapes, Cat would always focus on the things we could barely hear. Only through being completely silent could we record these frequencies. This is an apt way to think about how colonial invaders refused to listen to place in the first instance. But also what was then forgotten. The unconscious reverberations of forgotten histories that exist in colonial landscapes have effect. Silencing these histories requires a heightened level of ‘white noise’ to counter the echoes of the past. The silencing and the countering of these cries from the past create internal and social conflicts. We become enmeshed and embodied in the sounds of colonial nation states. To listen, to refuse to contribute to the white noise is therefore a political action. However, the pervasiveness of sound is the very thing that gives it its power. Its qualities—leaky, sub-audible at times, reverberating through the body—mock the one-dimensionality and limitations of the image. Despite the colonial project, the aural songs of pre-colonial times persist. Once you’ve made time to listen, it is hard to shake off a sound—once it’s found its way into you. There is a magic in that. The shared space that sound occupies also speaks to ideas of collaboration, communication and exchange—all ways to discover new perspectives and interpretations. We listen to place, we listen to others, and we both make and hear sound; it is democratic. One of the fabulous things about collaborating with musicians is that they work together, compromise and share. It reminds me of what cultural ethnographer Martin Forsey calls ‘seeing voices’. He writes that we must ‘advocate a democracy of the senses’, and that researchers often report findings ‘as the “seen” (when) in fact observations (are) of people conversing, singing, listening, speechmaking – noise-making’.10 Perhaps then, we have always been listening, but we have not consciously done so. Or, perhaps most importantly, the sounds we have heard have not shaped our actions.

10 Forsey, M (2010) ‘Ethnography as Participant Listening’. Ethnography, 11 (4), 558–572 (Sage).

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Part of the shift in my practice is to let the sound alter what I look at, literally and conceptually. In the installation lost (2008), Hope composed a piece from the residual sounds of the landscape of Lake Tarawera, where the images from the work arose. The project excavated a site from my father’s childhood memories in New Zealand that I visited for the first time shortly after he died. The lake endured a devastating night-time volcanic eruption in the nineteenth century, simultaneously burying the Māori villages around the lake and preserving them forever. I had hoped to stand in the place and hear something of his childhood, of him. But instead I could only feel the dark; the heavy missing-ness of his absence. The sound came not from outside, but from the pit of my stomach. At the time, Hope and I had been discussing her interest in volcanoes as a source of natural infrasound. Our mutual interest, the correlation between low frequency, barely audible sound and the hidden stories contained within the conceptual framework of the installation created a harmonious link in the collaboration. Hope argued that the composition seems static, but is reinterpreted as it moves through time. McMillan described her contribution to lost as being ‘about simultaneously losing memories and trying to preserve them’ (Barlow, 2008). The music reflects this duality in its hidden detail—music moves through time in a way that photography cannot, yet the music in lost aims for the timelessness of the photography it shares the space with. The inability to define the sound sources in the room, the blurring of layers and the continuous full texture of the music are all attempts at this effect. By complicating and burying any melody, rhythm and harmony in the composition through the processes of looping, time stretching, missing and tuning down, the final result is more of an ongoing ‘rumble’ than any audible musical structure that may carry it forward for a listener. Rather, the music moves through the three-dimensional space in a more conscious way, making the body implicit in the listening act. At times the layering can create an effect where some sounds seem to come from elsewhere. Listening to lost means sensing the sound in the space as well as hearing it, and the musical detail is revealed with focused listening. The photographic image is printed onto fabric that lines a room, yet the sound fills this same room (Fig. 8.1).11 Audiences noted that it was difficult to spend too much time in the installation. Even for me, it was akin to being in a tomb or the viewing

11 Hope,

C (2010) Doctoral Thesis, RMIT.

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Fig. 8.1  Kate McMillan, lost, 2008 John Curtin Gallery, digital print on polysynthetic fabric, sound (Courtesy of the author)

room of a funeral home. The sound created a vacuum in the space, and the longer you spent with it, the more tricks the sound began to play. Was that a bird? Which direction did that sound come from? Like the experience of standing on the edge of Lake Tarawera trying to channel my dead father, all I could feel in the exhibition was the sound in my stomach, heavy like a stone. The process of collecting, retrieving and listening in lost, and subsequent collaborations with Hope, has heightened my perception of the aural, as well as how the residue of history in the landscape may be heard. A process that began as simply adding an audio component has developed into a vital methodology for contextualising the critical conceptual messages in the work. It is the act of listening, rather than the sound itself, which has become the single most important feature of the audible process. Listening becomes the communication—an awareness of being in the work (and the landscape) and what it offers and shares, as well as a slowing down and engaging with the philosophical ideas in the

