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 embroidery, a new form of perceptually tentative ‘invisible mending’ as meanings are sought. This is intentionally different from the ‘stitching-over’ of aporias and gaps in understanding that Ravenscroft4 argues were wilfully contrived by callous reckoning and dominant cultural closed thinking of non-Aboriginal Australians of the past two centuries.
Importantly the divergent, open-ended research methodologies and contingent thinking/making is visual, material, and critical, as each aspect overlaps unpredictably evolving in a process of return that drives the research forward. Commencing in the Studio as a transitive verb, the performative creative practice, is later encountered/tested as an intransitive verb by the audience immersed in a version of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘enactive space of living enquiry’5 as installation and ‘being in’ Bourdieu’s ‘game’6 of unravelling shadows and uncertain relationships.
As an open process of critical, personally situated investigation and scholarly critique, the research has demonstrated the generation, modelling and externalising of new knowledge as exhibition and thesis. The body of work for exhibition and accompanying exegesis unsettles respectfully and rearranges imaginatively the fragments and narratives of the early colonial era. Re- envisioning colonial history as temporary alignments re-imagines the past that continues to infect the present as fraught fictions and fragile facts in incongruous ways denied to the discipline of history.
1 Russell, Lynette. Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790 – 1870. New York: State University of New York Press, 2012. p. 20 2 Young, Robert. ‘The Void of Misgiving’. In Communicating in the Third Space, Karen Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (eds.) New York: Routledge, 2008. p. 81 - 83. 3 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. 1994 p. 53 - 56
4 Ravenscroft, Alison. The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012. p. 18
5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’. In Johnson, G. (ed.) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. M. Smith (Trans.). Evanston, Illinois Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1952) 1993. pp. 76 - 120.
6 Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. 1990. p. 92
Preface
Why this story of all, needs must be told? I had heard of its protagonist by chance, tangentially, three times – once last century, as a girl in her second decade at the end of blackboards and chalk; once as a reader of certain, predictable histories of convict trauma, colonial glory and truths denied; and once, in conversation by chance, as a far, far older artist-researcher with longstanding habits of drawing and stitch - both most suitable for stories, used often by many. I recall each encounter clearly – the name and events were unsettling and I felt drawn towards trouble. I was not wrong.
At the centre of this story is a silhouette and events that some call a colony and others a war-zone. I have learnt to call this a complex, conflicted uncertainty – far more than a binary collision of cultures. The silhouette is perhaps my great, great, great grand Uncle – Jacob Hackett Mountgarrett (1773 – 1828). Irish-born, first ‘notorious’ Colonial Surgeon, Magistrate, Doctor, destitute by the end of the second decade of British occupation of Van Diemen’s Land. Aside from a shared name I cannot be completely certain of our relationship. Two centuries distant, my paternal family tree ends abruptly, erased by fires in the Public Records Office of Dublin, 1923 that destroyed that Nation’s Public Records Office and turned any certainty of precise relationship to ash and doubt. Leaving a gap, an open space for Jacob and James, his brother, just beyond the confirmed branches of the family tree, before they reappear again made visible by other archival ‘facts’. This gap is also a space of some anxiety – of both seeming complicity in relation to the first brutal years of colonial ‘settlement’ and the euphemisms of slaughter revealed by the Colonial archives as much as a need to take responsibility for telling these stories – to make sense of these lives beyond a stale and stereotypically drawn historical veneer.
Chapter 1 -Temporary Alignments: between fraught fictions and fragile facts
‘Dark times’, Hannah Arendt tells us, ‘surround us when the past cannot guide us into the future.’ Our work towards decolonisation is taking place in such a dark time, both because it cannot be theorised in advance (there is very little received wisdom) and because we are in an extremely unstable time of ever more rapid change. . . If we cannot see into the future, we can still look around us and into our past. If our world is uncertain, it is richer than any single story would lead us to believe.
Deborah Bird Rose 1
The central subject of this research is Jacob Mountgarrett - the ‘notorious’ first surgeon in Van Diemen’s Land who died destitute and dishonoured.2 Childless, he and his wife Bridget, baptised their ‘fostered’ daughter, Dolly Dalrymple Mountgarrett Briggs, and taught her to read, write and sew.3 This is the most common version of the narrative – a polite triumphalist settler version of the history, concealing other darker and more plausible circumstances. Amongst the first settlers in the colony of Van Diemen’s Land in 1803, both Jacob and Bridget were destitute and deceased by 1829. Dalrymple had left their home four years before. Dalrymple Briggs was the first child of a Trawlwoolway Aboriginal mother, Worrete-moete-yenner,4 and the grand-daughter of Mannarlargenna,5 a clan leader from the north-east of Van Diemen's Land. Dalrymple’s father, George Briggs, was an English-born, red haired sealer.6 Historic records claim she was the first child born in the Colony to a British father and indigenous mother. Dalrymple Briggs was given little more than British manners, an Anglican Baptism and a girl's education or so the most pedestrian of the historical records claim. Yet, with determination and bravery, she survived amidst the increasing cross cultural clashes and dispossession along with two of her five siblings, to make a life for herself to become a well- known Tasmanian Aboriginal heroine and matriarch – one of only a few acknowledged survivors in the increasingly violent frontier war-zone that was Van Diemen's Land in the first decades of the nineteenth Century. Dalrymple’s father, George Briggs, circumnavigated Van Diemen’s Land in an open whaling boat in
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1815.7 Dalrymple’s mother sailed with other sealers as far as Rodriguez and Mauritius in 1825.8 Further details of their lives are scant, as part of a larger unknown and poorly recorded era - the first 25 years of British settlement of northern Tasmania. Attempts to picture the lives of these individuals during this period of escalating warfare require an imaginative piecing together of few facts and fragments to shape mismatched what if? scenarios and to perhaps create a different sense of these lives and experiences and by comparison perhaps aspects of our own.
Diverse authoritative texts – critical theory, historiography, philosophy, literature, archives, museum collections, land titles, legal documents, historic sites from England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, France and Tasmania, accumulate, in neat precise order.9 Even a family Bible – offering clues in names and absences drawn by others official, dour and solemn but none provides confirmation. And that one odd change – one letter lost from this absurdly long name; removed by my great grandfather soon after arrival into a colony that had adapted too well the lessons of dispossession and decimation of the indigenous first Nations peoples learnt just across Bass Strait in Van Diemen’s Land. Port Phillip was the third Antipodean colony well practiced and skilled in drawing straight lines and boundaries and re- naming old country, Landscapes with Arcadian vistas and silencing its older true languages with pens, maps and British legal titles. Colonists claiming entitlement through Empire, God and Enlightenment reason and knowledge enacted with open disdain and secret violence the systematic destruction of the once high cultures of Gadigal, Palawa and Wurundjeri peoples. This colonial brutal dispossession was determinedly, evasively sanctioned within living memory of Jacob Mountgarrett’s fraught notorious life in Sydney Cove and Van Diemen’s Land.
Perhaps his alleged dishonesty was the reason one letter of our family name was removed a generation later to deny relationship, possibly duly discovered by my great-grand parents as newly arrived hopefuls in the Colony of Port Phillip. The squatting families my great grand-father worked for were the same families who had gained their wealth in Van Diemen’s Land within living memory of Jacob and Bridget Mountgarrett. In many respects these details don’t matter – this history is
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common to many Australians as are the habits of denial, distortion and secrecy in respect of many of the events of this past. In other respects it may be crucial for it implicates me directly in this brutal past at the very beginning. Either way it has brought me personally and intellectually to a point of confrontation - a newly difficult acknowledgement of this unresolved history.
There is no safe distance in this narrative. Apprehension has emerged from unanswered questions and a sense of my complicity in the numerous crimes that Mountgarrett is specifically alleged to have committed. My neglect of this past also entwines me because I have continued the ‘silence’ about this genocide into my own generation despite knowing of Jacob’s existence between the pages of those books. My experience suggests that a large part of this neglect is more than a seeming absence of factual information. It is now fashionable to have convict ancestry. It is far more confronting to acknowledge association with the genocide of the Frontier Wars ‘that have become emblematic of racism and greed at its most destructive’.10
Numerous historical records describe Jacob Mountgarrett as notorious11 and a dubious character12. He was probably an alcoholic, a gambler and a victim of circumstance (or perhaps all of these at different times). He was nonetheless present and thus directly implicated in the brutality inflicted on the Palawa peoples of Van Diemen’s Land in the first quarter century of settlement. My research and my sense of this Colonial era was, is and remains complex, contradictory – it feels at every turn dangerous, dishonest and impossibly oppressed, intricately contested. For this was as Henry Reynolds states, ‘one of the great tragedies of the early nineteenth century – the destruction of Aboriginal society in Van Diemen’s Land and Port Phillip and the demographic disaster which swept away men, women and children without distinction.’13 My conceptualisation of this historical place and time was disrupted and threatened because the traces of Jacob Mountgarrett in the archives provided no answers to adequately confirm or deny complicity, to resolve what kind of connection I have to this brutal past. My relationship is further complicated by the fact that this story is both part of the genocide14 of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people and part of their survival. The records of this poorly
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documented period, the first two decades of invasion of Van Diemen’s Land are unavoidably ‘in smithereens’15.
So began guessing games amidst the fragile facts and fraught fictions of this past that is ‘no gone thing’16.
Research issues arising: locating, tracking and orchestrating the research process.
Methodological Complexities: Intrinsic Theorising: Artistic Research: practice-based; practice-led and creative practice as research
This research began by questioning the ways that a visual narrative might be constructed to fold back across time - to reveal worthwhile aspects of the present from visual and material shadows of the past; to identify strategies by which these connections might be visually questioned without falsifying history to create contemporary meanings in ways denied to historians. As an artist engaged with narrative form, my research is fundamentally performative in both its production and audience reception. It follows a process of divergent textual, visual and material methodologies which assist the development of a personal language shaped by the disciplines and traditions of drawing and embroidery. These strategies generate more ‘enquiries’ to be tested visually and materially returning repeatedly at numerous stages to critical and textual sources to address various questions and to drive the wider research process further. The trajectory is an open and adaptable circularity with creative practice as its core concern reliant on both tacit knowledge as much as invention as required at various points to negotiate the unexpected creative practice research questions that arise. Consequently my methodologies are continually adapted, informed, challenged, re- directed, and motivated by way of an unpredictable process; a contingent, performative practice driven by a methodology that proceeds from practice. As such my creative practice is an ‘attention to the process of creativity’17 as defined by Merleau-Ponty. It is a form of inquiry into the phenomena of visual narrative through artistic, material and aesthetic means. This creative practice-based methodology conceives research as an enactive space of living enquiry; a
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performative, material ‘making visible/tangible’ production of meaning. According to Barrett and Bolt:
the innovative and critical potential of practice-based research lies in its capacity to generate personally situated knowledge and new ways of modelling and externalising such knowledge while at the same time, revealing philosophical, social and cultural contexts for the critical intervention and application of knowledge outcomes.18
Further they refer to knowledge that arises through intuitive understanding closely related to Bourdieu’s theories of a logic of practice, of ‘being in the game’19 where strategies are not pre-determined but emerge and operate according to specific actions and movements in time.
Brad Haseman on the other hand argues the case for practice-led research where:
researchers construct experiential starting points from which practice follows. They tend to ‘dive-in’, to commence practicing to see what emerges. They acknowledge that what emerges is individual and idiosyncratic… they eschew the constraints of narrow problem setting and rigid methodological requirements at the outset of a project. The second characteristic of practice-led researchers lies in their insistence that research outputs and claims to knowing must be made through the symbolic language and forms of their practice.20
This quote from Haseman, is a reasonable approximation of the unruly nature of my research practice which is located in the kind of largely experiential research process he describes. It suggests a certain fearless intent – of diving in and also identifies the importance of the symbolic, visual, material and formal character of my practice. But the qualification of my research as practice-led is not a model I have adopted. Nor do I propose a methodology framed by Barrett and Bolt’s concept of practice-based research. Both models identify key aspects of my methodology but do not adequately embrace the totality of the process which is located across and between both methodological models. My practice is neither framed nor orchestrated in an orderly, direct, coherent no didactic relationship with the early colonial period of history I have identified for my research. There is
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no neat linear chronological view across two hundred years - my present to a distant problematic past inhabited by ghosts that trouble my family tree. A practice-based or practice-led tightly organised and specifically focused model could not adequately manage the vagaries of extant evidence that partly guides the creative practice with its own unpredictable, nuanced re-directions and the materially problematic complexity and inconsistencies – its particular and peculiar for of material thinking following Paul Carter’s work of the same name.21
A key inherent problem with this historical subject and of identifying a methodological model to address it was my relationship to the subject across time in tandem with a creative practice as research process. An answer lay in the issue of conceptualising the concept of time as a means of acknowledging my relationship with this difficult unresolved history.
John Berger22 has noted, that although we know time chronologically according to the inherited 19th century axiom that time, at least on a historical scale, flows in a linear and consistently incontestable, objectively measured way, ‘the notion of a uniform time within which all events can be temporally related depends on the synthesizing capacity of a mind’.23 Berger argues that regardless of the diurnal motion of the earth, the changes of seasons, the sequence of clocks, we subjectively experience time as different intensities at different durations. ‘We face at the start a phenomenological problem. We are obliged to begin with a conscious experience’.24 Because our lived sense of time is uneven and far from smoothly measured, we perceive time duration differently – both intensely and superficially regardless of indifferent objective measure. Berger argues that time is experienced, ‘as two dynamic processes’ neither of which relate to a uniformly measured lived experience. Time he asserts is a product of ‘accumulation (a depth or density of experience) and dissipation (a still, regular, uniform flow of time). There may be a sense in which time does not sweep all before it; to assert that it did was a specifically nineteenth-century article of faith.’25 Berger’s proposition in relation to time as a phenomenological concept has allowed me to recognise a different categorisation for my research methodology – one that is subjectively
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oriented and thus different from the established models within the discipline of history which enables me to negotiate the historical content of the narrative through a contemporary, creative and subjective perspective. Paul Carter proposes a similar model where imagination, invention and creativity are all involved with creative practice as research as a given.26 Both Berger’s and Carter’s perspectives accommodate the ways in which my visual narrative resists a smooth linear movement and folds repeatedly back across time, marking the fluid relationships between past and present so that visual and material links between them may reveal worthwhile aspects of the present from the shadows of the past.
The model of creative practice that Carter refers to is, I believe most usefully described by Graeme Sullivan27 as Intrinsic Theorising: Artistic Research. Sullivan’s research tracks some of the debates and arguments of recent decades that began a complex process of defining the inherent character of a range of models in what came to be called creative practice as research which emerged over four decades ago as a new and distinctly different methodological form of practice. Since these arguments follow a trajectory that is close to my own navigation of the methodological conundrums of locating my process-based practice, I use them as the basis for defining my methodology here.
Recognition of Creative Practice as Research
The problem of defining creative process based research has a long history which according to Carol Gray, ‘began to emerge in the 1970s and early 1980s when first generation pioneering artists and designers saw the potential for exploring and developing practice through the process and framework of higher degrees.28
By the 1990s, this had become a distinct emergent field of academic research in the arts and humanities. As a new field of research a rigorous process of classification to attain legitimacy was required, ‘in response to the cult of accountability moving relentlessly through most Western systems of higher education.’29 An early working party committee report from the UK Council for Graduate Education in 1997, convened by Sir Christopher Frayling stated, that ‘the practice-based doctorate advances knowledge partly by means of practice’ (Italics in the original)
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and further argued that ‘the doctoral characteristics of originality, mastery and contribution to the field are held to be demonstrated through the original creative work. Additionally, defined, the research must include, ’a substantial contextualisation of the creative work.’30 This was intended to identify how the originality of the project could be claimed and what the scholarly contribution might be.31 The report followed a previous framework devised by Frayling in 1993 and set in train the subsequent debates about the definitions, parameters and criteria for determining the exact nature of Doctoral research in the creative arts. The scope of the debates that have ensued in the process of defining distinctive forms of creative arts research enquiry undertaken by practitioners in the arts and humanities is far too complex and drawn out for the scope of this exegetical introduction which aims only to locate my own methodology. My intention here is to selectively nominate those authors in addition to Haseman and Barrett and Bolt, who have I have identified through an extensive process of research of the field and who have articulated definitions that, I believe, best match my own forms of research enquiry.
Maarit Makela and Sara Routarienne32 define practice-led research as that in which artistic processes play a primary role in the impetus of the research which are then contextualised by other theoretical, conceptual, cultural and historical perspectives. They argue that in contrast to other established disciplines and fields of research such as health-care, where making is consequent to theory in the research enquiry and is defined as practice-based research, ‘in the field of practice-led research, praxis has a more essential role: making is conceived to be the driving force behind the research and in certain modes of research is also the creator of ideas’.33 In other words, they redefine importantly, the usual research paradigm of data collection in practice-led research as data creation. I consider this aspect of their definition of practice-led research as the most valuable for my own practice as praxis which engages traditional artists research data gathering methods such as sketchbooks and preparatory drawings as data creation. However, I also consider a practice-led definition problematic as it implies that the practice comes first followed by a critical knowledge outcome which is not necessarily the case.
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On the other hand, practice-based research is equally but differently problematic in relation to my praxis because it implies that making is consequent to theory in the research enquiry which is also not the case. By following Heidegger, I understand praxis here to mean, a form of material thinking in the sense of a mode of knowing which usually arises during active thinking-doing as practice but not necessarily always prior to subsequent propositional discourse and articulation. My understanding here aligns closely with that of others previously mentioned such as Paul Carter (2004); Barbara Bolt in Barrett and Bolt (2010) and Graeme Sullivan (2010) for example.
Henck Borgdorff, I believe provides the most useful framework by grouping ontological, epistemological and methodological characteristics of research in the arts as practice as research inferring that artistic practice is an essential aspect of both the research process and the research results. He argues that:
Art practice qualifies as research if its purpose is to expand our knowledge and understanding by conducting an original investigation in and through art objects and creative processes. Art research begins by addressing questions that are pertinent in the research context and the art world. Researchers employ experimental and hermeneutic methods that reveal and articulate the tacit knowledge that is situated and embodied in specific artworks and artistic processes. Research processes and outcomes are documented and disseminated in an appropriate manner to the research community and the wider public.34
So as a result of traversing these debates I have determined that via Carter (2004), Bolt (2010), Makela and Routarienne (2006), Borgdorff (2006) and Sullivan (2010) that my understanding of and engagement with the ontological, epistemological and methodological characteristics of research in the arts are best described clearly as practice as research since ‘artistic practice is an essential component of both the research process and the research results’.35 The open and varied practice of researchers in the arts, myself included, is best recognised for its fundamental value as selectively free-ranging, actively and materially engaged critical processes whose divergent outcomes are valuable and different. Or as Sullivan (2010) argues, it seems better to ‘publicly proclaim and profile outstanding examples of
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contemporary art practice as research that confound narrow prescriptions and exemplify the breadth of how visual arts contribute to cultural production in the broadest possible sense.’36 Given the strength of these arguments I have adapted Sullivan’s terminology of contemporary art practice as research to describe and locate my research as creative practice as research because the term creative acknowledges and underlines the individually variable but legitimate valency of the term creative as a key element within an adaptable methodology. I agree with Peter Hill who proposes that creative practice as research inquiry does not so much require a disciplined methodology, ‘as (a methodology) that (artists) discover and use to develop their own visual language, a personal methodology that is disciplined according to its own internal structure.’37 It is evidently contemporary practice and so, unnecessary to re-state the current nature of the practice and since it creatively engages visual and material forms in multiple, complex dimensionalities the concept of this as a form of visual language as ‘art’ is intrinsic. Creative practice as research is also a term used by Frayling (1997) who located the nature of this type of practice in the 1990s and it has been used often in locating practice models in the UK since the 1990s. As a succinct and recognised term I have used it to locate my practice within the wider field of research methodologies.
Additional Terminologies and Critical/Theoretical Location of Research
Initially, my research position in relation to this history was to use the term First Australians to acknowledge the sovereignty of the dispossessed Palawa Nations38 denied justice for more than 200 years as the term adopted by Langton, Perkins39 and other Aboriginal authors, artists and historians. I use the term Palawa40 even though it is a contested term amongst the First Nations communities of present day Tasmania, it nonetheless represents the most commonly used designation approved by a majority of community members and the wider Tasmanian non- indigenous population. Greg Lehman argues that:
The process of colonisation resulted in gross dispossession, disempowerment and disruption to traditional Aboriginal culture, making it sometimes difficult for observers to recognise the expression of that culture in a contemporary setting, or
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understand why Tasmanian Aboriginal communities struggled since European invasion to reassert our identity rather than succumb to forces that sought to assimilate us. One of the terms Tasmanian Aboriginal people used when referring to themselves was 'Palawa'.41
This descriptor of Aboriginal identity was of course a matter for the various communities concerned and by using the term Palawa I am endeavouring to adopt a respectful position that acknowledges indigenous identity and sovereignty. Its use is not intended to valorise one community over others nor is the term intended to verify any claims to legitimate descent or otherwise.
