Biennale of Sydney

Islands of Incarceration
Timber Drying Shed, Cockatoo Island

Biennale of Sydney 2010
Curated by David Elliott

CONCEPT/BACKGROUND

This project continues to extend and draw on my interest into Australian history, in particular, the inequities of colonial interaction with original inhabitants. As a white Australian, this is very much a conscious attempt to contextualise my own history and that of my ancestors within a discourse about contemporary social, creative and political issues.
Central to this investigation has been an overarching examination into landscape and its capacity to contain and evoke history and trauma. Given the extremely sketchy documentation of conflict during the early period of colonisation, this is a particularly apt way of experiencing and understanding the Australian landscape.
I have been continually interested in the notion of ‘an island’. Both as a physical description of Australia and the coastal islands that surround the continent – as well as ‘the island’ as a psychological construct that can simultaneously describe a state of alienation, and of fantasy and escape. Over many years I have researched the history of Rottnest Island in Western Australia. It is currently used as a beautiful holiday destination, but was previously used as an Indigenous Prison. The panopticon style Prison is used today as three star accommodation. This history is not signposted and is brushed over in the Rottnest Museum. As a child we would holiday there and I recall feeling that parts of the island were being haunted – the wind-bent peppermint groves, empty and desolate, but for the elements. Unmarked graves remain in a paddock-sized area loosely referred to as the ‘Aboriginal cemetery’. This previous and current interest in islands pulls me towards Cockatoo Island as a place to create site-specific work.
More broadly it is the extraordinary contrast between the beauty of our landscape and its history that has been an ongoing theme in my work. I have worked in various locations in Australia and around the world researching and documenting landscapes marred by trauma. This is the central component in my approach to the proposed Islands of Incarceration. And it is ultimately the sunny disquiet of Australia and our colonial history that underpins my position as an Australian contemporary artist.
Islands of Incarceration draws together two sites – Cockatoo Island and the Ludlow Tuart Forest located in the South-West of Western Australia, the site of the 1841 Wonnerup
Massacre in which up to three hundred Wardandi Noongar people are said to have been massacred and buried in the forest over a period of five years. The massacre occurred in response to the fatal spearing of George Layman after he held a thirteen-year-old Aboriginal girl captive in his homestead . The elder who speared him, Gaywal, was killed some years later and his head was decapitated and left on a stick as a warning to other Wardandi Noongar. The rich and abundant culture of the Wardandi people was decimated and only a very small number of original family members survive.
The forest is now a detour on the trip to the Margaret River Wine Region and has been made a national park. It contains no record of what occurred there other than what is recorded at Wonnerup House (see footnote 2).
During my research for this project I stumbled across a PhD submission that details the incarceration of eight Aboriginal men on Cockatoo Island in the first two decades of Settlement . Whilst this is not central to my proposal, it most certainly belies the thesis of my work – that our landscape is so extraordinarily layered, often in the most horrific sense. And that perhaps it is this refusal to name our past, which causes so much discontent and malaise in our present nation.