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artwork itself. The collaboration with Hope has therefore extended the breadth of communication through channels other than the visual. During the process of teasing the ideas in the work out, we also consciously developed strategies in the making that paralleled our concerns. Hope reflects on this in her doctoral thesis: McMillan’s articulation of the hidden histories of the land and its people aligned well with my interest in the ability of infrasound to create a form of hidden music. In lost, the low frequency effects are incorporated into the very musical fabric of the work, transforming the music into a physical realm through the movement of air and playing a key role in the musical composition as well as the constructed environment. 12 The sound and image for our collaborations in both 2008 and Islands of Incarceration in 2010 were captured, and then, the sound was reworked using various electronic collage techniques, the inclusion of instruments and improvisation, and then notated through Hope’s graphic scores. In the sound for lost, Hope included the recordings of twenty individual base guitars and then re-built the soundscape in layers. This ensured that previous residues were built-in and played a role in the formation of the sound. The frequency range was mostly without a recognisable tonal pitch. The final sound, muffled but also amplified through the construction of a sound-proofed space, created an unnerving background rumbling that, whilst immediately inert and subtle, built up over a short time, making it uncomfortable to stay in the space for longer than ten minutes. Curator and writer Geraldine Barlow wrote the accompanying catalogue essay for lost. She notes that: The sound is structured in multiple layers, some initially drawn from the bass guitar and stretched to a length of 23 minutes, as well as down so low as to be at the limits of the human auditory range and below—another underworld. At one point I hear the high craw of the crow and can’t decide whether this is in the work or my mind. The gallery is so sound proofed and buffered as to seem deep within the earth. This inner chamber has been carefully constructed so as to be close to acoustically ‘dead’. It is strangely like a crypt, this room of sheer curtains imprinted with the image of a sunlit island on a lake.13

12 Ibid.,

p. 58. G (2008) Lost (Exhibition Catalogue), p. 6.

13 Barlow,

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One of the outcomes of lost was in understanding the importance of the environment that the work was viewed in, as well as the fundamental role of the sound in framing the reading of the work. Brandon Labelle argues that ‘the background often contains the very substance by which the foreground gains significance…(and) embodies the weight and potential of surroundings, registering spatially the movements between signal and sign, ambiguity and clarity, shadow and its ultimate appearance’.14 Thus, there is a parallel discourse in how the sound operates physically, and the information and knowledge the work seeks to uncover. An outcome of the collaboration for lost was the post-work observation—that silence and silencing would become much more symbolic in subsequent works. The next project that Hope and I developed together was Islands of Incarceration for the 2010 Biennale of Sydney. This work excavated the history of the Tuart Ludlow Massacre where up to a thousand Wardandi Nyoongar people were killed in the south-west of Western Australia between 1841 and 1846. The sound for this work was collected from the forest area itself where the massacres took place. The forest is substantially below the water level of the nearby ocean; the experience of being there is of being ‘low down’. It sounds odd, but something invisible provides resistance as if you are wading through thick air. The Tuart trees also create a sense of foreboding. They regularly lose their limbs without warning, colloquially giving them the name of ‘widow maker’. The forest is so dark that very little grows beneath the trees except the introduced Arum Lilies (known locally as Death Lilies) in the springtime. Over the course of three days, the sound was collected through a process of quietly sitting, listening and recording. The silence encouraged a feeling of being present in the environment and of listening and noticing what was there. Even more than photographing the area, the sound recording allowed our presence to sink away and for the forest to overwhelm us. At first, it seemed we were in a silent forest but as we listened, it became clear that we were immersed within a noisy and busy ecosystem of birds, insects and plants. Thus, when I recall what I know from this forest, I remember listening to it, not seeing it. The audible was where the knowledge of place was gained. 14 LaBelle, B (2006) Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London: Bloomsbury Press, p. 18.

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This way of engaging, as well as being deeply embedded in Indigenous knowledges, also finds connections in Western sound art history. In speaking about his compositions, John Cage noted that, ‘all I am doing is directing attention to the sounds of the environment’.15 The impact that Cage had on the use of sound in art continues to manifest. Cage’s silent composition from 1952 4′33″ imbued the sounds of the audience and architecture into the work, embracing listening as a means of production for both the audience and the artist. Gemma Corradi Fiumara whose writing on listening was deeply influenced by Cage’s expanded field of practice wrote that ‘a philosophy of listening can be envisaged as an attempt to recover the neglected and perhaps deeper roots of what we call thinking’.16 For Fiumara, Cage’s practice enabled a shift from the favouring of speech in Western philosophy, towards an ethical position that embraces openness. Islands of Incarceration acknowledges a debt to Cage in the way he incorporated sounds from the environment and considered audience participation. In post-production, the low-frequency sounds recorded in the forest were pulled out and run through a sub-woofer in the final installation. The sub-woofer was placed underneath the timber drying shed floor at Cockatoo Island so that it emanated upwards and around the work. It sounded like distant thunder, rumbling towards us, creating a sense of unease and expectation, despite the visual beauty of the veil. Many viewers did not notice the sound, either because the space was filled with the noise of people talking, or the weather conditions on the island. This also provided for an accidental reading of the work when the sound was not heard, connecting with the overlooked histories that the work explored (Fig. 8.2). In the exposed space of the drying shed on Cockatoo Island, the sound could escape. The capacity for it to be free, to change and to engage with chance and the changing location was an important quality of how the sound was experienced. Many people noted a feeling of release—that the stories in the work were being lifted by the wind in the curtain and carried forward.

15 Cage, J (2010) Silences, Lectures and Writing. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, p. 109. 16 Fiumara, GC (1995) The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London: Routledge, p. 13.