I prefer to avoid the usual designation of ‘white’ or ‘black’ Australian as this proposes notions of simplistic binary opposites. Furthermore each has semantic and political implications - each is a fundamentally racist term designating a dominant ‘white’ hegemony and ‘black’ as ‘other’ and is thus a culturally imperialist term of domination. While these were the terms used by the settlers and are reflective of the divisiveness that characterised the relationships between the cultural groups of settler and Palawa during the period, they are only used where necessary to maintain a coherent meaning in the exegesis. The numerous designations of various clan names of Palawa peoples of Tasmania are also used sparingly as well as there is little confirmation of accuracy of many of these names.42 Consequently I have resorted to the use of either Palawa or geographical definitions such as Oyster Bay or Big River Tribes where regional Tasmanian First Nations identities are important to the narrative. Where authors use other terms in quotations I have of course, allowed their terminology to remain.
Subsequently this locates my identity socially and politically as a non-indigenous Australian to acknowledge and reflect my subjective position before this past; to emphasise a problematic and respectfully separate identity as a fourth generation settler descendant ‘Australian’. I prefer this term to ‘Anglo-Celtic’ or ‘European Australian’, since to claim a direct identity four or five generations distant from an Irish or Scottish heritage would be, I believe, a flawed expression of a contrived social and historical consciousness. While I am mindful, of Nicolacopoulos and
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Vassilacopoulos’43 arguments regarding the necessity for non-indigenous Australians’ acknowledgement of their ontological positions as being from elsewhere genealogically, this does not, I believe, deny my fourth generation, Australian born individual sense of being as - a non-indigenous Australian where First Australian sovereignty is acknowledged. This research represents my own attempts, as a non-indigenous Australian artist, to both express and understand my relationship and identity in respect of this unresolved and painful history. I consider this to be a culturally important strategy as a means of presenting alternative positions which challenge the dominant received history that continues to be constrained by socially defined binaries of opposition. Diverse personal experiences of encountering contradictory evidence from the past are a valuable tool to unsettle the received histories and dominant settler narratives.
I have also located my practice variously in comparison to works by other artists whose research addresses similar positions in respect of fraught histories and longstanding, unresolved cultural conflicts. A close consideration of the respective practices and works by William Kentridge44, Rozanne Hawkesley45 and Julie Gough46 that negotiate and interpret fraught histories of trauma, are drawn into focus and are considered in relation to the ways they inform and locate my own practice. Their works as encounters or events, as various forms of performative ‘historying’ as Greg Dening proposed47, are sites therefore of varying kinds of subjectivities, of subjective involvement and as sites of meaning making at odds with a disciplined approach to history. Each adopts a form of bearing witness – as Kentridge describes as Trauerarbeit, a kind of grief work’.48
I focus upon the process of reading or interpretation by which a subject constructs a relationship with the past in the present via forms and cues that are incomplete or unravelled as are the facts of this history which might valuably be reconsidered through a performative encounter with the past. Consequently, a key aspect of the research is its intention is to engage, extend and repeatedly question our understanding of the era through the performative aspects of the research process which produce the reading of the work. This involves the enactive nature of the process which begins as a transitive verb through my actions upon the visual and
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material forms in the process of reading/making the works and concludes with an affect – an intransitive verb which, if these research outcomes are to attain a legitimate status as creative practice, as a ‘completed performance’ they must attain an effect or meaning with an audience. Reading here is used to suggest any form of engagement with a ‘text’ – whether the ‘text’ be an art-work as image or other two dimensional creative work as drawing, print or three dimensional forms and the spatial illusions of shadow play or even that of reading landscape and country. This is the process of reading or interpretation that brings into focus something of our own making where meaning is drawn from the text.
Performative Aspects of the Research Process
This exegesis explores the difficulties of locating and containing this dependant, subjective relationship with the past given our connection to and understanding of this history is entwined with concepts of identity, country and nationality and emerges from these relationships. These relationships influence and frame any readings of both the past and the work about this history. I consider that it is this process that ideally must be questioned and navigated first before wider considerations of social, political and economic dynamics can be negotiated. I am concerned with the ways by which a ‘subject’ constructs a relationship with the history/past where the history is presented as forms or cues that are fragmented and uncertain, lacking in coherence – similar to the way history is encountered in the archives where the contradictions and inconsistencies between scattered evidence is at odds with a seamless and ordered metanarrative. So that what cannot be adequately corroborated must be re-considered, questioned, unravelled, re-gathered and re- arranged repeatedly because of the contradictory incoherence of the historic records – both the official documents and oral histories. My practice is framed by the ways in which I can identify and generate tangible visual and material forms by drawing upon various archival sources and on-site research at historic sites. It is further propelled by the emergent visual and material translations of archival evidence through creative studio based practice in combination conjure a perception of place as circumstance in time from the evanescent illusions and ambiguous spaces of history. The details of this process
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are elaborated in Chapters 2 and 5. The ways in which these forms operate in coded socially constructed conventions towards visual narratives shapes my creative practice. Bill Ashcroft, Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredin conceptualise place albeit in relation to landscape in Saussurian terms as ‘The equivalent of parole – utterance itself – rather than the potentiality of utterance that is space. Place, we might say is uttered into being and maintained by narrative and image.’49 As previously mentioned my creative practice is also informed by and located relation to Nicolacopoulos’ and Vassilacopoulos’ (2014) ontological conceptualising of identity as beings with a non-sovereign relationship to communities of place within an Australian nationality.
Consequently, the missing details necessary to draw upon to substantiate, enlarge and locate my particular relationships to these ghostly historical figures, Mountgarrett’s compatriots, as part of this period beyond silhouettes has sustained overarching doubts throughout this research process that any form of legitimate Academic research practice was possible. These ghosts have troubled the ontological domains of creative practice – refusing even shadow, resisting even a sense of space in which to place them. Avoiding the nostalgic or clichéd outcomes has been problematic throughout especially as the materiality of these works includes textile. This will be addressed in detail in Chapters 2, 4 and 5.
To navigate the often contradictory nature of the fragmentary evidence in regard to this era and in order to locate a methodological model by which to assess the plausibility of any likely interpretations, I have adopted a strategy that historian Nicholas Clements adopted for his recent Doctoral research – the ‘abduction’ model used by philosophers. I have adopted this methodology because Clements has applied it successfully to an almost identical era and setting in the history of the emergent Colony.50 Abductive reasoning is a type of inference that aims to identify the most likely explanation based on the extant evidence by working through a process of selection from a range of plausible explanations. Clements argues that this presents ‘a superior type of parsimony, explanatory power and congruity with background data (historical context and accompanying evidence).’51 Most significantly, the conclusions that might be drawn don’t necessarily follow from the
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initial premises however there should not be any logical inconsistencies. Abductive reasoning based on conclusions drawn from reliable premises differs from Inductive reasoning in that it can only be ranked by way of an imprecise scale of probability. Like Clements’ abductive model, I have used terminology that suggests varying levels of plausibility ranging from unlikely and questionable, to possible and perhaps or might and likely to most likely to and almost certainly lastly undoubtedly. Numerous historical texts have made assertions that have recently proven to be incorrect with more detailed analyses and closer questioning of the extant archival records. These will be identified in due course in relation to these particular subjects. Other evidence is questioned based upon the absence of clear evidence particularly where an abductive method suggests that certainty is at best an unreliable assumption and therefore unlikely.
Coherent narratives of the daily lives and common circumstances of these individuals I might attempt to create despite the fragmentary evidence risked being tenuously contrived or stereotypical and shallow. As Alison Ravenscroft states, the archives and resources I was reliant upon were not neutral sites of evidence – they too have narrative form albeit one that has been created by omissions and silences
– both wilfully constructed and accidentally accrued.52
Greg Dening too argues that, ‘archives and museums are mirrors of power and cosmologies’:53
All history… is no inert text. The past is transformed not once and for all, in a simple act of historical expression. The meanings in the expression are never stable or frozen at their moment of expression. They are always added to and embroidered by the very continuity and preservation of the text. Their continuity and preservation is always a cultural act in itself, done in institution and ceremony, done in technology, done in the very forms and structures of the text as a cultural thing.54
A reanalysis of extant evidence in historic records and archives – the top down authoritarian view, has recently informed many non-indigenous signed alternative narratives of this history, from literature, theatre and the arts in general. This
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critical reconsideration of fixed singular narratives emerged during the era of mnemonic concern that was prevalent at the end of the last century, partly in response to the remembering generated by the Bicentenary celebrations of 1988 and the subsequent History Wars was an aspect of a change in what Chris Healy has described as the Forgetting of Aborigines.55 However, these narratives also signal that the process of adequately addressing the complexities of long embedded myopic attitudes to the past remain unresolved. These issues will be addressed in Chapters 3 and 4. In the half century since the publication of anthropologist, W.E.H. Stanner’s resonant and powerful writings about ‘the Great Australian silence’, particularly the 1968 ABC Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming,56 little has changed in respect of the ways that the narrative of Australia’s history is presented. As Ann Curthoys argues, the narrative of how Australian history ‘came to be … has become a little too simple.57 She argues that the history is in fact far more complex. That the presentation of largely stereotypical identities continues, framed by simplistic binary contrasts of British authority, convict/shepherd or Native characters and circumstances. Chris Healy has also identified evidence in unresolved aspects of postcolonialism, that he terms Forgetting Aborigines (2008) in ongoing habits of selective remembering and amnesia – ‘the repressive cult of forgetfulness’ that Stanner identified, that has continued well beyond the 1970s into the present.
In the face of this problematic history and heritage, I was left with little more than a notorious and latterly destitute, one-armed Irish surgeon and Miss Dalrymple the heroic suitably Christianised mixed race child/woman of Palawa and British parentage. These caricatures, determined by the archives and the history texts, were obvious clichés, simplified distortions created by the epistemological dichotomies of the dominant history fraught with contradictions. As Homi Bhabha asserts, ‘It is recognizably true that the chain of stereotypical signification is curiously mixed and split, polymorphous and perverse, an articulation of multiple belief.’58 And as Edward Said argues in Orientalism, his classic ground breaking analysis of Western colonial epistemologies, ‘Representations are formations or as
Roland Barthes has said of the operations of all language, they are deformations.’59
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It was apparent from the early stages of the research that stereotypical typecast models were dangerously easy solutions that risked distorting otherwise plausible and credible (albeit imagined) characters. It was however, Lynette Russell’s viewpoint which most interested me when she states that:
… these epistemological dichotomies have fostered a number of overly simple interpretive paradigms. These include invasion and resistance; resistance and accommodation, acculturation and defiance, and so on. These heuristic devices based on imagined dichotomies categorise the world into a comprehendible black and white pseudo-reality, simplifying and homogenizing complexity, variability and uncertainty.60
I was faced with the hermeneutics of these translations as a problematic complex of tensions – that of history as evanescent, a fundamentally unstable conceptualisation; a balancing process between a subjective, personal and creative interpretation and the curb (as Dening calls it) of authority that the individual and collective meanings created be public and conventional.61 There seemed no way to identify evidence to shape an legitimately alternative yet coherent narrative even one in relation to Dening’s notion of historying62 - the creative process of writing true stories about the past.
Historying is a moral act in more ways than one. History is the past transformed into words or paint or music or play – is our noun. Historying is our verb-noun. Historying is the unclosed action of making histories. History is closed, shaped, a product. Historying is process, never done, dialectic, dialogic.63
With too few secure facts, no evidence without dangerously frayed edges; or relics that were not tainted by the codes of authority, I had no reliable metaphoric life- rafts nor life lines on a sea of anxiety. I was however mindful of what Ross Gibson argues, that history should be encountered ‘without a shut-up proof that concludes the tale’.64 Yet without a definitive and rigorously purposeful methodology, let alone substantial historical evidential foundations to work with, I remained anxious, adrift and unable to frame a concise connection, legitimate purpose or relationship to this impossibly distant past – to this ‘sad and bloody business’.65
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Conceptual Organisation of the Exegesis
Chapter 2 – Guessing Games in Borrowed Spaces locates the precedents for the creative practice as research and identifies the ontological and epistemological objectives of the research methodologies. Beginning with an emphasis upon incomplete visual narratives as versions of Lyotard’s post-modern concept of little narratives as alternatives to the established meta-narratives of the dominant historiographies, the individually devised, contingent and performative creative practice methodologies are further addressed by means of theories of Merleau- Ponty, Bourdieu and Barrett and Bolt. The problematic historic record is considered by way of critical analyses of Nicholas Thomas’ antagonistic intimacies and Ravenscroft and Boyce’s acknowledgement of the need to recognize individual complicity in relation to our collective history. This is further elaborated in relation to the value and potential of disciplines other than history to address the aporias and uncertainties of the problematic historic record. The research is further positioned in relation to the precedents set by other contemporary artists’ practices – William Kentridge; Rozanne Hawkesley and Julie Gough who have similarly engaged diverse forms of Freud’s grief work and von Zinnenberg-Carroll’s work of Art as a means of bearing witness when addressing complex colonial histories. Lastly the value and significance of accepting the concept of doubt and agnotology as necessarily influential aspects of the research practice and the related issues and problematic difficulties that arise from the consequential inconclusive, finite research outcomes are acknowledged and contextualised.
Chapter 3 – Navigating Tensions: fraught fictions and fragile facts addresses the historiographies that background the research. Close consideration is given to the construction and function of contrasting nationalist mythologies by way of conceptual analyses of Gibson, Reynolds, Neumann and Morrissey. This discussion is backgrounded by consideration of long-standing habits, as Healey describes, of remembering and forgetting of our collective history contextualised by Stanner’s Great Australian Silence and Curthoy’s four stages of settler narratives. The most
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recent debates of the Australian History Wars are addressed, including Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Australian History, as part of the post-structuralist challenges to established historicism that emerged after the Second World War and intensified during the closing decade of the last century. The psychological and ontological-pathological grief of these conflicting problematic narratives are considered in relation to Langton’s analysis of perceptions of presence/absence of indigenous Australians by non-indigenous Australians and Nicolacopoulos’ and Vassilicopoulos’ arguments regarding the disturbed and unresolved epistemological relationship of non-indigenous Australians to place through the disavowal of indigenous sovereignty. Lastly, the assumptions of binary inter-cultural trafficking and antagonistic intimacies that Thomas ascribes to established perceptions of indigenous and non-indigenous historic relationships are challenged by way of Russell and Clement’s plausible assertion that relationships between ordinary individuals were not simplistic stereotypical dichotomous conflicts but were in fact far more complex as Hansen also argues.
Chapter 4 – Apprenticed to Ghosts: accountable for mending shadows. In relation to the complex historiography and mythologising of the past two hundred years, this chapter contextualises and elaborates plausible prosopographies of the particular historic characters central to the research despite each being largely absent from the major historical meta-narratives. Detailed consideration is given in to their probable circumstances that might be gleaned and envisaged in relation to the complex and frequently contradictory settler narratives as analysed by Curthoys, Lehmann and Thomas amongst others. Additionally this contextualisation is considered in light of Ravenscroft’s concept of the post-colonial eye/I and my own problematic subjective relationship to this era. Each character is further considered in light of extant contradictory settler narrative versions of their lives drawn from the archives which are at times conflicted distortions of their likely historic circumstances. These narratives are also considered in respect of the problematic issues and potential distortions that arise from a contemporary non- indigenous interpretative lens reporting without evidence, the experience of
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colonisation by indigenous peoples. Recent evidence that has emerged as part of the scholarly reconsideration of this colonial era as outcomes of the History Wars that casts doubt on the record and circumstance of these historic characters is engaged throughout.
Chapter 5 – Between the sightlines – fragile facts and fraught fictions
Addresses the operations of the initial creative practice research in tandem with archival and museum artefact investigations. The strategies by which the creative practice as research methodologies and outcomes were initiated by means of traditional artist’s sketchbooks and on-site research at specific historic sites are addressed. The related contingent studio research practices of drawing and embroidery devised and located between wider research within the historic archives, museum and art gallery collections as well as national mythologies, theory and practice are explained.
The processes of integration of the fragmentary, problematic circumstantial historiographical ‘evidence’ as outlined in the previous chapters, are identified and elaborated by means of subjective interpretations and theoretical analysis. The operations of uncertain creative practice on location at specific historic sites, museum and art gallery observational studies and sound recordings in Ireland, the UK and Europe and in the studio as an emergent reflective research process and methodology to enfold the past into the present are elaborated.
The studio based research is further located by means of Ravenscroft and Taussig’s propositions of the importance of doubt and uncertainty in the process of navigating the field of research. This chapter also revisits Bourdieu’s theories of practice and works by Kentridge, Hawkesley and Gough identified in Chapter 2. Additionally, the theoretical analysis of von Zinnenberg-Carroll’s sidelong glance, Dening’s concept of historying and Foley’s concept of the presence/absence of evidence, Gibson’s ‘what if’ scenarios, Sullivan’s ‘messy resistance’ of creative practice all enlarged and confirmed the directions, and at times the circularity and
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eventual arc of the research methodologies. The design of the concluding installation and use of shadow-play as informed by a number of complementary conceptual frameworks are also addressed. Salber-Phillips four basic dimensions of mediating distance – formal, affective, summoning and conceptual; Stewart’s propositions in regards collections of objects and Petherbridge’s shared interpretation of Heidegger’s handlung in relation to drawing that underpins the practice and the importance of the fragment throughout the twentieth century arts practice as a key aspect contemporary creative research are identified in relation to the research. Berger’s ideas of the experience of time as addressed in Chapter 1 are aligned with Gibson’s concepts of narrative as an interplay of the episodic and semantic and Carter’s ideas of dark writing conclude the analysis and contextualization of the installation as the creation of a subjective immersive ‘field’ to challenge the viewer to consider the possibility of many little narratives of the past in the present.
Conclusion: Antagonistic Intimacies - Remembering / Forgetting –
The concluding Chapter revises and summarizes the complexity of the research process as both visual and material forms as a body of work and as invisible patterns of thinking which were closely informed by the foundational historiographies and related recent scholarship of the early Australian colonial period. This final chapter identifies the original contribution and outcome of the creative practice as research, as an open process of critical, personally situated investigation and scholarly critique, within the histories and current critical debates around the frontier wars and the habits and agendas of Remembrance. This chapter also identifies further potential research directions that have emerged and will be pursued. As exhibition and thesis it asserts its legitimacy as research demonstrating the generation, modelling and externalising of new knowledge to acknowledge the unresolved contradictions and errors in the ways we relate to and think about the larger narratives from the past on which our perceptions of the present and future are based.