CONCEPT/PROJECT OUTLINE

The top floor of a timber drying shed is coming apart and is utterly weathered. Barely alive. But so present. Perched high on the hill of Cockatoo Island - exposed – encircled by the perimeter of this urban island and by the harbour. As you approach this building you see the exterior and interior equally. The walls and floors are timber slats, evenly spaced. Are they burnt? They are so dark. I am struck by the beautiful contrast of light and dark as the sun falls across the side of the building. I imagine that from the top floor an almost panorama. The building is like a watchful eye. What has been watched on this island? Controlled. I think of all the things seen across this nation of ours but never spoken. A silent eye.
This shed keeps reminding me of the Ludlow Tuart Forest and my research there. Only Tuart – so odd. It is two hours south of my home city of Perth. Magnificent tall trees. They were once pulled down and stripped and dried. Ludlow was a timber town. They now sit in eerie silence. No scrub beneath their trunks. Just dappled shade onto cold, hard, damp leaf strewn ground. No one comes here really – the odd car passes through but doesn’t stop. Everyone I speak with who has driven this route remembers the disconcerting energy that passes through the place and the feeling of being compelled to exit it quickly. But no one can tell me what happened there.
The forest is below sea level on limestone ground, a short walk to the ocean. Wonnerup Estuary sits between the forest and the beach – a dead water. This is where things are said to be buried – things from yesterday. The ocean and the tuart trees, caretakers for all that is buried beneath them. Bones too. Maybe hundreds of bones. Aboriginal bones. For small indiscretions that seem hardly notable .
Recently I was wandering through the forest, alone with my camera. I came across a small area of burnt out bush. I am not sure whether it was a burn-off or a small spot fire. The smell of ash still overwhelmingly present. Everything had been swallowed by flames. Despite this, small forest orchids were beginning to sprout, death lilies too. Seedpods splayed open in order to release life for the next generation of Tuart. How bizarre that this landscape seeks devastation to regrow. This strange world where trees shed their bark not their leaves. I have taken a panorama of this burnt out grove. It was clear to me instantly that this group of images would be what I will use for Islands of Incarceration.
But after reflecting back on the images I had taken, I looked at the tall tuart trees that had remained untouched by fire. They were majestic. Standing tall despite everything. This also seemed right. I have presented these two views and will continue to ponder upon this as the project develops.
In the coming weeks I will revisit the site. Possibly to witness the re-burial of some bones recently uncovered. I will talk more with the Wardandi people and move slowly, taking stock of myself as I inhabit their space. I see my ideas continuing to mature and take on the complexity that this project deserves.


DESCRIPTOR
Islands of Incarceration.

I imagine a fine, elegant, single pleated veil curtaining around the inside of the top floor in an elliptical shape from the Southwest corner to the Northeast corner of the first floor of the timber drying shed. Gathering in folds on the floor, reaching up high into the ceiling and meeting at the suspended tracking. The burnt tuart trees printed onto the surface of the fabric - the translucency of the fibre allowing the image to be read from both sides. The panorama of the forest now surrounds us. It colours the view of the harbour and Sydney surrounds as we try to look out beyond the work. We walk in and around and through it. It catches in the wind, blowing out through the cracks of the slats and the wide-open doorways. It makes us aware of the weather and of our own body as we feel the work against us. This movement manipulates the image. The subtle pleats in the curtain mirror the vertical trunks.
Beforehand, as we approach the shed, it is higher and above us. An immediate sense of unease is present as if someone has left the windows open as a storm approaches, the curtains billowing out – we know instantly that something is amiss. We enter a place that something has happened in once, maybe recently or a long time ago. More likely it is something that continues to happen, yet we can’t put our finger on it.
We can’t escape this land. The memories it holds. The histories it conceals. What we have concealed.
The work is lit from within as the sun falls away, for night-time viewing. A beacon, a lighthouse. There is sound that bleeds out into the air as you approach the work. Slowly working on you, and when you are inside the work, it bleeds into you. Utterly present but somehow almost unconscious. It contextualises the way you read the image. It sets the tone of the work. You take the sound away with you. Inside you. The image too. You remember the veil flapping or fluttering (depending on the weather) in the wind. You can hear it. It may have touched you as you stood within it.
It is unknown what this sound may be. Working with Cat Hope, sound artist and technician, we will piece together and compose a work that creates this unease that I speak of. Perhaps we will record sound from the forest. Perhaps from the mud and deadwater of the estuary. Cat works with sounds that are below our hearing range, entering our bodies through the skin, effecting us without us knowing. An encroaching claustrophobia that is beautiful too.
On leaving the work, your memory is uneasy, even though beyond the work, you have seen the panorama of the harbour. Beautiful. This happy disquiet, this sunlit unease. This is my home.