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Fig. 8.2  Kate McMillan (detail) Islands of Incarceration, 2010 Biennale of Sydney, digital print on polysynthetic fabric, sound (Courtesy of the author)

Four years later, we produced The Moment of Disappearance. Two years in development, we were able to consider the sound component in a way not achieved before. The sound became the most critical element, situating the overall reading of the work and the themes of loss, disappearance, forgetting and the obscuring of history. The final work manifested as a five-screen video installation, with sound as well as live performances of the score during the exhibition duration. Hope and I developed the concept for the composition, and then, she wrote a graphic score. The final piece was played by the London Improvisers Orchestra and recorded at the Rivoli Ballroom in South London.17 The LIO was initially briefed about the work, and then, within the confines of the graphic score, the musicians were able to make their own 17 The graphic score can be viewed here. http://www.cathope.com/moments-of-dissappearance-2013.html.

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responses to the ideas in the work. The score focused on the potential of low frequency and sustained sound. The musicians were asked to play their instruments quietly for much of the piece and at times were instructed to use un-voiced or un-pitched sounds, which simply meant that they could only use the sound of their breath through the instruments. For example, even though there were four saxophonists, it is almost impossible to locate the sound of a saxophone. In addition to standard instruments, the orchestra included three object players (Steve Beresford, Adam Bohman and Lukax Santana) who emerge from a tradition of percussion, and fashion their own handmade objects. The piece begins with Sylvia Hallett playing the spokes of a bicycle wheel using a violin bow. The sculptural qualities of their instruments have led to recent developments in my sculptural works, whereby the object functions as sculpture/film prop and instrument.18 As the piece for The Moment of Disappearance was rehearsed, we were able to make further suggestions and requests to the musicians. Many of these directives were based on which instruments the musicians brought to the recording. Over the course of a day—numerous rehearsals and a recording—the seventeen-minute work was completed. Importantly, through the inclusion of improvisation, the aspects of chance, interpretation and play were opened up beyond my and Cat’s creative control. The development of sound with musicians and a score for this work differed from previous projects where sound has been gathered from the site to which the work refers. Certainly, at each of the four film locations for The Moment of Disappearance sound was gathered. However, in this work the recording became a part of engaging with the location and listening to place, rather than material for the final piece. It is the shifting role and transmutability of sound and the layered potential it plays in thinking, making and presenting work that has drawn visual artists to sound for decades. The Fluxus movement and their inherent concerns with the everyday and the ephemeral often focused on the sounds of the environment as part of their attentiveness to the insignificant, and their call for a ‘total work of art’. This radically re-situated the audience by shifting the process of engagement, often relying

18 This short film provides an overview of the making of the sound for The Moment of Disappearance. https://vimeo.com/112673072.

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on sound as the critical moment of exchange.19 George Brecht’s performances, such as Drip Music in 1962 required the viewer/listener to become completely silent, then move incredibly close and listen to the sound of water being poured into a bucket.20 LaBelle writes of this work that: It is exemplary in that it forces the listener into the delicate silence of near inaudibility: the ear must move closer to the quiet sounds, to follow each drip, as a universe of potentiality, each single drip and event, each resonance a sonic revelation. To stage the near imperceptible was to direct an audience toward the phenomena of perception itself.21 This ‘phenomena of perception’, inspired not by the visual, but by the audible, helps to situate the concept of listening with our feet. The sound acts to counter the more fixed and understood state of materials and ensures that the ideas cannot be fully contained, known or singularly understood. Importantly, by building on Cage, Fluxus and artists such as Brecht, this methodology embeds the experience of making, interpreting and forming knowledge in mechanisms of listening. Artists have also, especially during the last 50 years, been allowing nature to influence their work. The commissioning of sound artist Bill Fontana between 1974 and 1978 by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to record the sounds of Australia has been seminal. For Fontana, the significance of listening became apparent when he recorded the sound of a total eclipse of the sun. Capturing the two-minute interval prior to the eclipse, he was witness to the sounds of myriad birds singing at the same time. He writes that then ‘when totality suddenly brought total darkness, there was a deep silence’. From this, he ‘not only became interested in the musicality and compositional wholeness of environmental sound, so that the act of listening and its extension through sound recording equaled music; but that the visual space that was sounding equaled sculpture and architecture’.22 In the way a sculpture articulates space and fills it, an absence of sound can also articulate space through an implied three-dimensional quality. My process of listening to 19 For a full list of Fluxus performances, see this which is only available as an electronic document. http://www.deluxxe.com/beat/fluxusworkbook.pdf. 20 A filming of this work that was restaged can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=UT5lgaE-qZY. 21 LaBelle, B (2006) Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London: Bloomsbury Press, p. 86. 22 See Fontana. http://resoundings.org/Pages/Resoundings.html.