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1 Bird Rose, Deborah. ‘Introduction: Into the Wild’ in Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for De- Colonisation, Sydney: New South Publishing, 2004 p. 1 2 Australian Dictionary of Biography http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mountgarrett-jacob-2486 accessed October 2015 3 Australian Dictionary of Biography http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dalrymple-dolly-12877 accessed October 2015 4 The Companion to Tasmanian History http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/W/Woretem.htm accessed October 2015 5 The Companion to Tasmanian History http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/M/Mannalargenna.htm accessed October 2015 6 Briggs, George in Australian Dictionary of Biography http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dalrymple- dolly-12877 accessed October 2015 ; Gough, Julie. George Briggs Bass Strait ‘sealer’ https://georgebriggsbassstraitsealer.wordpress.com/ accessed October 2015 7 Kelly, James First Discovery of Port Davey and Macquarie Harbour http://eprints.utas.edu.au/15826/ accessed October 2015 8 Worete.moete.yenner. The Companion to Tasmanian History op.cit 9 Extensive research through ghostly lines of PRONI microfiche and Parish Records in PRONI Belfast, Registry of Deeds, Dublin and the National Archives, Kew, UK, few reliable traces were found - only Belfast Linen Hall documents (that contradict the Australian Dictionary of Biography) and a detailed family tree dating from 1800 provided to us by a relative who frightened my mother because of his uncanny resemblance to my long deceased father. 10 Clements, Nicholas. The Black War. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2014. p. 4 11 Mountgarrett, Jacob. Australian Dictionary of Biography. op.cit 12 Mountgarrett, Jacob. Shaping Tasmania: A Journey in 100 Objects, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. http://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/object.aspx?ID=20 accessed October 2015 13 Reynolds, Henry. George Augustus Robinson in Van Diemen’s Land: Race, Status and Religion in Reading Robinson: Companion Essays to Friendly Mission, Johnston, Anna; Rolls, Mitchell. (eds.) Hobart: Quintus Publishing. 2008 p. 169 14 Curthoys, Ann. Disputing National Histories: Some Recent Australian Debates. Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol. 1 No 1, March 2006 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/TfC http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/TfC/article/viewFile/187/134 accessed October 2015 15 Gibson, R. Places Past Disappearance. Transformations 13-1 (2006). http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml accessed October 2015 16 Dening, Greg. Performing Cross-Culturally in The Australian Journal of American Studies, 2006, Vol.25. no. 2, p. 6 17 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’ in Johnson, G. (ed.). 1993. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting pp. 76-120. M. Smith (Trans.). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1952) 18 Barrett, Estelle, Barbara Bolt,. (eds) Chapter 1, Introduction. Practice As Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. London: I.B.Tauris. 2005. p. 2 19 Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. 1990. p. 92 Bourdieu’s theory of ‘being in the game’ is also described as a process of making, ‘caught up in the ‘matter at hand’, totally present in the present and in the practical functions that it finds there in the form of objective potentialities, practice excludes attention to itself (that is to the past). It is unaware of the principles that govern it and the possibilities they contain; it can only discover them by enacting them, unfolding them in time. op.cit. p. 92-3 20 Haseman, Brad. A Manifesto for Performative Research. Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, theme issue "Practice-led Research"(no. 118) 2004 p. 4 http://eprints.qut.edu.au/3999/1/3999_1.pdf accessed October 2015
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21 Carter, Paul. Material Thinking: The theory and practice of creative research. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Publishing, 2004. p. 7-10. 22 Berger, John. Selected Essays: John Berger, Geoff Dyer (ed.) First Vintage International Edition, 2003. p. 483 23 Berger. op.cit 24 Berger, op.cit 25 Berger. op.cit p. 484 26 Carter. op.cit 27 Sullivan, Graeme. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts. 2nd Edition, Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2010 28 Gray, Carol. Inquiry Through Practice: Developing Appropriate Research Strategies. 1996. http://carolegray.net/Papers%20PDFs/ngnm.pdf accessed October 2015 29 Sullivan. ibid. p. 77 30 UK Council for Graduate Education. Practice-Based Doctorates in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design. Prepared by a working group convened by Professor Christopher Grayling. 1997 31 Sullivan ibid. p. 77 32 Makela, M., and Routarienne. S.(eds.) The Art of Research: Practice in research of art and design. Helsinki, Finland: University of Art and Design Finland. 2006. 33 Makela and Routarienne, op.cit. p. 22 34 Borgdorff, Henck. The debate on research in the arts. Sensuous knowledge: Focus on artistic research and development, 2. Bergen, Norway: Kunsthogskolen Bergen National Academy of the Arts.2006. p. 23 35 Borgdorff. op.cit 36 Sullivan. ibid p. 80 37 Hill, Peter. Keeping It Visual: The Studio-Based PhD, Art Monthly #229, May 2010. p. 5 38 Lehmann, Greg. Palawa Identity, The Companion to Tasmanian History http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/P/Palawa%20Voice.htm 39 Langton, Marcia and Perkins, Rachel (eds.) First Australians: An Illustrated History. Carlton, Victoria: The Miegunyah Press, 2008 40 Calder, Graeme. Levee, Line and Martial Law. Hobart: Fullers Books. 2008. p. 289 41 Lehmann, Greg. ibid. http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/P/Palawa%20Voice.htm 42 Calder. op cit p. 289. 43 Nicolacopoulos, Toula and Vassilacopoulos, George. Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian Philosophy of Origins, re.press Melbourne. 2014. http://re-press.org/books/indigenous-sovereignty-and-the-being-of-the-occupier-manifesto-for-a- white- australian-philosophy-of-origins/ accessed October 2015 44 Kentridge, William. http://nga.gov.au/Kentridge/ accessed October 2015 45 Hawksley, Rozanne. http://www.rozannehawksley.com/ accessed July 2015 46 Gough, Julie. http://juliegough.net/ accessed July 2015 47 Dening, Greg. 2006 op.cit. p. 5 48 Villasenor, Maria. Associate Curator: Film and Media Arts. William Kentridge: Black Box/Chambre Noir. Exhibition - Deutscher Bank and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2006. http://www.deutsche-guggenheim.de/e/ausstellungen-kentridge01.php accessed October 2015 49 Ashcroft, Bill; Devlin-Glass, Frances and McCreddin, Lyn. Initiate Horizons: the Post Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature. Adelaide: ATF Press, 2009. p. 324 50 Clements, Nicholas. Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land. PhD Thesis. Hobart: University of Tasmania. 2014. p. 5-6 51 Clements. 2014. op.cit. p. 5 52 Ravenscroft, Alison. The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012. p. 17-18 53 Dening, Greg. Making a present out of the past: history’s anthropology, a Poetic for Histories. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. 1998. p. 43 54 Dening. op.cit. p. 42
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55 Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney, UNSW: University of New South Wales Press, 2008. p. 205 56 Stanner, W.E.H. The Dreaming and Other Essays. Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc Books. 2011 57 Curthoys. op.cit. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/TfC/article/viewFile/187/134 58 Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. 1994 p. 111 59 Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. p. 72 60 Russell, Lynette. Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790 – 1870. New York: State University of New York Press, 2012. p. 20 61 Dening, Greg. ibid. 2006. p. 52 62 Attributed to Katie Holmes by Dening. op.cit. 63 Dening. op.cit. 64 Gibson, Ross. Places Past Disappearance. Transformations 13 - 1 2006. 22 Feb. 2007 http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml accessed June 2015 65 Boyce, James. ”What Business Have you here?” In The First Australians: An Illustrated History, edited by Marcia Langton and Rachel Perkins. Carlton, Victoria: The Miegunyah Press, 2008. p. 65
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Chapter 2 - Guessing Games in Borrowed Places/Spaces
I am only an artist, my job is to make drawings not to make sense.
William Kentridge1
Invention is always born of dissention. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities: it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.
Jean-Francois Lyotard2
Precedents towards practice
I am not an illustrator of certain conclusions that a dominant triumphalist historical narrative demands. Nor am I an historian by discipline. My research can best be described as a kind of guessing game where meanings are sought through an on- going process of temporarily aligned visual elements that require a repetitive form of re-reading to generate shifting interpretations that engage doubt and uncertainty intentionally. Like Kentridge, my task is to make drawings and textiles not to make complete sense of history but rather to create what Lyotard described as an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’3 which presuppose a universal importance and applicability but which on the contrary, ‘are merely historically located opinions masquerading as universal truth.’4 As Justin Clemens would have it, Lyotard’s metanarratives are tall stories that manage to pass themselves off as
‘truth, justice and happiness for all’.5 My contention is that better understandings of the past that continues to influence the present can be sought in the spaces between the lines of the dominant histories and meta-narratives. The spaces which Lyotard calls the ‘little narratives’ remain the quintessential form of imaginative invention which might be conjured through creative practice as research.6
My primary research objective is to question the meta-narratives of the distant past, the top-down versions of history to locate and better understand my own relationship to my ancestor and to this history – a history that was many things but most importantly, a time of great but fragile possibility and lost opportunity for a
25 different future. My intention is to focus upon a form of introspection and subjective personal reflective uncertainty about plausible yet unstable events and relationships and through my particular research methodology to demonstrate a creative practice process as an idiosyncratic flexible model of research. Furthermore, while my research may have a potential to relate to wider disciplines and debates this is not specifically my intention. My research addresses my own relationship to the past for the present within an Australian cultural context. At the broadest levels of contemporary communicative and shared cultural practice, the longstanding habits and patterns of forgetting and remembering the dispossession of the First Nations Australian peoples and the on-going process of destruction of their ancient fragile high cultures over the following two centuries, continue to infect the present. The sustained effects of this brutal history continue to influence wide ranging attitudes and perspectives to this unresolved history across all aspects of Australian cultural life with problematic consequences for all Australians. Chris
Healy7 proposes that this is ‘remembering not as something complete but as a shifting, heterogeneous, partial, repetitive assemblage of acts, utterances and artefacts’.8
The period 1803 – 1823 was a brief two decades before the entire British colony of Van Diemen’s Land was transformed into a war-zone as more settlers took up land seeking to make themselves anew. Roving parties, officially sanctioned by the Governor, but officially illegal under British law, worked across the island ‘bounty- hunting’ Aborigines. Those few settlers who had earlier attained some language and understanding of the first Australians in Van Diemen’s Land were swept away by the projects of unscrupulous, ambitious individuals intent on making their own fortunes at any cost and by any means available.
I have explored a process of visual/material retelling of these fragile circumstances and dramatic change, to unsettle assumptions about this particular cultural landscape of the past for the present. This is a narrative that has been largely shaped and imposed by dominant cultural knowledge of non-indigenous Australians that assumes a conveniently framed singular story of invasion and dispossession that excused the genocide as an inevitable result of the encounter of a
26 technologically superior British culture that overwhelmed and displaced the original inhabitants. The stages in the development of these particular perspectives which anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described as the Great Australian Silence in 1968,9 have evolved over the two centuries since colonisation through non-indigenous attitudes and bias towards the First Australians. Stanner’s silence became a powerful form of cultural amnesia in the minds of non-indigenous Australians in a process of remembering and forgetting which Chris Healy argues10 remains evident in many respects in the present. These historiographic and recent debates of the History Wars that address this history and the related processes of forgetting and remembering this problematic past will be detailed in Chapter 3. The prosopography of these ghosts and their possible relationships and circumstances that might be gleaned and envisaged between the lines of the historic records will be considered in detail in Chapter 4. The ways in which these histories and the tangle of fragmented problematic circumstantial historic ‘evidence’ have informed and shaped the creative practice as research process and methodology will be addressed in Chapter 5.
Methodologies of creative practice to unsettle the past in the present
Through my own creative practice research historying as Dening proposes, I have investigated my problematic connection to a group of individuals largely absent from the major historical meta-narratives which has demanded a careful re- consideration of a past otherwise closed and silent. I have engaged a form of what
Lyotard refers to as the little narratives of post-modernity,11 which are free of claims that they are or will become true for everyone or everything as the model of meta-narrative suggests. However, these little narratives are presented for what they are: specifically and historically located stories albeit fragmentary. A meta- narrative is not a story – its overarching form rejects details and specifics of settings and place and aims only to propose a model that is true for absolutely everyone no matter who uses it – whereas a little narrative recognises its own ambitious fictional status and its particular details of place or context. Little to Lyotard is not a derogatory term. It is claimed only as a means to suggest that a multitude of little
27 narratives will allow for the possibility of justice through multiplicity and variety in details and settings.12
My investigations have involved the navigation of a complex period whose historical documents present conflicted, uncertain facts and demonstrable fictions that are further complicated by contemporary debates, common myths and stereotypes of remembrance. By engaging traditional artists’ studio-based research methods and well established strategies – such as sketchbooks and preliminary studies towards more complex sustained visual and material outcomes, I have investigated and creatively reflected upon the historiography and the established mythologies of remembrance and forgetting that Healy recognises, drawing upon and activating the few extant images, motifs and artefacts of the colonial period. These elements are combined in contrasting relationships towards visual and material interpretations that might enable a glimpse, albeit uncertain and incomplete representation of the ordinary lives and extraordinary circumstances of these individuals whose lives were played out in the escalating war-zone of Van Diemen’s Land in the first two decades of colonisation. However as Ravenscroft argues, the non-indigenous postcolonial eye/I is mine – ‘after all; its vision and blindness are my own.’13
My creative practice as research methodology primarily conceives research as a performative space of living enquiry; an encounter as an enactive participation of material ‘making visible/tangible’ and making meaning as Merleau-Ponty14, asserts. Barrett and Bolt elaborated this as a, ‘capacity to generate personally situated knowledge and new ways of modelling and externalising such knowledge’ 15 as previously considered in Chapter 1. This refers to knowledge that arises through intuitive understanding that guides performative processes closely related to, Bourdieu’s theories of a logic of practice, of ‘being in the game’ when:
[…]caught up in the ‘matter at hand’, totally present in the present and in the practical functions that it finds there in the form of objective potentialities, practice excludes attention to itself (that is to the past). It is unaware of the principles that govern it and the possibilities they contain; it can only discover them by enacting them, unfolding them in time.16
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Bourdieu’s game is one where strategies are not pre-determined but emerge and operate according to specific actions and movements in time as an active negotiation and even perhaps a negation, of habitus. Habitus, Bourdieu asserts is symbolic and accounts for the inculcated continuation and acceptance without question of the dominant culture ‘in the form of durable dispositions.’17 Bourdieu asserts habitus acts to:
[…]incorporate the objective structures of society and the subjective role of agents within it. The habitus is a set of dispositions, reflexes and forms of behaviour that people acquire through acting in society…It is part of how society produces itself.18
According to Bourdieu it is habitus which causes our collective disregard for our own history. Following Merleau-Ponty, Barrett, Bolt and Bourdieu, it is my contention that at the centre of creative practice research are epistemologically wordless affects that arise from the perception of complex two and three dimensional spaces and haptic materiality which also includes four dimensional temporalities within the process of researching, making and encountering artworks. As products of an intuitive, imaginative wide ranging enquiry that crosses disciplines, my creative practice is necessarily contingent, unpredictable, an often ambiguous yet insightful process. Wordless problematic affects are valuable signposts or markers towards determining strategies toward generating incomplete visual and material narrative outcomes – as partial episodic sequences and by engaging the semantic forms of artefacts. By activating this approach I aim to address the uncertainties, gaps and silences – the aporias of the dark histories of the first twenty-five years of Van Diemen’s Land. Both drawing and embroidery offer particular potential as conceptual, material and contingent vehicles to create contemporary meanings as works which re-interpret and re-align the formal genres; media and vocabularies of the early nineteenth century artworks. Portraits, landscapes, botanical and observational studies and history paintings have informed my research outcomes formally and aesthetically. Given the limited number of extant art works from this early Colonial period in Van Diemen’s Land, and because this is a proto-photographic era, I have further incorporated single objects and
29 artefacts drawn from the Museum and Archives of the era specifically as a means of visually contextualising each character to suggest their respective backgrounds and circumstances. For example, I have created a type of artist’s book/sketchbook for each character which presents particular objects as fragments arranged in random sequences and combinations to establish a repertoire of symbols and signs toward individual portraits. These artist’s book/sketchbooks as a visual resource established a lexicon of elements that created ambiguous visual meanings as both semantic elements and subsequently in varied combinations created contrasting episodic little narratives throughout the body of work (Plate 1).
Using an innovative process of creative practice as research with drawing and embroidery as key drivers of a contingent and performative methodology, closely informed by historical sources and archival materials, I have re-presented otherwise overlooked events and individual lives of this era as an incomplete visual narrative which challenges an audience to reconsider the dominant top down versions of the colonial era framed by historical records. The resulting body of work as installation suggests, by way of fragmentary imagery, commonplace objects and drawing and textile as particular material forms immersed in shifting shadows, the circumstances that ordinary individuals living through the upheavals and escalating cross-cultural violence of Van Diemen’s Land in the first twenty five years of the colony most likely experienced and responded to. A viewpoint to date largely excluded from the narratives of history.
In these ways, I aim to make drawings and embroideries that are like unfinished sentences that remain strange and incomplete. To acknowledge the extent of what we cannot know aside from the dominant history, for the first twenty-five years of Van Diemen’s Land has left little more than fragments and scraps from the historic record. What facts and testaments remain are mainly found in the official archives - books and documents, shaped by the spy-glass lens of the powerful settler’s view. Other voices are silent or close to whispers between the lines and in the spaces inscribed by this spy-glass circle – hidden in plain view.19
Accumulating identity: acknowledging origins20
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Consequently, what is fundamental to this creative practice as research is a questioning of visual narrative, premised upon the fact of the resilience of diverse forms of visual storytelling. Its longevity across all cultures and centuries strongly suggests it is fundamental to human culture, a basic human need which may convey aspects of lived experience which can become part of an individual’s knowledge. Both drawing and embroidery have longstanding histories as vital and significant forms of visual narrative and this research draws upon that history in shaping this research.21 It is as much a ‘story’ communicated as it is a narrative that can operate as part of the construction and maintenance of an individual’s world. By way of drawing and embroidery as contingent practices, my aim is to present possibilities from uncertainties - visual narratives tinged with doubt that place the viewer in an interpretive space which relies upon a connection with the viewer’s own cultural conditioning for comprehension. Presenting contradictory visual clues and extant material evidence may also point to the value of flaws and fractures in generating ambiguous meanings to question the dominant historiography already under pressure from historians in recent decades.22 This process of doubt also requires the viewer to manage an inconsistent visual narrative – sequences of imagery with gaps in their meanings so that the works may suggest the unbridgeable gaps in understanding that generated fraught and brutal relationships between non- indigenous and indigenous Australians from the beginning of colonisation and that continue to haunt our shared cultural domains despite more than two hundred years.
Both Alison Ravenscroft and James Boyce identify the need for us to acknowledge and accept the extent of these gaps in understanding – the nature of what we do not and cannot know of both the historical and the indigenous cultural landscapes.23 As W.E.H. Stanner reported many decades ago, as previously noted, there are things in Aboriginal cultures that cannot be known, that representation is only partial and incomplete: some things necessarily escape representation. ‘A silence and gaps must be allowed to remain, the silence into which things must fall, places of unknowability’.24 Cross-cultural differences at all levels of understanding are of course crucial but most significantly in respect of Western culture, the value-
31 laden need to explain everything – the reliance on fact and rational explanation as a measure of legitimate knowledge, results in a rejection of the incommensurate as an unacceptable condition within Western epistemologies. Incommensurability is often perceived as evidence of insignificance; of insubstantiality because it is logically inexplicable. Yet in most cultures outside of Western ontologies, the incommensurable, the inexplicable is a key part of knowledge and culture. Furthermore, non-indigenous cultural perspectives assume that colonising and settler impulses and perspectives remain only in the past. As a result, Ravenscroft observes, indigenous cultures ‘remain in significant ways profoundly, even bewilderingly strange and unknowable within the terms of [these] settler epistemologies’.25 Curthoys26 and Healy27 argue that the disremembering that Stanner acknowledged continues as particular forms of remembering and forgetting of the past in the present while Boyce also suggests, that those who don’t share the constraints of history’s empirical practice and who can bring an imaginative response to the relationships – ‘artists, storytellers, community builders have perhaps the more important calling.’28 Ravenscroft argues in similar ways to Boyce, for ‘aesthetic practices that allow such strangeness to be... [that] an imaginative response might possibly accept and navigate difference as a stranger or foreigner might, not to trespass or colonise as versions of self but instead acknowledging radical difference – even sovereignty?’29
My particular objective of unpicking the seams of these characters’ disguises by way of a visual narrative in relation to this history, is a hope that they might be better recognised as different contributors to an imagined polyphonic narrative rather than be cast as stereotypical figures within a predictable overarching meta- narrative. By testing different settings for these individuals and visible damage upon fragile materials – paper, thread and cloth we may recognise relationships between past and present via images of culturally familiar settler objects and circumstances. And perhaps in the negative spaces between these culturally known images, arranged in odd sequences, displaced in defiance of a logical narrative and clear meaning, a perception of something else, something not clear or complete might arise.
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Unfinished sentences trailing little narratives
By questioning the historical record, I am underlining the value of considering other unconfirmed events and possible circumstances rather than simply re-telling singular stories. Via the writings of diverse cultural theorists and historians I have shaped a visual narrative practice that addresses what Nicholas Thomas described as the antagonistic intimacy of these colonial encounters – ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances. There is little extant factual information about these individuals’ lives but we can plausibly assume that they endured lives of great uncertainty – that varied wildly from social and financial success to desperate poverty, exploitation and neglect on the colonial frontier in fraught circumstance controlled by unbalanced and fraught power relationships; their survival consistently in doubt. Beyond the dominant archives and historical accounts are stories of survival despite the war-zone. This research aims to propose what-if? scenarios for other narratives albeit no more than uncertain propositions.
I focus upon the process by which a subject constructs a relationship with the past in the present via forms and cues that are incomplete or unravelled and which demand a consideration/re-consideration of the past through a performative encounter that arises from the visually and materially contingent processes of creative practice that questions the past. A key aspect of the research is its intention to extend and further activate the research process through the reception/perception of the resulting art works through the viewers’ reading or encounter with the works as much as it is of my own experience of testing and navigating the research process as a form of creative practice. What kinds of perceptions the viewer experiences are of course unpredictable and uncertain as are the ways in which these little visual narratives are created and presented. As outlined in Chapter One, reading here is used to suggest any form of engagement with a text – whether the text be an archival record, a museum object or art-work as image or other creative work on the page, on cloth, as paint or as drawing, print or object, shadow play or even that of reading landscape and country. This process
33 of reading brings into focus something of our own making where tentative meaning is drawn from the text. Like Ravenscroft, I too, am interested in ‘a reading practice that does not stitch up the gap in reading, but lets the enigmatic and aporitic remain… in the places where interpretation and the imaginative act fail.’30 She continues:
This is reading as a process through which we bring ourselves into uncertainty, through which we cause doubt to fall on our perceptions… that puts our knowledge under pressure, until we can say: ‘I do not – cannot – know the other’. And then to hold with this willingness to be an unknowing reader, a willingness to read anyway. That is against a notion of knowledge as accumulative, reading instead is a shift in relations between objects in a field, and between the field and what lies outside it, a shift that implicates the viewer or reader.31
I have adapted Ravenscroft’s idea of a process of stitching over the breaches that occur in meanings - ‘the gaps in representation… in the places where representation might be said to fail, and crucially… in the stitches that non- indigenous Australian readers of Indigenous textuality tend to make to cover over those gaps.’32 I aim to test whether my creative practice can be a means to provoke doubt through temporarily aligned fragmentary visual relationships and fragile materialities; to unsettle learnt assumptions about the past; to needle an imagining of other meanings – in the ways that Rorschach blots can suggest unexpected meanings. Using an unpredictable, tentative imaginative play of visual elements as a form of invisible mending as an alternative to the predictable ‘stitching over’ that Ravenscroft describes as closed thinking that only calculates the numbers of deaths rather than considering the realities of the lives of all on the colonial frontier. I will return to this idea of a callous reckoning later in this Chapter when addressing the problematic aspects of the research. My objective is to create a form of invisible mending using fragmentary visual forms and moving shadows which is different from Ravenscroft’s stitching over. By means of an encounter with an installation where meanings are uncertain and imagery is contradictory a viewer may respond by imaginatively interpreting the play of visual elements to tentatively conceive their own meanings to reveal otherwise unrecognised epistemological
34 assumptions about the past to disrupt predictable conditioned settler narratives in non-indigenous settler perceptions. Invisible mending I propose is a tentative making of different meanings within ‘the spaces of reading where interpretation and the imaginative act are tested and risk failure.’33 The idea of invisible mending is fragile and hesitant reading which works carefully to consider what meanings if any can be gleaned or begin to be reconstructed by way of immersion in the complex space of relationships within each of the individual works and within the overall space of the installation where the cues and meanings of signs and elements are changing. This idea will be discussed in relation to my creative practice in Chapter 5.
