TEMPORARY ALIGNMENTS: Between Fraught Fictions and Fragile Facts © Julie Montgarrett 2015 TEMPORARY ALIGNMENTS: Between Fraught Fictions and Fragile Facts SUBMISSION OF THESIS TO CHARLES STURT UNIVERSITY: Degree of Doctor of Philosophy CANDIDATE’S NAME: Julie Montgarrett QUALIFICATIONS HELD: Master of Arts (Visual and Performing Arts), Charles Sturt University, 1997 Graduate Diploma of Embroidery, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 1985 Higher Diploma of Teaching (Secondary Art and Craft), Melbourne State College, 1976 FULL TITLE OF THESIS: TEMPORARY ALIGNMENTS: Between Fraught Fictions and Fragile Facts MONTH AND YEAR OF SUBMISSION: November 2015 Table of Contents Preface Chapter 1 - Temporary Alignments: between fraught fictions and fragile facts 1 Research Issues Arising: 4 Recognition of Creative Practice as Research Performative Aspects of the Research Process Additional Terminologies and Critical/Theoretical Location of Research Conceptual Organisation of the Exegesis Chapter 2 - Guessing Games in Borrowed Spaces 24 Precedents towards practice 24 Methodologies of Creative Practice to unsettle the past in the present 27 Accumulating Identity: Acknowledging origins 30 Unfinished sentences trailing little narratives 33 Bearing witness: respective histories 35 Aesthetic Practice That Allows Such Strangeness To Be 41 Logistics of Methodology and a Practical Epistemology 44 Problematic Aspects of the Research 46 Place Settings: Country, Circumstance and Consequence 47 I Am Neither A Historian Nor An Illustrator of Certain Conclusions 48 Chapter 3 - Navigating Tensions: fraught fictions and fragile facts 54 Sovereign rights and terra nullius 55 Settler Narratives – remembrance and denial 57 The Great Australian Silence: Four stages of settler narratives 59 Strange conflicts between circumstance and rhetoric: antagonistic intimacies 62 Towards acknowledging dispossession 64 Archive Fever and the Australian History Wars 65 Mapping of the past into the present: remembering and forgetting 69 Unfinished Encounters 71 Chapter 4 - Apprenticed to Ghosts: accountable for mending shadows 86 Between historiography and mythology 87 My non-indigenous subjective postcolonial eye/I 88 Jacob Hackett Mountgarrett (1773? – 1828) 90 Repetitious facts and stereotypical villainy 91 Risdon Cove Massacre – May 3rd 1804 92 An Anthropological Whim 98 Robert Hobart May 99 Yorktown and Port Dalrymple 102 Countrymen and Servants - ‘He was a wretched drunk and she was worse’ 105 Bridget (Edwards) Mountgarrett: circa. 1777 – 1829 106 George Briggs – (1791? – 1854?) 107 Worete.moete.yenner (1797 – 1847) 109 Dalrymple Mountgarrett Briggs: (c 1808–1864) 112 … nothing but duck shot 113 Dolly Dalrymple Mountgarrett Briggs’ Shooting at Doctor’s Bend 115 Chapter 5 - Between the sightlines – fragile facts and fraught fictions 131 Between history, mythology, theory and practice 131 Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - Fiona Foley 136 Contradiction, conflict and opposition are useful states of mind 140 Dissecting these ghosts - unravelling disguises 141 Unsettling respectfully and rearranging imaginatively 142 Fragments, objects and settings: borrowed, gleaned, aligned and repeating 147 From page to wall - across the space as colony: the purpose of hindsight 150 Final Installation - Temporary Alignments: fraught fictions and fragile facts 150 House and Gable roof 152 Colonies of Objects 153 Hussifs 154 Drawings from colonies and Sketchbooks 154 Shrouds, Drawings and Shadow-Casting laces 157 Proclamation Boards 158 Camera Obscura 159 Shadows and Shadow narratives – Episodic and Semantic 159 Summary 162 Conclusion: Antagonistic Intimacies - Remembering / Forgetting 167 Revisiting country - circumstance and consequence: hidden in plain view 170 References 182 List of Plates 205 Appendix 1 - Summary of Historiography of Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania 215 Appendix 2 – British Navy Salary records- 1790 - 1800 217 Appendix 3 - Transcripts of Witness evidence in Case between Brumby vs Mountgarrett re: shooting of Dalrymple Briggs 218 Certificate of Authorship I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge and belief, understand that it contains no material previously published or written by another person, nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at Charles Sturt University or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by colleagues with whom I have worked at Charles Sturt University or elsewhere during my candidature is fully acknowledged. I agree that this thesis be accessible for the purpose of study and research in accordance with normal conditions established by the Executive Director, Library Services, Charles