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and gathering up silences or quiet noise articulates a link between methodologies of making and the conceptual framework of trying to make present the absences in intellectual discourse. In 2018, I was commissioned to produce an installation for Rohkunstbau XXIV in Germany. The title of the work was Instructions for Another Future (listening with my feet). Set within the derelict castle of the Schloss Lieberose in East Germany, the film-based sound installation narrates an exchange between two women: a young woman from Ghana and an elderly white British woman. They meet in secret in the cellar of the castle, wearing bespoke ‘spell dresses’, fitted with multiple pockets containing various sculptures and objects. Together, they perform a series of rituals which are underpinned by mutual respect and exchange and suggest a long and embedded shared knowledge. The work is imaginary, but inspired by the idea that perhaps it is the almost lost knowledges of women, ancient cultures and places in our peripheral vision that might hold the answers for a world in crisis. This, my most hopeful work, and framed with nostalgia in some ways, arises from a sense that these are desperate times. The two women were performing spells on the castle and its imaginary inhabitants—but it remains unclear in the work, what the spells may be. Curator Mark Gisbourne writes: What McMillan supposes in the contrast of these two fictional women protagonists, one white with long grey hair, the other a Ghanaian with braided hair, is a sense of an openly sincere and equal exchange between the two symbolic ethnicities. The focus is on collaboration and a self-revealing relationship that was deposed by the European legacy of slavery and dominance, but here draws upon the now hidden and forgotten pre-Enlightenment histories of female and/or older matriarchal insights and intuitions (Fig. 8.3).23 Equally, the spells could suggest something more sinister and the sound in the work provides clues to this. Using a combination of recordings of the percussive qualities of the sculptures, sound captured from the surrounding landscape and experimental sound contributions from Reluctant Carnivore/Karl Ockelford, the sound is both beautiful and disconcerting. The film, as in previous works, was edited to the sound, rather than the other way around. In the final presentation, the sound emanated from four hidden speakers, creating an immersive environment. It bled out from the room and through the walls, doors and floor of the castle, and the spaces where the filming had taken place, haunting 23 Gisbourne,

M (2018) ‘Rohkunstbau XXIV “Mind the Gap”’ (Exhibition Catalogue).

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Fig. 8.3  Kate McMillan (film still) Instructions for another future (listening with my feet), 2018 (Courtesy of the author)

the castle with the residue of making and the knowledge exchanged between the two characters (Fig. 8.4). The large entertaining hall where the work was installed featured over 2000 handmade ‘hagstones’. These objects could also be heard in the sound. Inspired by the musicians in the sound recording for The Moment of Disappearance, the sculptures performed as instruments, props in the film and a pathway leading the viewer through the final installation. The linkages between sound and sculpture, object and sound wave, helped to destabilise the meaning of the work and viewers ability to situate each element within their traditional roles. The hierarchy of value is also usurped—should we consider the objects high art (sculptures)? Or simply instruments or props? Are they the conduit for practice or the outcome? (Fig. 8.5) The dismantling of hierarchies of knowledge and value is core to this work. The use of hagstones, which feature in various European mythologies, is largely associated with wise women, and in some cases, witches. A common variation of this story is that some women had a gift and could look through the naturally occurring hole in the stone and see into the future. The work imagines that these women do still have the knowledge to challenge and counter the mass extinctions around us. Could women

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Fig. 8.4  Kate McMillan (film still) Instructions for another future (listening with my feet), 2018 (Courtesy of the author)

model the sort of collaboration economy we might come to rely on? Do first nation cultures already have the technology that might help us to listen with our feet?. As I was completing this commission, and touring another exhibition (The Past is Singing in our Teeth, 2017), that used similar methods, I came across the work of Quandamooka artist, Megan Cope. Her recent practice has shifted into sound-based sculptures. In discussion, she described to me the sensation of moving back to her father’s ancestral land at North Stradbroke Island: ‘one thing that I’ve been struck by since returning home is that I’ve been surrounded by completely natural sounds of my ancestral land (birds, ocean, wind, trees) and the voices of my family - it’s been very healing and strengthening after 12 years in cities and in the arts where there is SO much white noise’.24 Cope’s recognition of the ‘white noise’ of Australian life has stayed with me. It brings witness to the space that sound can occupy, and the emotional

24 Cope,

M personal correspondence with author 12 August 2018.

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Fig. 8.5  Kate McMillan (installation view) Instructions for another future (listening with my feet), 2018 (Courtesy of the author)

labour involved in listening to sounds that we do not identify with or have been oppressed by. Megan Cope instead reimagines the sounds of deep time, developing various objects and instruments where she has been able to recover and/or create the sounds of overlooked stories and places. Her work brings into focus the act of listening (both as a viewer and as a producer), and how it could provide a crucial framework for how sound can help reshape and uncover things that have been forgotten. Cope most certainly listens with her feet. Her work attempts to retrieve the stories of her ancestors, whilst bearing witness to the violent acts of dispossession that have not only decimated people, but the geographies that framed cultural practice. Her gently powerful acts of remembrance are inflected with a female resistance against the resource focused lens that shapes contemporary Australia and its relationship with non-city spaces. Her practice is a form of psychogeography, but not in the European, Dubordian sense. For Cope, her geography is a site of resistance, trauma and cultural legacy. Her work seeks to hear the residue of the