Bearing witness: respective histories
Similar methodologies and strategies that enable the negotiation of traumatic collective histories and uncertain, fragile facts can be found in the works of William Kentridge34, Rozanne Hawksley35 and Julie Gough36 - whose works also address the history of Van Diemen’s Land. Each artist’s works bear witness to respective histories that haunt the present while also engaging a number of methodologies to address the ways that the past continues to infect the present. Each addresses ideas of memory, visual narrative and collective histories recognising as Inga Clendinnen asserts, that ‘democratic peoples need true stories about their past’ and ‘a responsiveness to a multiplicity of stories catching the experiences of different individuals in different situations.’37 In recent decades the role of memory, imagination, and narrative in shaping individual and community identities, in a process of remembering and forgetting histories and traditions, has given rise to new forms of narrative in visual arts practice reflected in these artists’ respective practices.
Kentridge, Hawkesley and Gough engage the basic human need to acknowledge tradition and history - the very things Twentieth Century Modernism’s purist, Universalist aesthetic aspirations had denied and which has increasingly infected the content and form of contemporary arts of the past two decades. These artists, working through complex narrative series and exploiting the contingencies of a
35 creatively mutable material process demonstrate a movement towards new forms of visual narrative that investigate significant social and political issues of identity, fragility, disadvantage and disenfranchisement. Through drawing, embroidered assemblages and installations respectively, their works are evidence of:
[…] all those excluded, marginalised voices, unheard testimonies and objects imbued with specific historically located and narrated significance crowded into art’s buildings and spilled out into hitherto non-art sites and streets, like so many tokens of reminiscence brought down from a thousand attics after decades of being stowed away.38
Hawkesley’s textile assemblages address in subtle and complex ways poignant aspects of the human condition through emblems and symbols of commemoration and memorialization. Her works bear a particular focus on the nature and meaning of war across the gendered divisions of labour and duty through personal, community and national realms. She summons the enduring traumas of war through relics that are painstakingly crafted, dramatic and perfectly judged. ‘She mistrusts the glib certainty of authority, and feels profound rage against loss and injustice.´39
One of her best known and loved works in the Imperial War Museum, London, Pale
Armistice, 199140 (Plate 2) was made as a wreath partly in response to her grandmother’s bereavement after World War I. It is ‘fashioned out of gloves – some that are evidently worn, by women and children, others brand new, wedding gloves and those worn by officers — they represent all those who have been touched by war.’41 The inclusion of bleached bones amongst the wax and silk funeral flowers subvert the meanings of traditional symbols of commemoration and remembrance and the role physical objects play in constructing our interpretation of events lost to living memory. Hawksley’s fragile textile assemblages interrogate and exploit the work of cloth in culture. They work against the evident wealth and status of luxuriously elaborate fabrics and details of religious iconography and the saturated colours and formal structures of military uniforms, and the significance of each in national and domestic rituals. Her complex, intimate works explore the production,
36 roles and divisions of labour in women’s work and the ways these reflect social patterns of disadvantage, religious orthodoxy and community cohesion. A recurrent theme is Hawksley’s use of gloves as a motif which comes partly from her memories of her seamstress grandmother who as a War widow, eked out a thin living for her family sewing sailors’ collars between the First and Second World Wars. It also refers to the customary protocols of gloves presented as gifts at funerals – white for the rich and black for the workers.42
In works such as In Whose Name, 2000 and Continuum, 1987 (Plate 4), Hawksley also uses a series of gloves to refer to their place in formal collective ceremonial attire. The gloves act also as repeating gestures of human hands bearing signs of violent trauma, each nailed to broken planks of wood. These are relics of chaos now stilled; a powerful and poignant expression of tragedy masterfully created – stark and complex – and evidence of Hawksley’s understanding that textile’s ubiquitous grace when damaged, can convey complex universal anguish. It is equally an approach which can readily misfire. Hers is an intensely perceptive artistry, born of her own lived experience of deep and lasting loss. The intimate scale of all of Hawksley’s work and their immaculate craftsmanship are vital to their significance as memorials of remembrance and in ‘avoiding the blatant visual brutality that a larger scale would convey … instead insisting that the viewer step closer to engage in a hushed telling of a story’.43 Unlike monumental memorials of bronze and stone that stand for the mighty ideologies of destructive power, Hawksley’s works are fragile, intimate testimonials - collections of human scale fragments and small textile memento mori. The complex, symbolic materialities attest to the real truths of war – the human experience of grief in which remembrance can never be enough, where there are no arms for mourning.
Julie Gough’s works also engage sculptural forms as series and like Hawksley, develop ‘a visual language to express and engage with conflicting and subsumed histories’.44 However Gough’s works refer in part to the cultural traditions of Tasmanian indigenous first Nations and their histories of genocide, dispossession of country, culture and language. Dark Valley, 2008, (Plate 5) constructed from pieces
37 of coal refers to Palawa traditions of shell necklace making and her family’s connections to coal mining. Wearing these works she says she is ‘reminded of the present weight of history.’45 She does not mention that the exaggerated scale of the necklace conveys much more - an overwhelming sense of coarse raw edges of the coal and restriction. This is an oppressive weight to bear, a handicap that would drag and hamper the wearer’s every action. The necklace is presented on antlers on the wall like a form of trophy, a symbol of achievement – perhaps of dispossession. Like Hawksley the scale and particular material character of the works collected is vital in conveying the history of loss and trauma, however these are different kinds of collections Gough is referring to. In works from the 1990s such as She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not...1996 (Plate 6) and Pedagogical (Inner Soul) Pressure 1996 (Plate 7) which incorporated children’s slippers, school shoes, and kitsch trash objects assembled as signs of the thousands of Stolen Generation children cruelly institutionalised and lost to their own families and cultures. More recently in works such as Locus 2006 for the 15th Biennale of Sydney, Zones of Contact the use of massed tea-tree branches suggest both the weapons of Palawa warriors engaged in guerrilla warfare as much as fences and barriers of resistance, and screens and surveillance. Repetitive elements attest to the enduring nature of this history of loss and trauma as an on-going presence-absence. Gough has said of this aspect of repetition that it is:
[…] a means of uttering something without or beyond words. To the individuals and the collective the return to earlier events and memories may be traumatic. This revisiting of memory through assemblage is further conceded by Trinh H Minh- ha46 as an act of repetition, and she notes it can be ‘a process of memorisation rather than an individual technique of structuring’. It becomes then a way of denying or preventing any form of closure.47 The use of repetition in my work allows it to sit in flux between an orderly cohesion of a grouping of objects and the unsettled motion of objects hovering in formation demanding a closer reading of what they are intended to conceal/reveal.48
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The element of repetition throughout all of Gough’s works resonates with my own practice as a means of encouraging a viewer to read more carefully and closely to make sense of the similarities and differences, puzzles and gaps within a field of view that is perceived as incomplete and thus unstable. She has also recently explored the use of shadows as silhouettes, a trope we have both tested as a logical means of conveying this dark and disturbing history. A Consequence of Chance 2011 (Plate 8) uses silhouettes of figures adapted from illustrations on the Proclamation Boards,49 produced under the orders of Governor Arthur during the Black War in 1828 in Van Diemen’s Land. The Boards were intended to communicate to the Palawa Nations, engaged in the guerrilla war with the British, that they would be treated with justice in the event of violent encounters with the settlers – an entirely false and dishonest claim. Gough’s use of these silhouettes are intriguing for several reasons. The first being her translation of the figures to life-scale blank shapes on the walls of the tent – as a sign of the typical first residence of British settlers makes them strangely present.50 More effective is the absence of detail. The original Proclamation Boards carried details of faces and dress. We recognise in these shadows the repetition of frontier violence writ large but here Gough has reduced the figures to a soft edge shadow without the details of profile a silhouette would retain to suggest an identity as Victor Stoichita51 insists is required – as an outline traced from life. These shadows are muffled and once removed, depicting other kinds of violence out of sight in domestic service, unlike the violence detailed on the Proclamation Boards nailed to trees intended to be seen by all. Gough’s figures as shadows have become stereotypes - generic and commonplace. This is not only the horror of the settler violence of the Black War representing the past, it is also the on-going way in which stereotype reports it over time – it is how we now repeatedly imagine these events in the present. These are the shadows of
39 the past which haunt the present.Like Hawkesley and Gough, William Kentridge addresses equally traumatic histories of pre- and post-apartheid South Africa - a period of history he described as being recorded through ‘a struggle between paper shredders and photocopiers’.52 Kentridge uses drawing and simple visual languages of meaning and memory as an impetus to interrogate that complex and difficult past for the present to produce unique encounters and versions of history.
Drawing is the foundation and driver for all of Kentridge’s extensive internationally acclaimed body of work over three decades which explores universal personal themes of resilience, love, redemption and survival set against the wider sweep of violent, unbearable histories of both the closing years of the Apartheid Regime in South Africa; the subsequent Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the insidious impacts of Colonialism and post-Colonial aspirations across the world. Kentridge addresses the function and processes of memory and habits of orchestrated amnesia over time through drawing and erasure as a means of remembering against the tides of forgetting. His softly grained, charcoal drawn narratives of alteration, erasure and trace – immerse his audiences in a range of stories that move incessantly through gaps, diversions and intervals. As he has stated many times in many different ways of all of his works, ‘Seeing here becomes a metaphor for all the images and all the ways we apprehend the world.’53
His self-described methodology of stone-age filmmaking54 is most recognisable in the series of nine works, Drawings for Projection made between 1999 and 2003.55 Involving his alter egos – Soho and Felix in a battle for love against loss, the narrative also intersects with the tragedy of South Africa under Apartheid and the agonies of tentative healing in its aftermath. The process that drove Drawings for Projection, (Plates 10 and 11) of working without a specifically scripted intention, underpins all Kentridge’s works. Given the limitations of this paper, I will only address his Shadow Procession, 199956 (Plate 12) as it relates to my own use of shadow and fragment and one recent work Black Box/Chambre Noir, 200657(Plates 13 and 14). Shadow Procession made in three parts runs for seven minutes and has no ending because as Kentridge said ‘a destination felt tendentious’.58 The first part involves the Procession of the dispossessed and displaced. The sound-track is
40 a lament. The second stage is dance-like and involves odd puppet-like forms which, despite being momentarily recognised as a mundane coffee-pot handle or scissors, transform into the weary dispossessed. The third stage depicts the orchestrated surveillance and anarchic violence of Apartheid. Figures made entirely from black paper fragments, cut-outs and found objects pass by, ghosted by ragged shadows behind and despite the strange and often flawed idiosyncratic logic of Kentridge’s unfolding narrative, audiences are mesmerised because this work is based upon the immediate, direct and compelling ways that human beings have always made sense of the world. Kentridge calls this a practical epistemology - a game of child’s play – where we construct meanings from entangled fragments of perception and willingly project our past experience onto the raw scraps and clues, the icons, symbols, memories and rhythms he traces and erases. His uncertain process of creating these little narratives operates without a plan and results in works which then carry us as viewers on the same helter-skelter of meaning he made spontaneously in the studio through a testing and trialling of a sequence of images:
By taking in various perspectives, focusing on a single projection, abandoning a certain narrative and returning to other fragments – one will find a rhythm of spatial collage that reveals the coherence of a method and its materials.59
We are as Kentridge claims, ‘projectors or receivers of that which is in us, that we don’t know; or as recipients and transmitters of the world outside.’60 Throughout all of Kentridge’s work is a questioning of the dynamics of remembering and the forces of forgetting that occurs both in the making and viewing of these works. By way of processes of accretion and erasure, Kentridge conjures utterly credible yet fragile figures and ghostly shadows toward ambiguous and confronting narratives. These approaches to practice mirror mine in that, as Kate McCrickard states ‘Kentridge’s oeuvre may be best described as a mass of unbuttoned fragments that are never fully fastened together. He channels his visual world through a conduit of disjunction and incomplete viewing’.61
Aesthetic Practice That Allows Such Strangeness To Be62
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As Hawkesley, Gough and Kentridge demonstrate, the assembling, ordering, re- scaling of motifs, repeating fragments as visual and material clues can unexpectedly generate diverse stories and emergent meanings about the past. However one aspect which unites all these works, including my own, is the underlying theme of grief work or trauerarbeit – a term devised by Freud63 to address the concept of grief. The term carries multiple layers of meaning but most relevant here, is its use as a work of mourning which for the artists acknowledges the role of memory and as a means to interrogate the legacies of the past. As each artist demonstrates, this is an on-going labour towards making meanings through a creative practice questioning as a form of agency addressing for Hawkesley, the traumas of the Twentieth Century’s two World Wars, Van Diemen’s Land for Gough and myself and the wars and brutality of South African Apartheid and the dispossession of Colonisation of Namibia by Kentridge in a recent work entitled Black Box/Chambre Noir, 2006.64 This work specifically questioned issues of complicity, agency and atonement and first identified the idea of ‘grief work’ for Kentridge. Through a process which added animated video and puppetry and a complex scaled down Proscenium Arch theatre to Kentridge’s usual approaches to drawing. Black Box/Chambre Noir recalls the massacre of almost three quarters of the Hereo population at the hands of German authorities in 1904 in what is today, Namibia. The event is considered to be the first genocide of the twentieth century and is addressed by Kentridge using colonial archival documents and film footage to interweave his own methodological history from theatre and film. Kentridge blends a potent mix of self-critical, determined narrative innovation that refuses a sleight- of-hand of the historical records of memory to acknowledge the horrors and trauma of this era. The title refers to the black box of the theatre, the chamber noir of early twentieth century photography and the black box flight recorder that captures the evidence in aircraft disasters.
Kentridge’s notion of grief work aligns with Susan Radstone’s memory work65 which in turn arose from Freud’s theories of dream-work.66 In summary, Freud’s studies address the basic human need to condense, screen and consolidate knowledge and experience via dreams and dream analysis. In an essay, Mourning and Melancholia,
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Freud made the observation that in order to achieve the natural process of mourning – to grieve and accept the inevitability of the loss – you must know what has been lost.67 In many ways this is what Gough, Hawkesley and Kentridge are addressing - the ways in which to know what is lost and the ways absence makes demands on the individual either by direct experience or by the inheritance of the history. These demands can be many and include moral, historical and ultimately metaphysical challenges however the negotiation required in grief work of events from the past is not to mistake the history of the past as necessarily a fixed and ever present narrative that is inevitably repeating. Eva Hoffman in The Long Afterlife of Loss proposes that we ‘recognise and reckon with great suffering without mistaking destruction for the root and origin of the world – to place absence within the parameters of presence, death within the parameters of life.68 The form of reckoning that Hoffmann recommends, is apparent in the imaginative and creative processes that each artist exploits to activate memory and navigate absence and presence, towards new complex stories in defiance of conventional narrative sequences, in order to negotiate the past on their own terms.
My creative practice and that of Gough, Hawkesley and Kentridge as a form of uncertain creative practice, the practical epistemology that Kentridge claims, is necessarily an unpacked swag of intuitively navigated uncertain, integrated performative means and methodologies. As Sullivan proposes, this type of methodological uncertainty is legitimate and fundamentally important to creative practice:
…with art and research it is often from experiences that are simple and complex, precise and uncertain, that the most insightful outcomes are revealed and the most important questions arise. Therefore, it is not necessary to assume that theories are neat, practices are prescribed, that all outcomes can be predicted or that meanings can be measured. In fact, it is the opposite that is a more likely reality. The messy resistance of new understanding relies on the rationality of intuition and the imagination of the intellect, and these are the kind of mindful processes and liquid structures used in art practice as research.69
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Each artist’s methodology coincides with my own in as much as they follow a performative creative process that Sullivan describes to engage uncertainty and doubt pursuing outcomes that are unknown at the outset but are allowed to emerge thorough the coincidences of materiality and concept as a fundamental drivers of the research investigations. Their subjects are also intentionally difficult historical re-interpretations of social injustice and hypocrisy - the insidious impacts of Colonialism, the agonies of South African’s apartheid regime and the legacies of frontier and Imperial Wars across centuries.
Encountering and interpreting these artists’ works as unexpected narratives and fragmented patterns of coincidence dependent on individually framed cultural memory and bias, requires a complicity on the part of the viewer as does history itself. In the absence of fixed meanings, these histories are re-imagined by each artist and skilfully crafted to exploit the visual and material storytelling potential inherent in the forms to disrupt received historical narratives to create contemporary meanings without falsifying history and in ways that historians are denied.
Logistics of Methodology and a Practical Epistemology
My tentative attempts to identify an initial practice as research strategy by way of traditional arts’ research tools – sketchbooks and on-site observational studies at various historical sites in Tasmania70, established a methodological raft of tools towards a visual narrative. This, at first seemed unable to successfully ‘visually conjure’ or clearly identify circumstance and characters given the scarcity of visual evidence of the era. However, this initial testing of a viable process accidentally achieved a worthwhile result. It became apparent, through the abstractions that arose – symmetrical/asymmetrical ‘imprints’, as products of the bush-dye process caught in the gutter of the sketchbook pages by chance and tracings and drawings made at a number of historic sites – that the negative spaces, the empty fields and absences were the story. In this way my creative practice research process, as an inherently subjective negotiation had generated, by chance, necessarily fragmented
44 but worthwhile outcomes in which the negative spaces reflected albeit differently, similar gaps and absences in the archive and historical records. As a process of testing what remains from the historical record – known sites of events across two hundred years and using traditional artists’ research tools of the past, to create imagery in the present, I had identified a way of gathering new fragments to align with those from other historic sources – engravings, frottage, museum artefacts and text-based records amongst others. As Ravenscroft argues in respect of, Hubert Ficht’s novel ‘Detlev’s Imitations’71, it is in the way that:
he brings together fragments gathered from disparate sources – memory, fiction and the archive – but lets the gaps between the fragments remain rather than stitching them in order to make an apparent whole. The fragmentation, gaps and silences are the story.72
There is an ontological argument to be made here that these sites of various kinds of subjectivities and as sites of meaning making, however uncertain and mutable, are also part of a process which constructs the subjective self. The artist and viewer bring both their past experience and present self to the work – a blending of perspectives to the position they take up before the work - the cargo as Dening calls it.73
My research methodology has emerged through a process of identification of a plausible lexicon of imagery for each character based upon the historical records and archives from museums and galleries in England, Northern Ireland, France and Australia especially the collections of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart and the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston; from specifically staged on-site creative practice at various historical sites in Tasmania and by way of three staged exhibitions of work in progress held at strategic points during the research process. The resulting artist’s sketchbooks were created initially as a mean of visually identifying each of three characters. Gendered items such as a needle and thread, a carpet beater, empty chairs, anatomical engravings, ropes, knots and naval charts formed a visual and material language resource which enabled the development of the narrative form as data as Makela and Routarienne74 propose for creative practice as research as outlined in Chapter 1.
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This suite of sketchbooks and subsequent image making are a form of traditional artist’s research tools and as a research strategy informed, addressed and accommodated my fluctuating subjective position in relation to this complex history towards more complex outcomes within the research process. These methodological principles became the starting point to both the creative process and as a source for the research questions/focus, and as the making, reading, writing progressed these questions became enmeshed and entwined, embodied and actualised in the work. By way of this index of images and materials and by combining and re-combining the imagery in diverse ways, I have been able to suggest doubts about the historical record, to suggest other unconfirmed events and possible circumstances rather than simply re-telling singular stories. The outcomes of this process and the similarities and differences between my practice and those of Kentridge, Hawkesley and Gough will be detailed in Chapter 5.