Sturt University or nominee, for the care, loan and reproduction of thesis, subject to confidentiality provisions as approved by the University. Name Julie Montgarrett Date 13th November 2015 Acknowledgments There are always many people who deserve thanks and acknowledgement for their support, generous counsel and on-going assistance during a creative practice as research process such as this. Without the initial prompt and on-going guidance of my Principal Supervisor Associate-Professor Margaret Woodward in respect of many valuable Tasmanian histories and contacts, this colonial narrative would likely not have been identified as such a rich vein of narrative and future research potential. I am indebted to CSU Emeritus Professor David Green and former Head of the School of Visual and Performing Arts for his initial support towards this research undertaking and to Dr Johannes Klabbers who replaced Professor Green as Principal Supervisor with equal trust and generosity at the beginning of this research. Thank-you as well to Stephen Payne, Manager of the Wagga Art Gallery for his belief in the emerging works over several years and the offer of two solo exhibition opportunities – the first to present the research in progress. Most especially I am indebted to the trust and support all the Gallery staff demonstrated in offering me the privilege of presenting the final body of work for the candidature in the Margaret Carnegie Gallery in the Wagga Art Gallery. Charles Sturt University, through the provision of research funds during a period of Special Studies leave and two Compact grants made vital travel for research to the UK, Europe and Tasmania possible which enabled the foundations of the research ‘data’ to be identified and gleaned from diverse museum and archival sources. Particular mention must also go to Dr Julie Gough for archival suggestions and advice and Aunty Patsy Cameron for her generous, first-hand introduction to her country, in particular locations for on-site research and as such a better understanding of the terrain on which some of this history was played out. Far too many Museum, Art Gallery, Library and Archival assistants to list here, have also generously offered their time and invaluable astute advice during the repeated trawling of complex historical collections across the UK and Australia. Lastly, I am especially grateful to both my partner Dr Neill Overton and my daughter, Caitlin Overton for their unwavering trust in my capacity to make something of these tenuous fragments of a shadowy, distant past; for their sharp proof reader’s eyes and for their forthright critical honesty and patience over many years. Submission to Charles Sturt University for Doctor of Philosophy. ABSTRACT Many voices since the eighteenth century British invasion of ‘the great south land’ have called for an acknowledgment of the sustained brutality and dispossession suffered by the first Australians since colonisation. In recent decades, sustained rigorous scholarly critiques of the Colonial period have generated new and increasingly complex understandings of the ‘blind-spots’ in the history of genocide in Van Diemen’s Land. My PhD creative practice as research engages these scholarly critiques. Fragments and imagery gleaned from museums, archives, genealogy and historical sites are used to inform and disrupt the overly simplified paradigms that arise from the epistemological dichotomies of this history. Through intersecting, anachronistic visual imagery, and in defiance of a logical narrative, the viewer encounters ambiguous forms that challenge the legacies of non- indigenous, habitual perceptions of history and linear models of time that have produced as Russell argues, ‘a black and white pseudoreality’.1 Using the fragile contingent mediums of drawing, embroidery and moving shadows as installation, my purpose is to imaginatively question and visually and spatially problematize our relationship with the brutal, contested received history of Van Diemen’s Land (1803-1828) that continues to disturb the present through unresolved, confronting cross cultural issues of identity and trauma. This research represents absences. It tests deliberately incomplete, temporarily aligned visual narratives about the cultural landscape of the past and present. Absent presences, like those characterised by Young’s2 interpretation of the hybridity of Bhabha’s third space,3 resist clear identification of certain meanings and result in a perception of something incomplete, even damaged arising. Aporias result from uncertain relationships between culturally known and unfamiliar forms arranged and repeating inconsistently. As such the research has developed through drawing to