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past, bubbling up from place. Stradbroke Island, home to Nunukul people, is part of a large landscape of island homes. Listening to Cope discuss her relationship with them, it brought to mind Yuki Kihara and her expansive view of island and sea. Cope whose ancestral land also includes Morton Bay and surrounding islands feels similarly to Kihara— Quandamooka literally translates as people of sand and sea. Despite the powerful coexistence and resistance to white invaders, islands that encapsulate and surround Quandamooka country have met similar fates to other isolated islands along the Australian coast. They were central to the development of Queensland and early exploration, allowing navigators to travel by sea up the coast, instead of travelling overland. Along the way, the potential for each of the islands was noted and later utilised. Peel Island was used as a leper colony, the first of its kind in Queensland to house white and non-white patients, although the conditions for each were markedly different. Friday Island towards the Torres Strait was an Indigenous-only leper colony. St. Helena Island, so-called after an Aborigine called Napoleon, was exiled there in 1826, mirroring the other St. Helena Island in the Atlantic, on which the British had imprisoned Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. Queensland’s St. Helena served as one of the most brutal prison regimes in the Pacific from 1867 for sixty years and was considered inescapable. Despite the accruing knowledge since invasion, it was feared during the Second World War that gaps in understanding the complex island geographies of the Queensland coast left Australia vulnerable. The government feared that the Japanese may possess more knowledge of the region than the Australians or British. This led to an increasing vigilance regarding the possession and occupation of Queensland’s islands. These island histories of incarceration and institutionalisation were, like Wadjemup, microcosms of what was happening in the state of Queensland. It was a deeply racist and violent frontier colony, where it is estimated that more than 50,000 people were killed by state militia and pastoralists in the 150 years after white invasion. Timothy Bottoms calls this a ‘conspiracy of silence’ in his 2013 book that explores what is referred to as ‘the killing times’. His research is in many ways a gathering of already existing evidence of systemic genocide and violence in Queensland, such as the Goulbolba Hill Massacre where a hundred whites herded 300 Aboriginal men, women and children into a lake and drowned and shot them in 1867. Bottom says that ‘no Australian today is responsible for what happened on our colonial frontier. But we

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are responsible for not acknowledging what happened. If we do not, our integrity as a nation is flawed and we are shamed as people for perpetuating a lie’.25 His research underlines the importance of listening to the fullness of history, rather than the partial views and voices that dominate the sound waves of contemporary life. Megan Cope is not only interested in the human sounds of history. In a recent interview with me, Cope asked ‘if the landscape could speak, what would it say?’26 Instantly, Ross Gibson’s badlands come to mind and I could hear an ancient metallurgic substance scraping up against rusted car bonnets, hot winds, emptiness and a bird calling from a drought-stricken tree. But I am from Western Australia, and as Cope reminded me, this is an altogether different place than Queensland, where its lush beauty belies its terrible colonial past. Yet, in a recent work called Untitled (Old Kahibah) presented at Sydney Contemporary in 2018, the sounding of Cope’s sculptures did in fact recall a landscape not unlike a harsh semi-desert environment. The work was first shown at Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery and featured suspended instruments hung from the ceiling constructed from locally sourced rocks, hollowed logs sourced for didgeridoo, violin, cello and double bass strings as well as baskets Cope had made from traditional loop stitch. Her intention was to allow the landscape to speak, for the voices of these objects to resonate through the strings. The relationship between the silence of the objects and their potential as instruments was a profound reflection on the histories that are overlooked. Unlike a visual work, this piece was made to privilege its sound, resonating deeply and transporting the sounds of place into the bodies of the viewers (Fig. 8.6). Cope made the work in the Newcastle area, part of the larger Hunter Valley region. Well known for its vineyards today, it was also the location of some of the most brutal frontier violence—What Henry Reynolds argues is the war that made the nation.27 Newcastle, where Cope sourced the rocks for the work, is one of the most geologically rich areas in Australia. This unstable place exists on the biggest fault line in Australia, which is the cause of its resource-rich landscape.

25 Bottoms, T (2013) Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, p. 207. 26 Cope, M (2018) personal correspondence with the author 21 August, 2018. 27 Reynolds, H (2013) Forgotten War. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.

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Fig. 8.6  Megan Cope, Untitled (Old Kahibah), 2018 Interactive sound sculpture (Courtesy of Megan Cope)

Cope isn’t proscriptive about what sounds should emanate from the work, it is more that she is providing space for it to make its own sound. She notes that the rocks make a deep mourning noise, not unlike the sounds of mining activity. That the sounds make connections between these two very different engagements with the same landscape is pertinent. In the version shown at Sydney Contemporary, Cope incorporated herself into the performance where she provided a steady rhythm for two dancers who engaged and improvised with the sculptures. Cope sees this as the beginning of a new direction in her work. One where the object

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takes a back seat to collaboration, sounding histories and listening to place. In conclusion, listening with our feet offers insight into how we might differently engage with place, with our histories and what we have chosen not to hear. For white settlers, it is about making a space for stories that are not our own, and the stories of violent dispossession that we are implicated in. Artists, who often concern themselves with the efficacy of creative practice, can contribute to conversations around the Anthropocene and first nation justice simply through privileging the aural over the object.