Problematic Aspects of the Research
There are however many dangers in this creative practice not the least of which is a foolish assumption that imaginative readings of the fragmentary historical archive WILL recover the past – that these imagined versions of events and experiences are somehow accurate substitutes for the missing archives. These are similar assumptions to those often made about photographs, that they visually and materially record facts as documents of certainties. They cannot. All that this creative practice can do is point toward a space of fragmentary understanding of the ways non-Indigenous Australians stitch over the unknown circumstances of the past, underlining the unease we feel in the face of what we do not and cannot know. This is similar to the ways that faceless figures disturb us, and negative spaces can seem awkward and unbalanced. How we tentatively manage this emptiness and try to mend our discomfort usefully toward an acknowledgment of our complicity in this history is the objective of the encounter with these works. Inevitably and fundamentally it is our perceptions of the past as non-indigenous Australians informed by fraught habits of forgetting and remembering that are the problem with our relationship to this history. Imaginative readings as certainties,
46 however, are as potentially destructive as the claims by some non-Indigenous Australians that all has been erased and is lost irretrievably.
Place Settings: Of Country, Circumstance and Consequence
My research thesis acknowledges the conflicts between contrasting concepts of history and the past however its main focus is upon the multiple, divergent and contradictory ways of encountering or reading the past as a form of narrative. It addresses the ways in which a viewer encountering these incomplete narratives must endeavour to make sense of the fragments and incomplete ‘gaps’ between forms that do not readily convey a straightforward meaning. Its intention is to generate a problematic encounter – through a variety of different ways of encountering or reading of the scraps, fragments and colonial imagery I have scavenged from the archives and museums that have been aligned and combined with commonplace objects – as a setting by which I as an individual, through a process of creative practice, brings to an audience another view of the past imperfectly framed and folded into the present. This to me is both the work of art and as Khadija von Zinnenberg Carroll proposes it is also an example of the way in which Art can address history. She argues, this is not Art History – the study of conventions of traditions across time – this is Art referring to and re-creating the evanescence of history out of time:
Art History has been a discipline in which methods of history are used to study art. But what happens if that relationship is reversed and art is used to understand history? In such a case, the distance between history and art, and historian and objects of historical study are prescribed differently. These historical distances allow moments of intimacy and the study of affect.75
The background to this research is of course the so-called History Wars which are the most recent example of competing concepts of our history that clearly demonstrate both the patterns of the denial of colonial frontier warfare and its brutal outcomes as argued by Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002). Underlying most of the scholarship that surrounds these debates is a callous reckoning and ‘grisly disputes’76 about the numbers of fatalities across
47 communities which refuses to acknowledge the human subjects or to offer an account of the lives and circumstances of the people who died on both sides of the frontier. While Nicholas Clements’ recent research77 details the tally of casualties and fatalities based on extant documentation by location and circumstance unlike the majority of previous academic scholarship, he also addresses the view across the battleground to endeavour to question the experiences and perspectives of those on both sides of the conflict. The absence of the human subject is typically missing from the competing concepts of the top-down received histories. Like Ravenscroft and Stuart Macintyre, I aim to address an incomplete and uncertain narrative about the ordinary lives of those caught up in the violence.
Ravenscroft argues:
Rather than the number of the dead or the size of the suffering and other weighty calculations … I take a lead from Indigenous-signed texts where enigma and doubt are put into effect, in narrative content and form. My reading and writing ‘the other’ will therefore favour the fragment over the whole, unsettlement over certainty. It will give a formal place to non-knowledge and invisibility. In short I am interested in a literary practice where our gaping mouths (agape at times in horror, at others in wonder) are not stopped up with numbers and facts.78
I Am Neither An Historian Nor An Illustrator of Certain Conclusions
Ravenscroft’s and Boyce’s acknowledgement of the need for us to acknowledge and accept the extent of our gaps in understanding of both the historical and cross- cultural landscapes of the past is reflected in the problematic aesthetic character of the final installation of my body of work. I have intentionally devised an uncertain and liminal visual narrative planned as a site of presence and absence, I consider the space to be best defined by Homi Bhaba’s79 notion of the hybrid and problematic Third Space but akin to Robert Young’s particular interpretation of the concept:
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The third space is not a space, nor is it a place. If anything, it is a site…a site of production, the production of anxiety, an untimely place of loss, of fading, of appearance and disappearance.
…The third space, above all, is the site of enunciation, the instance of every utterance, and, at the point of the tongue, the fall into language…a void(vide) into which the speaker or addresses find themselves dropping but an emptiness which at the same time enables the articulation and assertion of their own subjectivity.80
It is this incommensurate reflective uncertain terrain that I have encountered most clearly during this research process through questioning this particular history and it is this aspect that Robert Young identifies of Bhabha’s third space that I have endeavoured to conjure through a complex installation that methodologically engages fragmentary elements created through both drawing and embroidery both during the creative research process and as vital elements to provoke an audience to re-envision this past. The process by which the research process unfolded and the particular logistics of my methodology of practice will be elaborated in Chapter 5. This includes the stages and means by which I have visually constructed a connection to this history towards a space of contradictory elements and alignments using archives and artefacts as a subjective and temporal process that interprets and navigates the fragments and gaps in meaning from the past. The exegesis will also address the relationship of my practice to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the fragment. Additionally current theoretical cultural debates are addressed specifically in relation to the development and framing of the research and final installation as body of work through the writings of Khadija von Zinnenberg Carroll (2014), Paul Carter (2013) and Ross Gibson (2012) and others in addition to the authors and artists already referred to.
In summary, I am asserting that encountering these works as a form of creative practice research outcomes requires a complicity on the part of the viewer as does history itself. Meaning is gleaned and cross-referenced visually, materially and spatially. Indexes and signs by repetition in the disjunctions of fragments and patterns of coincidence are dependent on individual perception, cultural memory and bias to perhaps reveal unforeseen, even inconsistent narratives and outcomes.
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The works are informed as much by the histories of drawing, embroidery and Colonial Australia as by contemporary ideas and issues where both the making and audience perception is reliant on a process of speculation, as an incomplete narrative or the asking of Gibson’s silent questions, what if? Or perhaps better still, as Samuel Beckett wrote, ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail Better’.81 This is not to suggest that I am promoting the despondency and nihilism of Beckett - merely that the uncertainty and doubt that accompanied my first encounters with this period and these individuals was valuable in critically propelling the process of conjuring other meanings; other possible views and understanding of this past and the ways it can both positively and problematically infect the present.
1 Kentridge, William. anything is possible art21.org https://vimeo.com/14544412 accessed October 2015 2 Lyotard, Jean-Francois. ‘The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge’. In Theory and History Of Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1979. p. xxv 3 Lyotard, Jean-Francois. op.cit. p. xxiv 4 Lyotard, Jean-Francois. op.cit. p. xxiv 5 Clemens, Justin. ‘Postmodernity and the Inversion of the Modern’. In Cultural theory and Crafts Practice, edited by Mark Pennings and Justin Clemens. Melbourne: Craft Victoria, 1996. p. 41 6 Lyotard, J.F. ‘Answering the question: What is Postmodernism?’. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. p. 60 7 Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney, UNSW: University of New South Wales Press, 2008. pp 8 - 10 8 Healy. op.cit. p. 9 9 Stanner, W.E.H. The Dreaming and Other Essays. Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc. Books. 2011 10 Healy. op.cit 11 Clemens. op.cit. p. 41 12 Lyotard op.cit. p. 60 13 Ravenscroft, Alison. The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012. p. 3 14 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’. In Johnson, G. (ed.) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. M. Smith (Trans.). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1952) 1993. pp. 76 - 120. 15 Barrett, Estelle, Barbara Bolt. (eds) Chapter 1, Introduction. Practice As Research: Approaches to
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Creative Arts Enquiry. London: I.B.Tauris. 2005. p. 2 16 Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. 1990. p. 92 17 Bourdieu. op.cit. p. 80 18 Bourdieu. op.cit. p. 81 19 Tobin, Jacqueline and Dobard, Raymond. Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. USA: Anchor Books/Random House. 2000. The patterns and designs of African-American Slave quilts carried a particular visual language of codes which was unknown to the white slave-owning society but which secretly communicated a distinct language to members of slave communities across the US and Canada and guided escaping slaves travelling on the Underground Railroad to safe houses and marked out the trails toward freedom in the northern USA and Canada. The codes and cues were a mix of European quilt patterns and symbols and signs from African cultures familiar to the slaves. As an oral and women’s craft history it was for many decades overlooked as being of cultural significance. Unseen and unknown in its time by Western eyes. 20 Cochrane, Grace. Title of, as yet, unpublished catalogue essay for Julie Montgarrett’s PhD candidature exhibition: Temporary Alignments: fraught facts and fragile fictions, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Margaret Carnegie Gallery, December – January 2015. 21 The most well-known example of Western narrative embroidery is the English Opus Anglicaanum embroidery – the Bayeux Tapestry which is one of many outstanding works from the Middle Ages which are considered to be the height of excellence in Embroidery’s Western narrative traditions. I have been well familiar with these works for many decades. However seeing these works first hand was a significant aspect of my research in Europe and the UK in 2011. This research also included the opportunity to see first-hand another narrative work considered to be of equal significance from the traditions of Japanese narrative art – the Emakimono of Ban Diagon Scroll. Both works have materially and formally influenced the development of 2 major drawings for this creative practice research. http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft2f59n7x0&chunk.id=d0e2428&toc.id=d 0e2428&brand=ucpress 22 The details of these debates and historiography will be covered in Chapters 3 and 4. 23 Boyce, James. “What Business Have you here?”, Chapter 2 in Langton, Marcia; Perkins, Rachel (Eds.) First Australians: An Illustrated History, Melbourne: Miegunyah Press. 2008 p. 65 24 Ravenscroft. op.cit. p. 18 25 Ravenscroft. 2012. ibid. p. 10 26 Curthoys, Ann. Disputing National Histories: Some Recent Australian Debates. Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol. 1 No 1, March 2006 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/TfC http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/TfC/article/viewFile/187/134 accessed October 2015 27 Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney, UNSW: University of New South Wales Press, 2008. p. 208 28 Langton and Perkins. op.cit. 2008, p. 65 29 Ravenscroft. 2012. ibid. p. 1 30 Ravenscroft. ibid. p. 20 31 Ravenscroft. ibid. p. 20 32 Ravenscroft. op.cit. p. 9 33 Ravenscroft. op.cit. p. 20 34 Kentridge, William. http://nga.gov.au/Kentridge/ accessed October 2015 35 Hawksley, Rozanne. http://www.rozannehawksley.com/ accessed July 2015 36 Gough, Julie. http://juliegough.net/ accessed July 2015 37 Clendinnen, Inga. True Stories: History, Politics, Aboriginality (1999 Boyer Lectures) Melbourne: Penguin Books. 2008 38 Farr, Ian. “Not Quite How I Remember It” – Introduction. In Memory: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. 2012. p. 13 39 Hughes, Philip. ‘Preface’. In Rozanne Hawksley, Mary Schoeser. Ruthin, Wales: Ruthin Craft Centre and Lund Humphries. 2009. p. 9
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40 Hawksley, Rozanne. Pale Armistice. Imperial War Museum, London. http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/42009 41 Hawkesley, Rozanne. http://www.rozannehawksley.com/ 42 Schoeser, Mary. Rozanne Hawksley: Offerings. Ruthin, Wales: Ruthin Craft Centre/Lund Humphries, 2009. p. 175 43 Mary Schoeser http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/articles/chaos-to-calm/ 44 Gough, Julie. http://juliegough.net/artist-statement/ 45 Gough, Julie. http://juliegough.net/artwork-about-unresolved-histories/ 46 Minh-ha, Trinh T. ‘The Undone Interval’. In Trinh T. Minh-ha in conversation with Annamaria Morelli, in The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, (ed.) Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, Routledge, London, Chapter 1. 1996, p. 11 47 Minh-ha. op.cit. 48 Gough, Julie. Transforming Histories: The Visual Disclosure of Contentious Pasts. PhD Thesis. Hobart, Tasmania: University of Tasmania, 2001. p. 74 49 Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. http://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/object.aspx?ID=37 50 This perception is especially strong in the darkened space of the Parrawe, Parrawe – Colonial Frontier Gallery, 3rd floor, Bond Store in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, where this work is now permanently located. 51 Stoichita, Victor. A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. 52 O’Sullivan, Michael. Kentridge’s Troubling Shades of Truth, Washington Post March 9, 2001. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2001/03/09/kentridges-troubling-shades-of- truth/ a6ce9675-32c9-4891-85ab-6a3f275e7bf4/ accessed January 2014 53 Kentridge, William. ‘In Praise of Shadows’, Six Drawing Lessons: The Charles Eliot Norton Drawing Lectures, 2012. Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2014. p. 18 54 Tone, Lilian. http://artarchives.net/artarchives/liliantone/tonekentridge.html 55 Drawings for Projection include – Johannesberg, Second Greatest City After Paris 1989, Monument 1990, Mine 1991, Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old 1991, Felix in Exile 1994, History of the Main Complaint 1996, Weighing… and Wanting 1998, Stereoscope 1999 and Tidetable 2003. 56 Kentridge, William. MoMA. http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/williamkentridge/flash/ 57 Kentridge, William. Deutscher Guggenheim. http://www.deutsche- guggenheim.de/e/ausstellungen- kentridge01.php 58 Tone, Lilian. William Kentridge: Fortuna. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2013. p. 250 59 Frieling, Rudolph. ‘Walking and Looking: Technology and Agency’. In William Kentridge 5 Themes. Mark Rosenthal (ed.) New Haven, London: Yale University Press.2009. p. 168 60 Kentridge, William. Six Drawing Lessons. 2012. op.cit. p. 20 61 McCrickard, Kate. William Kentridge. London: TATE Publishing, 2012 p. 45 62 Ravenscroft. ibid. 63 Freud,Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 1901 Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, the Penguin Freud Library, vol.4. 1976, reprinted 1991. 64 Kentridge, William. Deutscher Guggenheim. ibid 65 Radstone, Susan. Memory and Mythology. Oxford and New York: Berg. 2000. p. 9; 11 – 13. 66 Freud, Sigmund. ibid 67 Freud, Sigmund. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. 1917. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, (ed.) London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74. 14, pp. 237-58 68 Hoffman, Eva. ‘The Long Afterlife of Loss’. In Memory: histories, Theories, Debates. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwartz, New York: Fordham University Press. 2010. p. 411 69 Sullivan, Graeme. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts. 2nd Edition, Los Angeles: Sage Publications. 2010. p. 245 70 On-site creative practice research travel in Tasmania : August 2012 - 5 days; January 2012 – 3 weeks; April 2013 - 14 days; January 2014 – 22 days; September 2015 – 11 days 71 Fichte, Hubert. Detlev’s Imitations (Masks). London and New York: Serpents Tail Press. 1991. 72 Ravenscroft, 2012. p. 12-13
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73 Dening, Greg. Making a present out of the past: history’s anthropology, a Poetic for Histories. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. p.187 - 189 74 Makela, M., and Routarienne. S.(eds.) The Art of research: Practice in research of art and design. Helsinki, Finland: University of Art and Design Finland. 2006. 75 von Zinnenberg Carroll, Khadija. Art in the Time of Colony, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014. p. 1 76 Macintyre, Stuart (ed), The Historians Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2004 77 Clements, Nicholas. Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land. PhD Thesis. Hobart: University of Tasmania. 2014. p. 5-6 78 Ravenscroft. 2012. op.cit. p. 15 79 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. 1994 p. 53 - 56 80 Young, Robert. ‘The Void of Misgiving’. In Communicating in the Third Space, Karen Ikas and Gerhard Wagner (eds.) New York: Routledge, 2008. p. 81 - 83. 81 Bloom, Harold. ‘Waiting for Godot’. In Samuel Beckett – Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Info Base Publishing. 2008. pp. 46 -49
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Plate 1
Julie Montgarrett 2011 - 12 if ‘if’ is a question?
First artist/Sketchbook – 300+ pp of initial investigations towards locating a vocabulary of images for ongoing research – drawing from 19th C archival sources, assorted papers, found imagery.
Media: Diverse papers: approx. A3 size – hand drawn, scanned laser-printed copies of archival materials; monotypes; collages/montage; bush-dyed, organically stained papers – made on-site and in studio; various studio resources, hand and machine stitched, assorted papers mirror covers.
Approx: 600mm wide (open) x 350mm high
Plate 2
Rozanne Hawksley
Pale Armistice 1991
Wax flowers; worn gloves – women’s, men’s and children’s and bleached bones
Imperial War Museum, London
Photograph: Damon Cleary
Plate 3
Rozanne Hawksley
Upper – Penitance 1: the Garter of Penance 2006
A leather garter laced with fish-hooks
Lower – Alice’s World.
Drawing on canvas 2006 http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/listings/rozanne-hawksley-war-and-memory/
Plate 4
Rozanne Hawksley
Continuum 1987
Single nailed glove from a series of over 50 gloves each nailed to a piece of found timber.
Complete Series of 57 gloves: In Whose Name.
Ongoing installation work http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/listings/rozanne-hawksley-war-and-memory/
Plate 5
Julie Gough
Dark Valley, Van Diemen’s Land 2008
Tasmanian coal on nylon on antlers on Tasmanian oak approx. 120 x 100 x 30cm Collection of Art Gallery of NSW
Source: http://juliegough.net/artwork-about-unresolved-histories/ accessed October 2015
Plate 6
Julie Gough
She loves me, she loves me not… 1995
13 plastic roses, 13 synthetic slippers, 13 found Govt. photos c.1962, plastic magnification inserts, variable dimensions Collection of Mildura Arts Centre Source: http://juliegough.net/artwork-about-race-representation/ accessed October 2015
Plate 7
Julie Gough
Pedagogical (Inner Soul) Pressure 1996
40 pairs of second hand school shoes, lights, slides, found photos, stilts, shoe shine box, acrylic on wood ≈ 300 x 450 x 60 cm collection the artist Exhibited in: Dark Secrets/Home Truths, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne, 1996 (Solo exhibition)
Sourced: http://juliegough.net/artwork-about-race-representation/ accessed October 2015
Plate 8
Julie Gough
The Consequence of Chance 2011
calico, pine, cardboard, lights c. 2.4 x 1.5 x 2.4m
Permanent installation (2012+) in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. Parrawe, Parrawe – Colonial Frontier Gallery, 3rd floor, Bond Store.
Source : http://juliegough.net/artwork-about-unresolved-histories/ accessed October 2015
Plate 9
Julie Gough
Stolen 2011
enamel on pewter, steel private collection Exhibited in: THE MISSING, Bett Gallery, Hobart, June – July 2011 (solo exhibition)
Source: http://juliegough.net/artwork-about-memory-time-and-space/ accessed October 2015
Plate 10
William Kentridge
Drawings for Projection Series:
MINE 1991
Series of charcoal drawing stills from animation.
Lilian Tone (ed.) William Kentridge Fortuna. Thames and Hudson 2013. p. 151
Plate 11
William Kentridge
Drawings for Projection Series:
Felix In Exile 1994 – 2001
Charcoal, pastel and poster paint
500mm x 640mm.
Lilian Tone (ed.) William Kentridge Fortuna. Thames and Hudson 2013. p. 151
Plate 12
William Kentridge
Shadow Procession 1999
Charcoal, pastel and pster paint
500mm x 640mm.
Lilian Tone (ed.) William Kentridge Fortuna. Thames and Hudson 2013. p. 252
Plate 13
William Kentridge
Drawings for Black Box/ Chambre Noir:
Series of collage/ ink drawings for projection into Miniature Theatre Black Box.
Plate 14
William Kentridge
Drawings for Black Box/ Chambre Noir:
Series of collage/ ink drawings for projection into Miniature Theatre Black Box.
Photo: John Hodgkiss. Deutsche Guggenheim, © William Kentridge.
Chapter 3 - Navigating Tensions: fraught fictions and fragile facts
‘Australia is a nation created in peace.’
Amanda Vanstone, former Howard Government Minister.1
‘We cannot live in the past but the past lives in us…’
Charles Perkins2
‘Is it the fear of forgetting that triggers the desire to remember, or is it perhaps the other way around?’
Andreas Huyssen 3
‘… before newcomers…reflect on human history in Tasmania, a moments silence is needed. We need to let go of the burden of ‘expertise’ long enough to acknowledge the extent of what we do not and cannot know.’
James Boyce 4
[…] he saw the first ships come to Van Diemen’s Land when they settled at Hobart town, called Niberlooner; that the Py.dare natives speared some white men who landed in a boat, one man in the thigh; that white men went after the natives, the natives see them come but did not run away, saw their guns and said white men carry wood; that by and by white men shoot two blacks dead, when they all became frightened and run away.. Woorady, Elder of the Nuennone people of Bruny Island as told to and reported by George Augustus Robinson 5
These were not the first ships to be closely observed by the inhabitants of Trouwunner. The island we know as Van Diemen’s Land or moreover Tasmania, renamed in an attempt to redeem its convict past and in honour of the first European Dutchman Abel Tasman to ‘discover’ its shores in 1646. Between the first documented visitation by Tasman in 1646 and the arrival of Bowen’s settlement party in 1803, it is likely there were twelve similar sightings close to shore.6 French explorers, Baudin and D’Entrecasteaux, along with James Cook and others had all made landfall on the eastern shores of Trowunner in the latter decades of the eighteenth century.
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To the clans and Nations of the Palawa peoples who watched them closely, the white birds that appeared infrequently on the horizon brought Wrageowrapper7 the spirit of destruction and the devil of the night to their country. As the invaders progressively established three settlements in the south and north of the Island, fears held by the original inhabitants of the Island were confirmed. However they could not possibly have foretold the extent of the dispossession and destruction that was to follow. Within a generation of the landing in 1803 at Risdon Cove, an estimated population estimated of 6,000 to 8,000 First Australians were brought to near extinction.8
Sovereign rights and terra nullius
The British Colonial Office originally intended to establish an outpost in Van Diemen’s Land to prevent a French territorial claim by sending three British parties to the south and north of the island in 1803 and 1804.9 Each of the colonial settlements claimed a fictitious ‘standing under European law of possession by discovery and settlement’.10 However Lieutenant Governor David Collins, already an experienced colonial Officer, acknowledged in correspondence to Governor King in September 1804, that the British were occupying Aboriginal land and that he expected a response. Collins also advised King that he had not informed the settlement’s inhabitants that:
[…]the Aborigines of this country are as much under the protection of the laws of Great Britain, as themselves.’ He added that, given that ‘this essential point’ was a key part of the instructions he received from the Colonial Office, he ‘should have issued a general order at Port Phillip’… and ‘repeated it here’ – in the settlement on the Derwent after the first failed attempt to establish a colony at Port Phillip.11
Nonetheless, it was not until 1835 that Governor Bourke invoked the eighteenth century British legal doctrine of terra nullius.12 Therefore the British authorities were aware that at the time of early settlement, occupation of the land was an infringement upon the sovereign rights of the Palawa inhabitants. However by the mid-nineteenth century, such concerns were considered to have been rendered
55 inconsequential in light of dominant European scientific and religious beliefs in which the indigenous peoples were viewed as ‘savages’ inevitably doomed as a result of their ‘innate inferiority’ and consequent inability to compete successfully with the Europeans.13 The Tasmanian Aborigines, it was conveniently argued were ‘at the bottom of the human evolutionary ladder’14 and consequently the blame for their demise, the near genocide of the population, did not lie with the British. It was allegedly inevitable. Wilfully dishonest assertions such as this permitted many ambitious British arrivals to dispossess the Palawa people by any means they deemed appropriate and necessary as the pastoral invasion continued across the country of the first Australian Nations in a pattern of violent, staged events repeated across Australia. Lyndall Ryan describes the events and race relations of Settler Colonialism as a formalised, staged genocidal ideology. She notes:
Settler Colonialism considers the white settler occupation of lands of native peoples as a structured process whereby the settlers could achieve their objective – the production of a major staple for export – only by completely dispossessing the native peoples, in particular hunter-gatherers from their land and subjugating and partially or fully eliminating, them as a distinctive group.15
The British colonisation of Australia was an example of the brutal dispossession of hunter-gatherer cultures by European colonial invaders. Henry Reynolds argues that in time hindsight will relegate the World Wars of the twentieth century to relative insignificance in comparison to the impact and longstanding ramifications of the violence and dispossessions of the Colonial era worldwide:
As we advance further into the twenty-first century, the relative importance of our involvement in two world wars and the following Cold War will diminish as they lose their pre-eminent place in global history. The central story in the new century will increasingly be seen to have been the linked histories of imperialism and decolonisation, which were preparing the way for the great shifts in power and wealth currently underway. And in that story the relationships between European settlers and Indigenous Australians will become increasingly important.16
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Settler Narratives – remembrance and denial
It is not surprising that there is a fundamental relationship between the two major historical narratives that account for and underpin Australian mythologies of Nationhood. What is surprising is that the relationship is one of binary opposition – one of a concerted Remembrance and the other of a determined, wilful misrepresentation of the origins of Nationhood through colonisation – a particular form of forgetting. Both are symbolic of deception. As Ann Curthoys has noted:
National history seems to be a form of history marked by a particularly strong relation between past and present. In the last few decades, the most serious historiographical conflicts, and the ones which have attracted public as well as scholarly attention, have tended to be those where national honour was felt to be at stake. Very often they have concerned either the foundation of the nation, or the national role in war, and sometimes both… These debates have attracted particular heat because history was seen to have implications not only for specialist
historians but also for the morality and future of the nation.17
Most commonly in Australian nationalist narratives, the emphasis is placed upon the Great War which released a new scale of brutality and grief upon the optimistic, largely Anglo-Celtic settler descendants’ white Australia policy communities. Australia’s first prevailing national narrative of Remembrance is officially defined on the ANZAC Centenary website as, ‘…a milestone of special significance to all Australians. The First World War helped define us as a people and as a nation.’18 In the many decades that followed, the First World War claimed a strong hold on our popular collective memory developing as ‘martial myths by male historians and poets as a “baptism of blood” (that would cleanse Australia of its convict past) or as “the lost generation”.’19 Yet despite the traumas of the First World War, the Great War has become the central symbol of Remembrance and National pride. The hold that the ANZAC mythology has over the Nations’ narrative has grown stronger each year further embedding a complex and problematic mythology which, like all myths, hides many truths.20
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The First World War fostered a mythology wherein the first test of Australian nationhood since 1901 was played out in battles for the British Empire. However, in terms of a dramatic loss of life, the First World War was not the first brutal warfare to re-define the communities of our country. The earlier frontier wars of colonial Australia that occurred across the un-federated colonies were also a call to arms for indigenous First Nations warriors to defend their country. One of the earliest was the frontier battles of the Black War of Van Diemen’s Land, which provided in many respects the tactical templates for much of the frontier violence that followed. The official start of the Black War in 1828, intersects with the subject of this creative practice as research, the closing years of the first twenty-five years of the new colony of Van Diemen’s land during which time the frontier violence had escalated. This quarter century was also the start of the process of the problematic reporting of frontier conflict and its subsequent denial over the next century and a half. One of the first violent encounters occurred just nine months after the first settlement at Risdon Cove. For many decades the events at Risdon were considered by successive historians and Governors, starting with Arthur in 1830, to be the reason for all the subsequent violence across the frontier. John West in 1852 argued that ‘the consequence of these events were lamentable’, creating ‘irremediable distrust.’21 J.B. Walker in 1888, also claimed that if not for, ‘Lieutenant Moore’s error at Risdon, a war of extermination, with all its attendant horrors, might have been averted.’22 And… the ‘unhappy event’ of May 3rd 1804, ‘sowed the seeds of hostility on the part of the blacks, which… filled the colony with deeds of outrage and horror.’23 So within two decades of the event it had been mythologised as an excuse to blame Lieutenant Moore at Risdon for the resistance and frontier violence committed by the Palawa peoples defending their sovereignty. Their alleged aggression was the fault of others and nothing to do with the immediate realities of settler violence of the ever encroaching frontiers. The process of particular forgetting and remembering was underway. As such the next Chapter – Chapter 4 provides detailed consideration of Jacob Mountgarrett’s role in this conflict.
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As Nicholas Clements’ recent rigorous research has made clear, through detailed tallying of every violent incident recorded between 1804 and 1842, the events of the Black War had their origins in the beginning of the colony. However, what had begun dramatically at Risdon Cove for many years remained relatively peaceful, with only sporadic violent events, in contrast to the levels of violence which escalated significantly after 1816-18 when the next significant wave of settlers began to arrive and the previously contained settlements at Hobart and Port Dalrymple expanded. In the following decade the cross-cultural violence gained such momentum as to take one of the world’s oldest civilisations to the brink of extermination within a single generation.24 Like many of the wars that followed, this colonisation through dispossession by British Imperialists was orchestrated for the benefit of a limited ruling elite. Frontline violence in Van Diemen’s Land especially traumatised Aborigines, convicts and poor white settlers alike. Those who benefitted financially and materially remained safely at a distance on the other side of the world. For all present, even the most wealthy settlers in Van Diemen’s Land, there was no safe distance from the violence as the war escalated during the 1820’s. While the eastern population of the island was estimated to be around 2000 Palawa people in 1803, by 1820 the population was likely halved and by 1832 there were less than one hundred people identified as survivors.25
The Great Australian Silence: Four Stages of Settler Narratives
The widespread denial of the Frontier Wars marks the beginning of what became the second major narrative underpinning the Australian nationalist agenda. Anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, during his second 1968 Boyer Lecture entitled After the Dreaming, coined the expression ‘The Great Australian Silence’ to identify the almost total absence of First Nations Australians in key history texts of the twentieth century. Stanner noted that ‘…that inattention on such a large scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness…We have been able for so long to disremember the Aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so.’26
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However despite the amnesia of the settler narratives that have emerged since colonisation, during the nineteenth century, a number of significant historical texts were published that specifically addressed the events of the frontier wars of
Tasmania and the dispossession of the First Australians of Van Diemen’s Land. Of the numerous texts I have consulted, most contemporary historians consider the foundation texts for any historical research into Tasmanian colonial history from the nineteenth century to be John West’s seminal History of Tasmania (1852) which remains the most detailed, valuable and accessible record of the period and H. Ling Roth’s outstanding Aborigines of Tasmania (1890 revised 1899) is an extensive, detailed compendium of Aboriginal life despite the fact that Roth did not have access to Colonial Papers nor of course George Robinson’s papers at the time of writing. James Calder’s, Some Accounts of the Wars Extirpations, Habits, etc. of the Native Tribes of Tasmania published (1875) remains a valuable source also. Consequently both Ling Roth and John West’s histories have formed a reference point and backdrop to much of my reading and research towards my creative practice.27
It is therefore likely that the particular depth and scope of this extensive scholarship prompted Keith Windschuttle to address Tasmanian colonial history specifically in his contentious Fabrication of Aboriginal History. As Henry Reynolds asserts:
Given the richness of interpretation and the great wealth of documentation available in Tasmania, it was not surprising that the History Wars of the first decade of the new millennium focused on… the frontier conflict of the 1820s and the early 1830s. And one direct consequence of the intense debates of that period has been that a new generation of scholarship has appeared.28
However recent scholarly debates largely originate with W.E.H. Stanner’s rebuttal to the conservative and entrenched perceptions of Australian History during the 1950s and 60s. Stanner chastised historians for 'having given the Aborigines no place in our past except that of "a melancholy footnote”’.29 He further argued however that the silence was not solely caused by the way that Australian history had been written by individual historians since colonisation. He claimed that it was also:
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[…] a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.30
However as Ann Curthoys observes, while Stanner’s writings particularly the 1968 ABC Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming:
[…] have been important…..as time has gone on, the narrative of how Australian history came to be transformed from a largely white settler narrative to one at least attempting to deal with the history of interaction between Aboriginal and settler peoples since 1788, and indeed earlier, has become a little too simple.31
She argues that the history is in fact far more complex. Curthoys identifies four stages of settler narratives in the process of ‘disremembering’ this history. Indeed while many voices since the 18th C British invasion of ‘the great south land’ have called for an acknowledgment of Aboriginal sovereignty, and recognition of the sustained brutality and dispossession first Australians have suffered since the Colonial era destruction of their ancient high cultures, other agendas and ideologies have successfully silenced both the history and the expressions of settler misgivings. Curthoys’ four stages of settler narratives is permeated by Biblical narratives of exile and exodus in which convicts and pioneers are portrayed as victims cast out into the Australian wilderness. Here, following long periods of abandonment and deprivation, these figures forge a new egalitarian Australian identity ultimately based on the exclusion of the ‘other’ – who in this case were indigenous peoples with sovereign rights.32 More than two hundred years later however this project, that actively ignores the truths of the events of our collective history, continues as evidenced by Vanstone’s remarks cited in the opening quotations of this chapter. As I will argue later, this also represents a process by which the events of colonisation are mythologised. Indeed in the first two decades in question, cross-cultural relationships emerged that suggested a different future might have been possible33 were it not for an escalation in the widespread increased lawless competition for acquisition of land which in turn cemented the nationalist mythologies that have since helped prevent the majority of non-
61 indigenous Australians from an unequivocal acknowledgment of this brutal history of lies and deception.
Curthoys’ first stage of settler narratives ‘defended colonisation itself, as ordained by God and necessary for the advancement of humanity.’34 The first stage narratives included the story of ‘Australia’s pioneering settlers…as having endured the harshest continent on earth, with its endless drought, fire, and flood, their struggle most poignantly signified by near starvation in the first years of settlement, or in the story of the selectors later in the century who attempted to carve out a living from an often unforgiving land.’35 This process of reversal was noted as long ago as 1845, when visiting Polish Count Strzelecki observed that the indigenous people of Tasmania had been seen ‘as a sort of brute intruder’ on lands that allegedly, rightly belonged to the settlers.36 These narratives proposed the British settlers as the rightfully civilised, Christian owners of the land in contrast to the nomadic indigenous peoples whose entitlement to the country was tenuous and thus undeserved.37 The mid-to-late nineteenth century also included narratives of evangelical zeal in ‘bringing’ Christianity to the savages. For those First Nations individuals who refused the assimilating salvation of a Christian ‘conversion’ their inevitable demise was thus further justified. As Nicholas Thomas notes during this period, ‘Some colonists saw the new societies they were founding as the culminations of civilisations, as ‘last nations’ that extended European progress beyond the congestion of Europe’.38
Strange conflicts between circumstance and rhetoric: antagonistic intimacies
The second stage dates from the end of the nineteenth century wherein colonists had become ‘…the original inhabitants of the land where the indigenous people had already died out or were destined to do so’.39 More recently Curthoys has also argued that at this stage:
The pioneer national narratives were now silent on race and ethnicity… obscuring the dispossession of indigenous peoples almost entirely. In both, the hardships endured by white people, especially those of British or Irish origin, were at the heart of the narrative. In common with other colonial and settler societies, settler
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Australians developed narratives of reversal, placing indigenous people as the
invaders and seeing the settlers as the defenders of their land.40
However, as Nicholas Thomas notes, the effects of colonial close contact also left another problematic legacy despite this mythologizing of the settler struggles which erased the first Australians from the landscape. He argues that:
In the nineteenth century, when evolutionary thought postulated radical difference between the civilised and the savage, between modernity and the dawn of time, colonists and natives were close; they shared the very ground that they struggled over. Though this coevality was consistently denied in settler ideologies, contacts were in fact sustained rather than episodic and were marked by a singular kind of antagonistic intimacy.41
Thus there was a strange conflict between circumstance and rhetoric. In principle Aborigines were ignoble savages, yet as individuals they were encountered by many as dignified and admirable people. On the one hand, an Aboriginal presence was real, and it had to be acknowledged; on the other hand it had to be imagined away. It was this fundamental encounter that created the problematic struggle of imagining away indigenous Australians that created over time the narrative tropes of remembrance and a conjoined wilful amnesia which created a series of narratives to frame this unresolved history. Henry Reynolds has described the emergence of this national narrative as:
[…] one of a hard and heroic fight against nature itself rather than one of ruthless spoliation and dispossession. The squatter and the bushman became national heroes, sharing many attributes but appealing to different sections of the community. No one wanted to notice the blood on their hands.42
Moreover the issues of National honour which continued for decades, steadfastly ignored the nation’s responsibility towards the first Australians conveniently considered to be a dying race, overwhelmed and dispossessed by a superior British culture. This particular version of the settler narratives established a kind of thinking in relation to both Aborigines and Aboriginality as either present or absent. Present on the colonial frontier as a fearful threat and later believed to
63 be an absence as evidenced in Tasmania by the claims of many mid-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century historians that the Palawa peoples of Tasmania had died out. John West reported the ‘triumph of colonisation’ in 1852, noting that, ‘Such is the process [of colonisation]…At length the secret comes out: the tribe which welcomed the first settler with shouts and dancing, or at worst looked on with indifference, has ceased to live.’43 In 1870 James Bonwick, reporting the Darwinian beliefs of the era in 1870, claimed that, ‘the Blacks go before a superior Caucasian race, as the old gigantic Saurians before other types of beings, and we have but to shrug our shoulders and cry, “Poor fellows”’.44 James Calder commenting on the death of Trugannanner claimed that she was ‘the last survivor of a now wholly extinct nation.’45 Ling Roth commented on the ‘sad and untimely destruction of this interesting primitive race…’46 and in 1966 Plomley, when publishing George Robinson’s journals, included an appendix entitled, ‘The causes of the extinction of the Tasmanians.’47
These kinds of assumptions supported an emergent nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century reflected in the formation of the White Australia Policy espoused by this country’s first documents at Federation in 1901 – the Immigration
Restriction Act.48
Towards acknowledging dispossession
The third and fourth narratives which arose during the latter part of the twentieth century were initially that ‘Indigenous people and their issues with the past re- surfaced to reframe the narrative to acknowledge that the settler’s battle with the land included dispossession of the Aborigines’.49 This narrative, first addressed by Stanner’s Boyer Lectures in 1968, articulated the concept of ‘the Great Australian Silence’ as previously cited.50 Somewhat ironically at this stage both Stanner and later Reynolds believed that the collective ‘silence’ would not survive because of the development of sustained levels of new academic scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s which they argued would resolve the amnesia; that attitudes to forgetting that afflicted the nation would change by revealing the trauma and injustices of the hidden history.51 However these narratives were far less resilient, embedded within
64 the national mythologies, and nonetheless requiring more than an intellectual historiographical analysis alone to change them. A far more fundamental reworking of perceptions and relationships to place and indigenous sovereignty through ontological and philosophical shifts is also required. This will be addressed in due course after further discussion of the last two stages of Curthoys’ settler narratives.
As such, an example of the intersecting third and fourth narratives is most evident in the events of the early 1990s which began with then Prime Minister Paul
Keating’s landmark Redfern Address of 1992.52 This speech became both a highlight and a temporary conclusion to a process of acknowledging the longstanding denial and dispossession that had begun with Stanner’s Boyer lectures over two decades before. However such attempts to echo Stanner’s call for the acknowledgment of Aboriginal sovereignty, for a remembering, were rapidly countered by many reactionary narratives including that of the subsequent Prime Minister, John Howard’s emphatic denial of prior indigenous sovereignty and the publication a decade later of Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.53
Archive fever and the Australian History Wars
The broadcast of Stanner’s Boyer Lectures ‘After the Dreaming’ in 1968 called to account long established triumphant settler narratives which had omitted the broader history of European-Indigenous relationships of the first half of the twentieth century. However Stanner also challenged attitudes to Aboriginal Australians held by those of his generation. His ground breaking anthropological work, undertaken over the three decades prior to the Boyer Lectures, had supported the transformation of collective understanding of Aboriginal society and of the history of relationships between settlers and indigenous Australians. Stanner established a vital platform for the new intellectual, cultural and historiographical movements that followed and enabled the subsequent research of a large majority of leading historians, academics and cultural critics including Manning Clark, Inga Clendinnen, Ann Curthoys, Greg Dening, Henry Reynolds, Bain Atwood, John Connor, Bill Gammage, Lyndall Ryan, Robert Manne, James Boyce and of course
65 ongoing cultural theory and research by indigenous academics, authors and activists such as Charles Perkins, Neville Bonner, Faith Bandler, Marcia Langton,
Djon Mundine, Noel Pearson, Gary Foley, John Maynard, Anna Haebich, Greg Lehman, Julie Gough, Patsy Cameron, Hetti Perkins, Rachel Perkins and Bruce
Pascoe amongst many others. The rigorous scholarship generated by this new generation of intellectuals and theorists, was part of a world-wide questioning of historicism’s claims to neutral objectivity, the assumptions of closure and the emphasis on historical linear progress. These debates were part of the politicisation of cultural memory and the subsequent rigorous critical analysis of official histories that emerged through poststructuralist literary critiques and changing attitudes to historicism in Europe post Second World War.
The process however had been underway internationally for most of the twentieth century led by many critical theorists, historians and social scientists.54 By the 1990s the topic of cultural memory gained such momentum that it came to be defined as an era of mnemonic obsession - an ‘archive fever’ exemplified by the publication in 1996 of Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever. Andreas Huyssen’s Twilight Memories also traced the same movement from the 1980’s as part of his wider critiques of the play of cultural memory in postmodern culture. His question, ‘Is it the fear of forgetting that triggers the desire to remember, or is it perhaps the other way around?’, as an observation of the conflicted dynamics of memory and its relationship to amnesia is of particular relevance to the perceptions of history, mythologies and remembrance I will address towards the end of this chapter.55
As Marita Bullock noted:
Australia was slower to register the impact of these memory studies. Such sustained examinations of cultural memory only reached their full potential in Australia during the 1990s when scholars began to address the issue of Australia’s ‘Bicentennial’ Celebrations of European settlement (1988) This event sparked intense debate about how history should be represented in the public sphere particularly in relation to Australia’s colonial history and its lasting impact on
indigenous people.56
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The new politics of the history of remembrance57 that emerged from debates around the Bicentenary, framed by the rubrics of the History Wars, have generated more than two decades of highly contested argument. This disturbed the very things Curthoys, cited at the opening of this Chapter, contended namely that ‘national honour was felt to be at stake…[because they were] seen to have implications not only for specialist historians but also for the morality and future of the nation.’58 The greatest intensity within the debates however came from the politics and agendas of remembrance surrounding the Black Wars – the widespread violence of the Frontier Wars. During the same era key reports and emerging jurisprudence began to address structural and historical injustices and contributed to the process of remembering in the domain of Aboriginality59 in a way that ‘reconfigured the relationships between Aboriginality and national heritage.’60 These included the reports of the 1991 Royal Commission report into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the 1992 High Court Mabo decision; the 1996 High Court Wik Judgment and the 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing them Home: The Stolen Children Report on the Stolen Generations.