Epilogue The Potential of Dis/Order in the Global South What does the work of these artists tell us? What instructions do they provide? In what ways do they have resonance beyond the local borders of their own communities in the global south? These are the core questions this research has aimed to bring focus to. I have mapped out, through listening to the work of these powerful and resilient women, strategies for understanding the persistence of history in present-day struggles. The creativity and activism present in the stories of the seven women explored here, despite the inheritance of colonial oppression, provide hope. The presence of violence and colonial terror that the veil of the global south, and the isolation of its island landscapes, offered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is also the veil that could assist in its disentanglement from the global north. Just like the remoteness of the Galapagos Islands that enabled unique evolutionary patterns, so too for artists removed from the incessant pressures of the global art market. Could their location in the global south assist in resisting the dogged persistence of colonialism? Or as Caroline Levander and Walter Mignolo suggest, can they instigate and support ‘the global south’s world dis/ ordering potential and possibility’.28 In the first instance, artists such as Yuki Kihara and Lisa Reihana provide us with ambitious and critical reworkings of history. Their practices are evidence of the loosening grip of empire on the narratives that frame

28 Levander, C & Mignolo, W (2011) ‘The Global South’, 5 (1), Special Issue: The Global South and World Dis/Order (Spring), 1–11 (Published by: Indiana University Press).

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the history of islands in the global south. Suddenly, the past extends far beyond the human capacity for thinking about time. These become ancient landscapes, with embedded knowledge transcending the limitations of text and linearity. As Julie Gough remarked when she first visited her ancestral home in north-east Tasmania, it is as if our lungs can open up to the fullness of place. Seen in this way, the history of the British Empire is just a knot on a much bigger timeline of experience. Yet, there is no doubt that the impact of Cook’s voyages has forever changed and, in many cases, destroyed the way of life for cultures throughout Australia and Moana. The work of Yhonnie Scarce shows us that we can make something beautiful with the residue of destruction. This doubling points to my discussions around the colonial sublime—the tension between the mesmerising beauty of the colonial landscape and the residue of terrifying acts of violence that have been enacted on it. The transformative potential of art is where its potency is situated. Not because it wipes the slate clean, as we find new pathways forward, but because it adds each story to history, creating an umbilical cord into the past, present and future. We understand the connectedness of things through art. Scarce’s delicate glass sculptures help us feel connected to the stories that destroyed her peoples and enable us to recognise the weight these histories have in the present. They resist the forgetting that typifies colonialism. Yet, it is not just the object that generates this connection to the past. Just as Scarce’s journey back to Maralinga with her assistants becomes so central to the importance of her work, so too do the travels that Julie Gough undertakes as part of her filmic practice and her research more broadly. Gough highlights the absurdity of cultural normativity and the falsity of smooth movement through the world. We recognise the clumsiness of explorers and the way in which accident, perhaps even more so than design, defines the outcomes. Gough, trying to navigate two worlds, declares what she has found, but mostly what is lost. She cannot go back in time to the exchanges depicted in Lisa Reihana’s in Pursuit of Venice (Infected). Instead, she is left with the imaginary world of the artist. None of the artists explored herein are satisfied with what the proscribed role of the artist is. Part of their attention to history is to problematise it, which includes challenging what they must do as knowledge makers. It requires extraordinary research skills and persistence in the face of gatekeepers. Reihana’s work took over a decade to complete. Julie

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Gough is constantly travelling the world, seeking avenues that might lead her to the remains of the past. Kihara continues the global tradition of Sāmoa, spending most of her time finding opportunities to trade ideas and present new works. Arguably, these artists are more global than any artist working in the global north, where the long trip south is generally considered prohibitive. This worldly view and familiarity with being outside culture enables them to see their own cultural locations with scrutiny. There is no better place to view the chains of one’s own existence than from a distance. What is normalised can often become absurd from this viewpoint. Yet, for most first nations peoples, particularly when existing as a minority, they don’t have to physically sit outside their nation to really see it. Artists such as Karla Dickens piercingly attend to the failed logic of colonialism from the inside of her studio. Confronting the deeply embedded systems of exclusion and racism is not something she arbitrarily attends to—they are lived experiences that shape her identity at all levels. Her works are emblematic of the dual emotions of injury and defiance that typifies most Indigenous lives in Australia. Her work, like many of her peers, adds to 250 years of resistance. The lineage she identifies with is not the modernity of the north, it is the resistance fighters of the global south. Her land, like those of all first nation people in Australia, was never ceded, and the lives of Aboriginal women, in particular, have been violated as part of the mechanisms of invasion. Her battles are not only with the past, they are with current injustices that are only undone at the expense of activists. Proust in the Antipodes is a term I use to attend to the methodologies of recognising the links between the past and the present. The act of being in art, of making it and of thinking on the meanings it may attend to, underscoring its function as a memory object, catapulting us back in time to deeply felt moments. For many of these artists, the often forgotten or neglected histories are traumatic and so too is the forgetting of them. Oftentimes, the refusal to remember is the hardest of all. This epistemology of ignorance, a societal willingness to make these histories small, has undermined reconciliation and future memory work. The work of the artists in this book refuses this forgetting. By offering us these tricks of visual pleasure, our minds suddenly become connected to the things we might otherwise like to erase. Erasure is not possible; these badlands, places that carry the memories of the past, dutifully archive all that was done there. This is the sunny-disquiet of colonial life.