Writing in the conservative literary/political journal Quadrant, in 1993 historian Geoffrey Blainey dubbed the opposing sides of the debate as, the overly positive Three Cheers View and the otherwise unduly negative Black Armband view. The ensuing arguments involved even then Prime Minister John Howard and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party who adopted Blainey’s term – The Black Armband View - derisively. Howard claimed:
This black armband view of our past reflects the belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination.
I take a different view. I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved so much more as a nation of which we can be proud than of which we should be ashamed.61
In terms of Australian historiography, the most significant long-term result of the politics of Remembrance that surrounded the Black Wars was the publication in
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2002 of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Windschuttle argued that the frontier violence between Aborigines and the British ‘settlers’ in Van Diemen’s Land had been vastly exaggerated over 170 years in the historiographic record by the historians he called together as the orthodox school. In the case of three historians specifically: Henry Reynolds, Lyndall Ryan and Lloyd Robson, he asserted that they had deliberately fabricated evidence.62 Windschuttle’s stated aim was to present 'an alternative version of its subject, a counter-history of race relations in this country'.63 As Robert Manne noted, ‘Amongst Australia’s conservative intelligentsia, and beyond, support for
Windschuttle grew. Clearly he was singing a song many people wanted to hear.’64 Windschuttle’s arguments remain astonishing for many reasons but most significantly in terms of this exegesis they clearly summarize the four particular narrative stages Curthoys outlined that explained away and excused the creation of destructive colonial hegemony that engulfed First Nations cultures in the previous century. Windschuttle argued:
[…] that the “full-blood” Aborigines had died out within seventy years of the British arrival, in part because of their susceptibility to European diseases, and in part because, as “agents of their own demise” the men had traded away their women to the whites. Windschuttle argued that the Tasmanian Aborigines had no sense of “property” and hence no idea of “trespass” or even strong bonds of attachment to their lands.65
In response, in Whitewash, as part of the rapidly published, landmark response to
Windschuttle’s Fabrication, Robert Manne noted that:
It followed then that the fierce attacks they mounted on British settlers, especially in the 1820s were not patriotic, nor in defence of territory, nor reasonably understood as acts of war, but mere expressions of their criminal proclivities, the lust for plunder of consumer goods and the unprovoked desire of savages for murder and revenge.66
James Boyce also argued in his contribution to Whitewash that ‘the number of elementary errors in Fabrication will soon exclude it from serious historical
68 debates’67. Boyce’s observations while accurate did not anticipate the rigorously renewed efforts of remarkable academic scholarship by historians, theoreticians, cultural critics, artists and writers of the following decade which were ironically prompted by the publication of Windschuttle’s text. Published in 2003 in response to Windschuttle’s claims, Whitewash has sparked renewed interest in debates around the colonial history and contemporary circumstance of Tasmania during the Black War and has also by comparison enhanced the role of historical and cultural scholarship for the whole nation. The authors have included - John Connor (2002), Henry Reynolds (2004, 2012), Ian McFarlane (2008), James Boyce (2008) Graeme Calder (2011), Patsy Cameron (2011) and Lyndall Ryan (2012) and Nicholas
Clements (2013) among others.68
Henry Reynolds has argued that Windschuttle’s main ambition was the ‘vilification of the Tasmanian Aborigines’69 and to:
[…] undermine all those staples of contemporary indigenous politics – landrights, self-determination, reparation, even the need for a prime ministerial apology – then the necessary and logical path is the one opened up by Windschuttle that leads to the interrelated concepts of savagery and terra nullius. If the desire is to forestall the emergence of aboriginal nationalism, then the way to do it is to rob indigenous communities of anything in their past that might nurture pride and self- confidence.70
Mapping of the past into the present: remembering and forgetting
Despite the detailed and substantial rebuttals provided by leading scholars and historians in the years following the publication of Fabrication, its broader cultural and political impacts remain profound. In some sectors of the cultural milieu there remains clear evidence that Stanner’s silence continues.71
Cultural theorists, historians and anthropologists72 have traced Curthoys’ various pioneer narratives of presence and absence and the lingering effects of Stanner’s silence within contemporary non-indigenous perceptions of Aboriginality. This process represents a mapping of the past into the present as part of the process of a concurrent remembering and forgetting. Dening, Langton, Neumann and others
69 particularly argue this is as part of a contemporary experience of the legacy of the historical paradox of ‘presence and absence’. As historian Klaus Neumann suggests it is more important to move:
[…] away from a debate about historical evidence and towards one about the production of histories; away from a discussion about the past and towards one about how we keep silent about that past;… towards a pro-active imagining of histories beyond a prevailing orthodoxy.73
The silence that Stanner proposed and sustained largely characterised both Aborigines and Aboriginality as either absent or present: initially present on the colonial frontier and imagined as a terrible force, and later believed to be an absence. Murri scholar, Phillip Morrissey writes of the inevitable paradox within this dominant model of settler perceptions and fears as a:
[…]rhetorical ‘doing away with’ Aborigines – their erasure as subjectivities and intelligences from history and contemporary Australia…Paradoxically, in spite of the success of this erasure, Aboriginal corporeality – the embodied being of
Aborigines – remains a troubling and disturbing fact for settler Australia.74
The development and dominance of settler historical accounts of Australia’s history, up to the end of the twentieth century and debated into the start of the new millenium are explicable. However the current and sustained disavowal of elements embedded within Australian culture and history a decade after the ‘History Wars’ are not. As noted in the preface to this chapter the ongoing denials of the frontier wars, as argued by some contemporary cultural theorists and historians, are evident in Amanda Vanstone’s comments regarding the origins of our ‘peaceful nation.’75 Alternatively the argument that Australia was not a Nation until 1901 but rather represented a number of unified British colonies, endeavours to give credence to these findings. However such convenient sophistry may only aid in further avoiding the truths so often and so readily overlooked. Australian nationhood was dated from 1788 for the 1988 Bicentenary celebrations. If that history counts as part of those celebrations of Remembrance, it should equally be
70 counted towards acknowledgement of this other brutal past that remains unacknowledged. Australia is not and never was a country created in peace.
Despite significant reconciliation speeches by two Prime Ministers: Paul Keating‘s Redfern Address of 199276 and Kevin Rudd’s 2008 ‘Apology to the Stolen Generations’,77 historically triumphalist accounts of omission continue to be asserted by those in positions of power. Yet as Paul Keating observed, this may become one aspect of ‘a test of our self-knowledge. Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history. How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal
Australia.’78
Unfinished encounters
It remains that the historiography, archival and oral history evidence across all decades over the past two hundred years is without doubt confronting. This may account for the poor regard with which many Australians of all generations view the history of colonisation and of the frontier wars. As Reynolds claims, it is a disturbing and distressingly complex dynamic of unfinished encounters to navigate and unravel.79 While Nicholas Thomas further argues that:
In recent decades indigenous cultural and political renaissances have taken place, questions of indigenous rights are persistently troubling and frequently debated. To varying degrees efforts have been made to transcend the injustices of invasion, to restore rights to land and to redress manifold forms of discrimination. But the intimate connection between the foundations of settler societies and the dispossession of prior occupants makes any larger resolution elusive and intractable. 80
A key aspect of these unresolved, enduring and fraught colonial relationships is outlined by anthropologist, Marcia Langton as a mismatch she argues created by two social forces often operating in conjunction: one historical and the other conventional these generate problematic perceptions of Aboriginal presence and absence in settler descendent culture.
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The most dense relationship is not between actual people, but between white Australians and the symbols created by their predecessors. They relate to stories told by former colonists [and] the constant stereotyping, iconising and mythologising of Aboriginal people by white people who have never had any
substantial first-hand contact with Aboriginal people. 81
At the heart of these problematic narratives is a philosophical and ontological- pathology and the need for a philosophical historiography which Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos argue82 is a result of our unresolved shared relationships to place – our perception of ownership and disavowal of indigenous Australian’s sovereignty.83 It was precisely this attitude that was expressed so clearly by Howard as a ‘fear of losing the land the settlers’ have won and of being displaced by people they had defeated a century before.’84 Fiona Nicoll identifies ‘the ground of indigenous sovereignty as the place where all Australians come into relationship’85 as the problematic meeting place, not unlike the place Healy argues is, ‘[f]ar more than a moment of first-contact or fatal impact, this is a ‘contact-zone’ in an extended field that is both colonial and post-colonial.’86
Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos further argue that there is a need for white Australians to name our atopos topos, our collective commonplace: not merely the spaces we inhabit but our own being with regards to the society to which each of us belong and that we inhabit as place. They believe there is ‘indeed such a need precisely because our history has been, and still is being, shaped by a certain command: ‘name yourself’, ‘come out of your hiding and present yourself’ or ‘give a truthful account of your own story’. They conclude that as non-indigenous Australians are ‘unable to retreat from the land we have occupied since 1788, and lacking the courage unconditionally to surrender power to the Indigenous peoples, white Australia has become ontologically disturbed.’87
They propose that ‘the force of the command derives from the fact that it is addressed directly and unconditionally to our very being.’88 And, moreover, that the power of the command lies in its source as it is uttered by the sovereign being of the Indigenous peoples and addresses non-indigenous Australians.89 In this respect the legitimate sovereign being of indigenous Australians comes from within
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Australian society for they have never ceded their lands and continue to experience social segregation. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos further contend that this extends beyond injustice on a moral or ethical plane, rather this is ‘an ‘ontological violence’ against the Indigenous other as well as ontological terror against ourselves’.90 For Irene Watson, ‘[i]t is in thinking through how to engage with Aboriginal sovereignties that Australian society [...] becomes ‘stuck’, where the ground of ‘impossibility’ lies, but it is this ground ‘exactly’ where our thinking should begin.91
Until this essential relationship is addressed and accepted, we are all ‘unable to dwell in this land philosophically.’92 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos further argue that: […] ”philosophy”, in this instance, ‘refers to those concepts that spring from the conditions determining one’s history and instituted being and which in turn give conceptual shape to those conditions and thereby render them an object of engagement for political consciousness. So, for example, the nationhood of a nation always relates to philosophical encounters with history, that is, encounters involving the fundamentals of a people’s being as an historical agent interested in its ontological and ethical integrity, in its freedom and responsibility. It is in this sense that philosophy offers an account of origins, a genealogy of where one comes from. Moreover, it performs the role, to some degree, of educator of the nation in so far as it engages in the practice of (re)situating the self-understandings of the collective present within the context of collective origins.93
Since we are now twenty years past Howard’s renewed disremembering, we are also long overdue for an open honesty in quiet re-telling and re-witnessing of the dispossession of the country of the First Australians. Echoing the philosophy of place proposed by Nicolacopoulos and Vassiocopoulos, such a re-telling might allow the truths of history to resurface by countering this mythologising of the past through agendas of Remembrance. The unresolved and largely unacknowledged onto-pathological grief of this history instead is fundamentally grounded in a need for an epistemological acceptance of our collective non-indigenous migrant status,
73 regardless of whether our forebears arrived in the late eighteenth century or sometime in the intervening two centuries since.
Perhaps clearest evidence of the continued presence of Stanner’s ‘silence,’ as product of the History Wars, lies within one of the Nation’s most significant museums of remembrance - the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The Memorial has repeatedly refused calls to acknowledge the frontier violence and dispossession of the First Australians as a legitimate event in Australia’s history of warfare. Officially the Memorial was established to recognise and memorialise
Australian wars fought since 1885 ‘as a result of combat accident or disease’94 and:
[…] is in stark contrast to the official attitude to the thousands of Aborigines who died over many years on the encroaching frontiers of settlement. The white dead are honoured and remembered. Indeed, remembrance is seen as a compelling national duty. ‘Lest We Forget’ is a revered endlessly repeated phrase…What a difference it makes if you were black and died violently on the Australian frontier.’95
Again as noted at the beginning of this Chapter, Curthoys’ claim that such issues concern not only specialist historians but also the morality and future of the nation is echoed by Reynolds who argues it is, ‘about the most significant matter of all – ownership and control of the continent itself. That after all, is the irreducible foundation of the nation and the source of most of its wealth.’96
However while ‘the present consistently clutters our vision of the past’97, the old settler descendant ontologies, legacy of nineteenth century colonial relations, will continue without rigorous and sustained challenges to undermine such a comfortable forgetting of the past. Such amnesia, we may conclude, has been perpetuated by contemporary Australians who would prefer the mythology of remembrance that would perhaps envision themselves as heroic victims and survivors, not oppressors. This will be a long and slow process while Australian settler nationhood remains entwined with the ritual and mythology of glossy Remembrance agendas that aim to inculcate collective solidarity to certain versions of nationhood and cause without question. The enduring conservative arguments
74 which resurfaced during the political and cultural debates of the History Wars, particularly under the leadership of then Prime Minister John Howard, were a response to perceived threats to these kinds of ‘issues of National honour.’98 Debates surrounding ‘national honour’ are recurring and at this time appeared thinly veiled attempts to control the land; property and its twin, sovereignty were perceived to be at risk. It is these results of remembering and forgetting I would lastly like to turn my attention to in concluding this chapter. By considering the role of mythologies and history as forms of mnemonic systems, we may recognise a potential space between these two domains for storytelling which might provide new avenues for imagining different ontological and epistemological relationships between the past in the present. Such a model becomes a form of grief-work as previously mentioned in relation to the works of Kentridge, Hawksley and Gough as well as my own practice.
Despite the fact, as Robert Bollard cited above asserts, that ‘we are a nation with little regard for its own history,’99 histories and mythologies remain fundamental to our philosophical, social and cultural understanding of recalling the past. As outlined at the start of this chapter and illustrated in Howard’s idealistic Remembrance during the History Wars, these complementary dominant ontologies continue to underpin our perceptions of nationhood. First described by the nineteenth century French historian Ernst Renan, Nationalism is ‘the creation of large-scale myths of solidarity’ which aim to reaffirm a singular group loyalty instead of historical accuracy; that avoid presenting events in all their moral and political complexity.’100
The legacy of the ongoing denial of indigenous sovereignty often with violent ramifications for indigenous and non-indigenous Australians alike, is hidden within the dark side of the rituals of Remembrance which acknowledges only half of the story under a false narrative façade. As noted previously, Australian narratives of Remembrance recognise only the settler’s determination in the face of great struggles and fears – they acknowledge only the herculean tasks of remaking country in the guise and purpose of a new British society and culture against all odds. However the fact that this struggle involved the dispossession of the
75 legitimate sovereign custodians of the country has been, over time, largely erased from the history. A single generation’s passing allowed myopic false testimonies and mythologies to begin to grow and soften the hard, distressing facts of the history safely overlooked in the archives. 101 First person witnesses were replaced by hearsay and euphemisms of events102 that hid the guilt of complicity or fear of retribution. The myths acknowledge while they also deny.
As a country and nation we need to recognise a shared responsibility to consider narratives of this conjoined history that are by necessity both painful and unavoidable. A re-telling of histories would permit newly critical analysis to contradict our current myths that have in the past readily allowed for a softening of the hard facts of history. Ross Gibson in 26 Views of a Starburst World, considering of colonial myths of transcendence – of Charles Sturt, the ANZACS and Ned Kelly - argues that they all present narratives of the insufficiency of men made noble and rewarded, not always materially, with the status of mythologised heroism. Such status is attained through staunch endurance despite adverse circumstance and haunting doubts about the legitimacy and ‘righteousness’ of the project of colonisation.’103 Gibson further argues:
Myths get composed and told like this again and again so that we can continue living without being paralysed by the contradictions that always assail us. History is written, by contrast, so that we can acknowledge the ever-prevailing contradictions without being lulled asleep with the temporary relief availed by our myths. Myths
prevent paralysis, histories disturb complacency.104
I propose we seek new narratives that fall somewhere between the myth and the hard truths of hidden histories, which may provide a more creative and adaptable site for proposing new epistemologies. These would have the capacity to remain incomplete, accept doubt and in doing so allow for alternative versions of history to remain open to questioning. New narratives would also allow for a revaluation of national mythologies and for better understandings of collective relationship to place and country and enable non-indigenous act as shared custodians alongside indigenous Australians. By challenging closed patriotic assumptions of commemoration, we may rebut any singular dominant history by engaging in an
76 open process of conversation and debate. Rather than closed assurances, an element of ignorance and uncertainty that allows other possible explanations to emerge or at least be considered if not fully imagined is vital to the slow emergence of worthwhile and enduring understandings of the relationships between the past and present.
My creative practice is consequently involved in finding a space between this history and mythologizing, by testing a creative practice version of Dening’s historying. Seeking a shared ongoing historying alongside cultural narratives that evoke all kinds of human experiences, for example the universal loss and grief of cruel separations, may help to underline the dangers of alienating otherness that refuses acknowledgement of a shared common humanity. There are important things to acknowledge by seeking to remember and recall what has been wilfully erased and forgotten by agendas of Remembrance; of self-satisfied mythologies and myopic triumphalist histories. We may indeed encounter a form of grieving through acknowledgement of our brutal past because there are no weapons for mourning and no arms for this kind of grief. Remembrance has always been too narrow a viewpoint and has never been enough.
This is the conceptual and ontological framework I have borrowed from Nicolacopoulos, Vassilacopoulos, Gibson, Dening, Healy and Langton as an interstitial form of ‘intercultural trafficking’ to address the lives of these historical characters located in a creatively imagined space between the myths and histories of the past. It is a conceptual space in which I locate and make visible my own creative practice as research based upon the first twenty-five years of colonial encounters between ordinary people otherwise left out of the historian as authority top-down models of history that acknowledges and negotiates little more than the historiographical record. It is not an easy terrain to navigate with equanimity given that the power relations alone ascribed a dramatically unbalanced fragile set of social dynamics that existed within the wider scenario of cultural destruction amidst an escalating war-zone where dispossession loomed large as it did in all settler-indigenous histories. The process stands, ironically as the dark side of a story that has often been narrated as a progression from ‘darkness to light’. As
77 previously noted, Thomas proposes this was a coeval existence as a kind of
‘antagonistic intimacy.’105
Following this premise, historians Lynette Russell and Nicholas Clements have also sought alternative approaches to address the ways ordinary individuals likely experienced and responded to colonialism. Rather than characterising relationships between ‘natives’ and settlers’ as dichotomous conflict, Russell proposes ‘models of interaction that include negotiation, economic imperatives and alliance formations, providing a nuanced understanding of the ambiguities of cross- cultural encounters.106 Both consider there is great value investigating a variety of ways of presenting the experiences and everyday lives of those individuals whose lived experiences were overlooked during this period. This is my objective to address and question without assumptions one group of individuals and their relationships within the wider social histories of the first decades leading to the Black War. These questions are of course inconclusive given the scant ‘facts’ on which these assumptions are based. It is not possible to define the exact circumstances of these individuals’ lives but equally importantly there is great value in having to carefully consider what might have been. During this process each supposition requires a nuanced analysis that provides a greater understanding of the variety and complexity of such circumstance and the recognition that there are no assurances – no myths and no secure histories - only a sense that many stories of real life struggles and experiences were plausible and possible.
My research propositions are concerned with these issues particularly the day-to- day constraints and struggles of these lives on this frontier. My approach is more akin to that of David Hansen’s observation of the value of ‘doing history’:
In doing history, we examine and interpret documents and artefacts in order that the people of the past might again live briefly in the present and in that resuscitation help us understand ourselves…you cannot take contemporary understandings and judgements back across the temporal border, only contemporary questions. You can’t tell the dead how to behave, or what to say. 107
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In this way I have approached my own research and apprenticeship to ghosts in ‘doing history’ in the spaces occupied by extant artefacts and in the gaps and absences of further limited evidence suggested by the archives. I have engaged a visual and material language that lies between myths and histories. The prosopographical conundrums proposed by the limited biographical and historiographic details of these characters’ lives are addressed in the next chapter. Their appearances are little more than glimpses that I have been able to discern having respectfully and carefully reconsidered and rearranged the remnants of their lives, in contrast to other stereotypical versions permitted by dominant histories of remembering and forgetting.