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What of the future? Kihara’s work reminds us that it is not just colonialisation that destroys culture, but the irreversible side effects of climate change. Islands of the Pacific are increasingly effected by the catastrophic impact of emissions from the north. The liquid continent of Moana needs to resist the last days of late-capitalism to ensure its future existence. The days of the Anthropocene are with us, and I argue that responses from the global south and the artists that work from these places may provide alternative ways to inhabit place. Megan Cope exemplifies what I call listening with our feet—a knowledge that conjoins ancient nature-based sciences, collaboration and listening, with the potential that creative practices offer. I propose that through an ethics of listening we can begin to consider appropriate ways to live in the world, reconcile histories and attend to the damaging realities of a carbon economy. Julie Gough writes that: By utilizing the fragmentary and almost lost, I am hoping the magnitude, complexity and the sheer number of stories that do presently or may shortly lie beyond our earthly realm, inferred and implied only by those surviving.29

Bibliography Bailey, P (1996) ‘Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Historian Listens to Noise’. Body & Society, 2 (2), 49–66. Barlow, G (2008) Lost (Exhibition Catalogue). John Curtin Gallery. Bijsterveld, K (2019) Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s–present). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Bottoms, T (2013) Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Cage, J (2010) Silences, Lectures and Writing. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press. Fiumara, GC (1995) The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. London: Routledge. Forsey, M (2010) ‘Ethnography as Participant Listening’. Ethnography, 11 (4), 558–572 (Sage). Gammage, B (2011) The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia. London: Allen & Unwin. Gisbourne, M (2018) ‘Rohkunstbau XXIV “Mind the Gap”’ (Exhibition Catalogue). 29 Gough, J (2018) Fugitive History: The Art of Julie Gough. Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing, p. 8.

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Hope, C (2010) Doctoral Thesis, RMIT. Gough, J (2018) Fugitive History: The Art of Julie Gough. Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing. Kelly, L (2016) The Memory Code: Unlocking the Secrets of the Lives of the Ancients and the Power of the Human Mind. London: Atlantic Books. LaBelle, B (2006) Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London: Bloomsbury Press. Levander, C & Mignolo, W (2011) ‘The Global South’, 5 (1), Special Issue: The Global South and World Dis/Order (Spring), 1–11 (Published by: Indiana University Press). Moynagh, M (2002) ‘This History’s Only Good for Anger: Gender and Cultural Memory in Beatrice Chancy’. Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28 (Autumn, 1), 97–124. Reynolds, H (2013) Forgotten War. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Schafer, R M (1994/1977) The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny Books. Voegelin, S (2010) Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Index

A Artists Brenda Croft, 4, 167, 186 Brooke Andrews, 167, 187 Cat Hope, 11, 190, 193, 194, 196, 199 Destiny Deacon, 167 Fiona Foley, 167, 186 Julie Gough, 2, 4, 9, 117, 126, 127, 129–131, 133, 134, 136–138, 141, 142, 160, 210–212 Karla Dickens, 2, 10, 167, 168, 176, 179–181, 184–187, 211 Kate McMillan, 82, 97, 107, 195, 199, 203–205 Lisa Reihana, 2, 8, 82–90, 166, 209, 210 Megan Cope, 2, 4, 11, 191, 204, 205, 207, 208, 212 Richard Bell, 167, 175, 176 Sidney Nolan, 121, 122 Vernon Ah Kee, 167 Yhonnie Scarce, 2, 10, 142, 150, 152, 154, 156–159, 210

Yuki Kihara, 2, 3, 8, 79, 80, 82, 90, 91, 95, 96, 100, 206, 209 I Islands Antigua, 23 Aotearoa New Zealand, 8, 20, 32, 33, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 90, 91, 95, 96, 119, 121, 124, 166 Australia, 1, 4, 5, 8–11, 17, 18, 24, 28, 33, 35, 36, 43, 44, 48, 64, 65, 67, 69, 83, 96, 97, 121, 206 Bass Strait, 40, 41, 136 Bernier, 45–48 Britain, 5, 7, 9, 18, 23, 24, 28 Cape Barren, 41 Carceral, 1, 8, 28, 42, 44, 48, 64, 67, 69, 70, 97 Caribbean, 21–23, 25 Cockatoo, 8, 37, 38, 97, 98, 198 Dorre, 46, 47 Falkland, 25 Furneaux, 126, 136

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 K. McMillan, Contemporary Art and Unforgetting in Colonial Landscapes, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17290-9

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216  Index Goat, 37 Ireland, 21 Jamaica, 22, 23, 25 Kiribati, 44 Loyalty, 44 Manus, 8, 20, 48, 64, 66–68 Maria, 41, 42 Marshall, 94 Montserrat, 23 Nauru, 67 Nevis, 23 Norfolk, 35, 67 Oceania, 3, 145 Papua New Guinea, 66, 68 Peel, 206 Polynesia, 32, 89, 90 Rottnest Island, 1, 18, 43, 48, 53, 63 Sāmoa, 3, 44, 90, 92–96 Sarah, 41, 42 Slaving, 7, 24, 25 Solomon, 44 St Kitts, 23 Stradbroke, 204, 206 Tahiti, 83, 91–93 Tasmania, 4, 35, 38–41, 136 Tuvalu, 44 Van Dieman’s Land, 43 Vanuatu, 44 Wadjemup, 1, 18, 36, 48–50, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59, 61–64, 68, 97, 105, 166, 206 K Key Terms Aborigines Progressive Association, 167, 176, 177 Activism, 175, 179, 209 Anthropocene, 2, 5, 92, 94, 95, 189, 209, 212 Antipodean Proust, 158

Badland, 125, 142, 151, 192, 207, 211 Blackbirding, 44, 45 Botany bay, 34, 35, 178 British Raj, 27 Bunuba, 178 Captain James Cook, 83 Convicts, 21, 22, 34–37, 41, 42, 44, 53, 64, 67, 112, 124 Decolonialism, 79, 111 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, 32 Fanny Balbuk, 179 Feminism, 2, 12, 147 First nations, 78, 118, 124, 136, 149, 156, 181, 189, 211 Freedom Ride, 169, 174 Global south, 1, 3–8, 10, 12, 17, 18, 20, 31, 48, 70, 77–79, 82, 83, 89, 92, 119, 121, 124, 127, 143, 148, 160, 167, 189, 191, 209–212 Imperialism, 26, 27, 79 India, 20, 23, 26, 27 Jandamarra, 178 Listening with your feet, 11 Māori, 32, 33, 81, 83, 89, 96, 119, 166, 194 Maralinga, 10, 142, 150, 151, 153, 155, 210 Massacre, 8, 39, 40, 51, 57, 97, 100, 111, 123, 130, 170, 190, 197 Moriori, 119 Native police, 44 Nyoongar, 17, 114, 178, 179, 197 Oceania, 3, 77, 79, 82, 85, 90, 92, 93 Oyster Cove, 41 Perth, 1, 11, 17, 18, 45, 48, 50, 52, 53, 63, 85, 97, 99, 121, 136, 165, 179, 190 Point Puer, 42, 43

Index

Port Arthur, 35, 41–43 Port Macquarie, 41, 42 Postcolonialism, 2, 110, 115, 147 Quandamooka, 2, 11, 204, 206 Queensland, 44, 45, 67, 121, 123, 167, 169, 171, 206, 207 Swan River Colony, 51, 52, 57, 179 Terra nullius, 10, 33, 124, 170, 173 Treaty of Waitangi, 31–33 Vincent Lingiari, 170–172 Wave Hill, 170, 171 Wybalenna, 40, 41, 136 Yagan, 178 Yolngu, 171, 173 Key Thinkers Adlai Murdoch, 26 Anna Haebich, 6, 60, 61, 111, 114, 118 Ann Curthoys, 169, 175 Anthony Gardner, 78, 79 Aristotle, 108 Barbara Bolt, 120 Bruce Elder, 39, 40, 51, 57, 123 Bruce Pascoe, 112, 113, 134 Catherine O’Sullivan, 8 Charles Mills, 8, 24, 120, 150 Charles Perkins, 174, 175 Chris Healy, 111 Daisy Bates, 47, 48, 52, 53, 55, 179 David Lowenthal, 19 David Olusoga, 24 Djon Mundine, 111, 184 Edmund Burke, 124 Edward Said, 115, 135 Elaine Freedgood, 20 Elizabeth McMahon, 33 Epeli Hau`Ofa, 3, 77–80 Frances Yates, 108 Gayatri Spivak, 115 Gemma Corradi Fiumara, 198 Genevieve Grieves, 126

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Gilles Deleuze, 12, 77, 78, 129 Henry Reynolds, 5, 6, 37, 169–171, 207 Homi K Bhabha, 115 Immanuel Kant, 124 James Baldwin, 118, 119 Jeremy Bentham, 43 Jessica Rapson, 9, 110 Jessie Street, 169 John Milton, 92, 94 John R Gilles, 17, 19 John Scanlan, 110, 146 Karen Till, 116 Katy Roscoe, 35, 36, 48 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 111 Marcel Proust, 9, 143–145 Maureen Moynagh, 191 Nancy Tuana, 6, 8, 120, 147 Neville Green, 48, 53–60, 63 Noel Nannup, 48, 49 Patrick White, 33 Paul Connerton, 110, 149 Paul Ricoeur, 115 Pierre Nora, 110 Plato, 108 Rebecca Solnit, 113 Ross Gibson, 125, 142, 151, 207 Salome Voegelin, 192 Sigmund Freud, 143, 144, 146, 147 Simonides of Ceos, 108 Simon Schama, 112, 114 Sneja Gunew, 115 Susan Moon, 48, 53–60, 63 TJ Demos, 127 M Memory Amnesia, 9, 120, 125, 127, 137, 160 Colonial forgetting, 105, 125, 149

218  Index Forgetting, 2, 5, 7–9, 11, 24, 38, 48, 64, 70, 77, 79, 81, 105, 110, 116–118, 125, 130, 137, 142, 146–150, 156, 160, 165, 199, 210, 211 Historical amnesia, 137 Memory object, 158, 181 Memory trigger, 10, 106, 142, 151

Memory work, 1, 8, 9, 109, 117, 118, 142 Mnemonic, 106, 108, 143, 144, 158, 182 Unforgetting, 8, 70, 96, 111, 137, 143, 158, 165