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1 Amanda Vanstone on ABC 24 – National Television, April 19, 2012 while promoting a new National Anthem she has written, said that, ‘Australia is the only country to be created in peace.’ 2 Perkins, Hetti. art+soul. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2011. Quotation on back cover from her father Dr. Charles Perkins. 3 Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia, Public Culture, vol.12, no. 1, 2000, p. 28 4 Langton, Marcia and Perkins, Rachel (eds.) First Australians: An Illustrated History. Carlton, Victoria: The Miegunyah Press, 2008. p. 65 5 Plomley, N.J.B. Friendly Mission. Hobart: Blubber Head Press. 1966 p. 375 6 1642 - Abel Tasman, 1772- Joseph Marion Du Fresne, 1773 – Tobias Furneaux, 1777 – James Cook, 1788 – William Bligh, 1789 – John Cox, 1792 – Bruni D’Entrecasteau, 1792 – William Bligh, 1793 – Bruni D’Entrecasteau, 1793 – John Hayes, 1797 – Guy Hamilton, 1798 – Charles Bishop,798 – George Bass and Matthew Flinders, 1802 – Nicholas Baudin, 1803 - John Bowen 7 Ryan, Lyndall. Tasmanian Aborigines: A History Since 1803. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. 2012. p. 43 8 Estimates of Tasmania's Aboriginal population in 1803, the year of the first British arrivals, range from 3000 to 10,000. Lyndall Ryan's (2012) analysis of population studies led her to conclude that there were about 7000 spread throughout the island's nine nations. p. 14, p. 43; Nicholas Clements’ most recent extensive investigations (2013), cites research by N.J.B. Plomley and Rhys Jones who settled on a figure of 3000 to 4000. p. 324-325 9 Boyce, James. Van Diemen’s Land. Hobart, Tasmania: Black Inc. Press. 2010. p. 20 10 Ryan, Lyndall. Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803. 2012. p. 44 ‘This convenient legal fiction was based on the roman legal principle of terra nullius or empty lands, which the Swiss philosopher Emmerich de Vattel had re-framed in his book, The Law of Nations published in 1759. Vattel argued that there was not enough space in the world for small nations that neither cultivated the soil nor operated a system of government recognisable to Europeans to keep hold of their country. If this country were discovered by a ‘civilised community’, in reality a European power, then they could legally claim the country and settle it.’ 11 Collins to King, 11 September, 1804. HRA Series3, vol. 1. p. 281 12 http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibition/objectsthroughtime/bourketerra/ accessed July 2015. When New South Wales Governor, Sir Richard Bourke, enacted a Proclamation issued by the Colonial Office, sent to him by Dispatch 99 of 10 October 1835, the doctrine of terra nullius was effectively implemented. Bourke intentionally reinforced the notion, upon which British settlement was based, that the land belonged to no one prior to the British Crown taking possession of it in order to prevent John Batman’s attempt to purchase land from the Kulin Peoples of Port Phillip by means of a signed treaty. Aboriginal people therefore could not sell or assign the land, nor could an individual person acquire it, other than through distribution by the Crown. Its publication in the Colony meant that from then, all people found occupying land without the authority of the government would be considered illegal trespassers. 13 Ryan. 2012. ibid. footnote p. xix 14 Curthoys, Ann. ‘Mythologies’, in Richard Nile (ed.) The Australian Legend and its Discontents, University of Queensland Press with the API Network, St.Lucia, Qld, 2000. pp. 11-41; pp. 30-33 15 Ryan. 2012. ibid p. xvii 16 Reynolds. 2013. ibid. p. 7 17 Curthoys, Ann. Disputing National Histories: Some Recent Australian Debates Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol. 1 No 1, March 2006 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/TfC accessed 15.9.15 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/TfC/article/viewFile/187/134 18 http://www.anzaccentenary.gov.au/ 19 Bollard, Robert. The Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden History of Australia in World War One. Sydney, NSW: New South Publishing. 2013. p. 27 20 The Frontier Wars, largely fought in sporadic, guerrilla struggles, spanned the earliest decades of the nineteenth century well into the twentieth century. These violent struggles were a response to the continuing dispossession by British colonists driven to escape the class-bound poverty of Britain through the acquisition of land, status and wealth in the name of God, King and Country. Reynolds, Henry. Forgotten War. Sydney, New South Wales: UNSW Press, pp. 1-7. Indigenous
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first Australian warriors defended their country against increasing numbers of colonists desperate to reinvent themselves at any cost, ‘to make themselves: it was an act of self-formation - and no less obscene for that’ (f/n p.13 Ravenscroft). The agonies of the Frontier wars remain unacknowledged, the death toll unknown and the shame and traumas hidden in the shadows of the myth of Gallipoli. 21 West, John. History of Tasmania.(1852) 2nd. Ed. Sydney: Angus and Robinson. 1971. p. 263 22 Backhouse, W. Early Tasmania. Hobart: Tasmanian Government Printer. 1914. pp. 49-50 23 op.cit 24 Clements, Nicholas. Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land. PhD Thesis. Hobart: University of Tasmania. 2013. p. xv 25 Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St. Lucia, Queensland: UQP. 2014. p. 68 26 Stanner, W.E.H. The Dreamings and Other Essays. Black Ink 2010 p. 188-189. 27 The following list of historical references is by no means complete. However it is a record of the texts I have consulted by way of various readings and research over the past six years. The first of a series of nineteenth Century Tasmanian histories of the ‘The Black War’ was by Henry Melville – History of Van Diemen’s Land (1835). Melville, as Editor of the Colonial Times during the War was well placed to report on the settlers’ perspectives of the period that reflected these attitudes including considerable negativity towards Arthur’s conciliatory policies towards the ‘natives’. The next significant history to be published was John West’s excellent, seminal History of Tasmania (1852) which remains the most detailed, valuable and accessible record of the period. James Bonwick’s Last of the Tasmanians (1870) while sympathetic to the Palawa and extensively researched is according to many historians unreliable and requires secondary confirmation of its many claims. James Calder’s, Some Accounts of the Wars Extirpations, Habits, etc. of the Native Tribes of Tasmania published (1875) remains a valuable source and James Fenton’s History of Tasmania (1884) is indebted in many respects to West’s earlier text. H. Ling Roth’s outstanding Aborigines of Tasmania (1890 revised 1899) is extensive, detailed compendium of Aboriginal life despite the fact that Roth did not have access to Colonial Papers nor of course George Robinson’s papers at the time of writing. Both Ling Roth and John West’s histories are considered to be the foundation for any historical research into Tasmanian colonial history and consequently they have formed a reference point and backdrop to much of my reading and research towards my creative practice. However since many of the details and claims cannot be verified they have been used with caution. The depth and extent of historical research in Tasmania is unusual in contrast to the comparative absence of similar scholarship by historians across the mainland of Australia.
However both Tasmanian and mainland historical accounts are largely silent during the first half of the twentieth century until the publication of Clive Turnbull’s (1948) Black War: The Extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines, Black War, Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire Ltd) an anthology of selected government correspondence. It was another three decades before the publication of Robert Travers’ The Tasmanians: The Story of a Doomed Race (1980) and Lyndall Ryan’s Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981, revised 2012). These works have been followed by a proliferation of texts that have addressed Tasmanian History and included sections on the frontier War. These include Lloyd Robson’s A History of Tasmania: volume 1, Van Diemen’s Land from the earliest Times to 1855 (1983); Sharon Morgan Land Settlement in Early Van Diemen’s Land: creating an Antipodean England (1992); Henry Reynolds (1995; 2001; 2004; 2011; 2012; 2014); Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume 1, Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1847 (2002); John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788 –1838 (2002); Robert Manne (ed.) WHITEWASH: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2003), James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (2008); Ian McFarlane, Beyond Awakening: The Aboriginal tribes of North-Western Tasmania: A History (2008); Graeme Calder, Levee, Line and Martial Law: A History of the Dispossession of the Mairremmener People of Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1832 (2010); Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures on the Colonial Sea Frontier (2011); Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and resistance in Tasmania (2014). Murray Johnson and Ian McFarlane, Van Diemen’s Land: An Aboriginal History (2015). There are also numerous post-graduate Theses and those that have been latterly published are listed above. Details of all publications and theses are included in the bibliography of this exegesis.
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28 Reynolds, Henry. Introduction to Van Diemen’s Land: An Aboriginal History, Johnson and Mcfarlane Sydney: UNSW Press. 2015. p. xi 29 Stanner, W.E.H. ibid. p. 188-189 30 op.cit 31 Curthoys, Ann. Disputing National Histories: Some Recent Australian Debates. Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol. 1 No 1, March 2006 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/TfC/article/viewFile/187/134 32 Curthoys. op.cit 33 Boyce. op.cit. p. 11 34 Curthoys, Ann. ‘Mythologies’, in Richard Nile (ed.) The Australian Legend and its Discontents, University of Queensland Press with the API Network, St. Lucia, Qld, 2000, pp. 11-41. 35 Curthoys. Ibid http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/TfC/article/viewFile/187/134 36 Strzelecki, Paul Edmund (nd) Physical description of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans: p. 348 37 Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St. Lucia, Queensland: UQ Press. 2014. p. 12-15 38 Thomas, Nicholas. Possessions: Indigenous Art, Colonial Culture Thames and Hudson 1999. p. 10 39 Curthoys op.cit. p. 33 40 Curthoys op.cit. 41 Thomas, Nicholas. Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture. London: Thames and Hudson. 1999. p. 10 42 Reynolds, 2013,ibid. p. 16 43 West, John. (edited by A.G.L. Shaw) The History of Tasmania (1852) Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1971. pp. 332-333 44 Bonwick. The Last of the Tasmanians or the Black War of Van Diemen’s Land. Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1969. First Published 1870., p. 375 45 Calder, James. Some Accounts of the Wars Extirpation, Habits, etc., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania. Facsimile edition. Hobart: Fullers Bookshop, 1972. First Published 1875. p. 108 46 Roth, H. Ling. The Aborigines of Tasmania. Halifax, England: F.Kind and Sons, 1899. pp. 228 47 Plomley. 1966 op.cit, pp. 964-967 48 The Immigration Restriction Act. http://www.foundingdocs.gov.au/item-did-16.html 49 Curthoys. op cit. p. 33-34 50 Stanner. ibid 51 op.cit. p. 191 52 Keating, Paul Redfern Address. https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf 53 Keating’s Redfern address was one of a series of events which included the 1991 Royal Commission Report into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the 1992 High Court Mabo decision as well as debates that had arisen around the time of the Bicentenary celebrations. These events were also part of a worldwide process of Archive Fever, as coined by Derrida, that had developed after the Second World War. These events also resulted in a conservative backlash that became known as the History Wars and the clear demarcation of opinions across the political divide described as the black armband view of history against the Three cheers View opponents as described by Blainey. The most notable outcome was Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History and the new generation of scholarly attention to the early Colonial period. http://aso.gov.au/titles/spoken-word/keating-speech-redfern-address/notes/ 54 Notable amongst these critical theorists were Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certas, Michel Foucault, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Maurice Halbwachs amongst others. Chris Healy, Ann Curthoys, Heather Goodall and others were key voices amongst the founders of cultural memory studies in Australia. Darian-Smith and Hamilton’s 1994 Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia cites essays by these authors. 55 Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia. Public Culture, vol.12, no. 1, 2000, p. 28 56 Bullock, Marita. Memory Fragments: Visualising Difference in Australian History. Bristol: Intellect, 2012. p. 10 57 Remembrance ceremony and rituals were previously considered to refer only to the national
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process of acknowledging the ANZACS and subsequent Wars of Allied National defence forces especially through the National and State Australian War Memorials 58 Curthoys. op.cit 59 Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney, UNSW: University of New South Wales Press, 2008. pp. 112-113. 60 op.cit. p. 113 61 Howard, John. Sir Robert Menzies Lecture 18 Nov 1996, reported in the Australian Newspaper, 19 Nov 1996. 62 Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. I, Van Diemen’s Land 1803 – 1847. Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002. pp. 11-15 63 Windschuttle. op.cit. 64 Manne, Robert. (ed.) WHITEWASH: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Melbourne: Black Ink. Press, 2003, p. 7 65 Windschuttle. ibid. 66 Manne. ibid. Manne notes that ‘Windschuttle claimed the Tasmania Aborigines did not know the meaning of the Christian virtue of ‘compassion”.’ 67 Boyce, James. ‘Fantasy Island’. In WHITEWASH: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Australian history, Black Ink. 2003. p. 17 68 See Bibliography attached to this exegesis. 69 Reynolds. WHITEWASH. ibid. p. 133 70 Reynolds. op.cit. p. 135 71 Examples of the continuing forgetting include Vanstone as previously noted and most recently former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s claim in 2014 that there was ‘nothing here before 1788’; further the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, continues to refuse to acknowledge the frontier wars within the central galleries of the Memorial – see Reynolds, Forgotten War pp. 242-256 72 Such as Chris Healy, Nicholas Thomas and Anthropologists such as Marcia Langton amongst others. 73 Neumann, Klaus. Among Historians, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 9, no.2, 2003 p. 182 74 Morrissey, Phillip. ‘Dancing with Shadows: Erasing Aboriginal self and Sovereignty’, in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.) Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2007, p. 65 75 Her assertion on National Television, as recently as 2012, that ‘Australia is a nation created in peace’, is an example of the ongoing frequent and wilful assertion of Stanner’s ‘silence’ that was reflected in the History Wars, as an insidious national delusion embedded in cultural memory and sustained for far too long. 76 Keating, Paul. Redfern Address. https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf 77 Rudd, Kevin. http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/our-country/our-people/apology-to- australias-indigenous-peoples 78 Keating. ibid. 79 Reynolds. ibid. p. 256 80 Thomas, Nicholas. Posessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture. London: Thames and Hudson. Interplay, 1999. p. 11 81 Langton, Marcia. ‘Well, I heard it on the Radio and I saw it on the Television…’ (an essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things), Australian Film Commission, Sydney, 1993. p. 33-35. Langton follows sociologist Emile Durkhiem, locating Aboriginality ‘as a social thing’ – as an interpretation of social engagements that produce real effects in the real world. op.cit 82 Nicolacopoulos , Toula and Vassilacopoulos, George. Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, re.press Melbourne. 2014. pp. 11 -14 http://re-press.org/book-files/9780980819717-The_Being_of_the_Occupier.pdf 83 Curthoys. op.cit. p. 30. This concept of Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos relates closely to Ann Curthoys’ first settler narrative – the Biblical story of exodus and exile which through survival in a harsh environment excludes the ‘other’ – the original indigenous inhabitants of the ‘new’ land they now claim. 84 Manne. WHITEWASH. ibid
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85 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos. ibid. 86 Healy. op.cit. p. 31 87 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos. ibid. p. 14. ‘In our two centuries-long refusal to hear the words—‘I come from here. Where do you come from?’—that the sovereign being of the Indigenous peoples poses to us, we have taken the Western occupier’s mentality to a new, possibly ultimate, level. Unable to retreat from the land we have occupied since 1788, and lacking the courage unconditionally to surrender power to the Indigenous peoples, white Australia has become ontologically disturbed. Suffering what we describe as ‘onto-pathology’, white Australia has become dependent upon ‘the perpetual-foreigners-within’, those migrants in relation to whom the so-called ‘old Australians’ assert their imagined difference. For the dominant white Australian, freedom and a sense of belonging do not derive from rightful dwelling in this land but from the affirmation of the power to receive and to manage the perpetual-foreigners - within, that is, the Asians, the Southern European migrants, the Middle Eastern refugees, or the Muslims. 88 op.cit. p. 11 89 ibid 90 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos. ibid. p. 61 argue that this ontological terror involves a fundamental question of mutual recognition of both the violent dispossession and that it is also a denial of First Nation Australians of rights of self-determination and sovereignty. ‘The violence perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples constitutes more than an admittedly serious injustice on a moral or ethical plane… the distinct significance of what we are referring to as ‘ontological violence’ concerns the fundamental question of mutual recognition…[of] the violent dispossession of the Indigenous peoples [through which] white Australia did more than merely fail to acknowledge the status of Indigenous Australians as the country’s original owners, as has been suggested. Further: See, for example, Genevieve Lloyd, ‘No one’s Land’. Lloyd, Genevieve, ‘No one’s Land; Australia and the Philosophical Imagination’, Hypatia, vol.15, no.2, 2000, pp. 26-39. The Indigenous-white Australian encounter is not just a matter of the latter denying to the former their rights of control over their lands. Instead, white Australia has denied Indigenous being as self-determining subjects and as sovereign peoples. This is not to suggest that the Indigenous peoples depend upon the white Australian state for recognition of their sovereign being. As Tony Birch explains, sovereignty within Indigenous communities themselves is not reliant on either European law or occasional state paternalism. It is maintained through pre-existing, pre-European models of governance. p. 40. Tony Birch, ‘The Invisible Fire’, p. 107. Nevertheless, this self- sustaining internal sovereignty has been rendered inoperative in Indigenous-white Australian relations and the refusal fully to recognize Indigenous property-owning being is a constitutive feature of the relationship. 91 Watson, Irene. ‘Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Are We free to Roam?’, in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2007, pp. 15- 32; p. 25 92 op.cit. 93 Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos. ibid. 94 Reynolds. (2013) p. 45 95 op.cit. p. 45-6 96 op.cit. p. 45-6 97 Clements. 2013. p. 3 98 Curthoys. 2006. ibid. 99 Bollard. ibid 100 Rieff, David 9/11, the limits of Remembrance. http://harpers.org/archive/2011/08/after 9/11/ 101 Batman to Anstey, 7 September 1829, AOT, CSO1/320/7578, cited in A.H. Campbell. John Batman and the Aborigines. Melbourne: Kibble Books, 1987. pp.32 – 33. A clear example of this phenomenon within the era of the Black war is John Batman’s account of the deaths that resulted from his Roving Parties that attest to the open ways the Black War was reported at the time. 102 Expressions such as ‘counting crows’ referred to the numbers of deaths of Aborigines by Roving Parties and other reprisals across the frontier. 103 Gibson, Ross. 26 Views of a Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788-91 Perth: UWA Publishing. 2012 . p. 227
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104 op.cit. p. 228 105 Thomas. op.cit. p. 10. Thomas is referring here to Johannes Fabian’s formulations in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Other, New York, Columbia University Press, 1983. 106 Russell, Lynette. Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790- 1870. New York: State University. 2012. p. 18 107 Hansen, David. Seeing Truganini. [Calibre Prize Essay.] [on-line]. Australian Book review, No. 321, May 2010: pp. 45 – 53
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Chapter 4 - Apprenticed to Ghosts: accountable for mending shadows
Every site of memory is also a contested space, highlighting certain aspects of the past, ‘forgetting’ or ‘distilling’ others. Bruce Scates1
It is recognisably true that the chain of stereotypical signification is curiously mixed and split, polymorphous and perverse, an articulation of multiple belief.
Homi Bhabha2
Language has unmistakeably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but a medium. Above all he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter, to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the “matter” itself is no more than the strata which yield there long sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield those images that severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights, like torsos in a collector’s gallery.
Walter Benjamin3
Walter Benjamin is referring to an individual’s memory of their lived experience – not of an individual’s relationship to the problematic patterns of forgetting and remembering of collective memory and the debates of historians about events two hundred years distant. However, his advice is valuable in respect to this research process into the history of Jacob Mountgarrett 4 and those with whom he lived that I have more recently discovered: Bridget Edwards Mountgarrett (1780 – 1829)5, George Briggs (circa 1792 – 1854)6, Worete.moete.yenner (circa 179? - 1847)7 and
Dalrymple Briggs (1808 - 1864)8 amongst others. These are my inherited torsos inhabiting a different collector’s gallery from that of Benjamin’s imagination but they are troublesome and problematic teachers nonetheless. They have left just enough of a trace in the historical records to be identified, dwarfed by the triumphalist top-hat and horse, dominant figures of Knopwood, Collins, Macquarie, Mannagarlenna 9 and other major historical figures in this incomplete little narrative. They are constrained and deformed, as Roland Barthes suggests in
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Mythologies, as the inevitable outcome of the operations of all language.10 Their stereotypical identities and their particular uniform costumes of the era were made to fit the singular repetitive narrative that repeats and repeats and repeats one version of Australia’s Colonial past in exhaustive detail.11 They remain largely unknown - ghosts whose prosopographical12 details reveal only partial ill-fitting uniforms, that trouble the ontological script. What I do know is that their fragmentary presence indicates that something more is missing. When I ask them what that might be, they always turn and walk away.
Between historiography and mythology
It is apparent when reviewing the reports of the events at Risdon Cove and the later history of Port Dalrymple, that they follow the four stages of settler narratives that Ann Curthoys modelled as also outlined in the previous Chapter.13 However, while the perspectives offered by these respective historians are entirely understandable, they perhaps provide an overly simplified account of the scenarios involved as Nicholas Thomas notes:
Historians of Tasmania have shown a marked sympathy for the island’s vanquished peoples. The unintended result of this well-meaning tradition has been an image of hapless blacks eradicated by heartless whites, which undermines any attempt to understand the experiences of either.14
Thomas’ analysis of the flaws in a traditional binary model of black versus white informs my approach to investigating more complex cross-cultural relationships in the lives of these individuals through an abductive process towards a more complex consideration of what their lives and experiences might have been. Despite the violent narratives of this history and fact of the larger arc of the genocide and destruction of Palawa culture, more subtle yet plausible elaborations of their circumstances might better locate them respectfully amidst the escalating, brutal events of this era. Greg Lehman, Palawa Scholar, argues that:
Much Tasmanian history has been pityingly patronising and belittling, almost exclusively non-Aboriginal in origin, and distant from the Palawa experience. What
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has been recorded of, or written by Palawa, has been mostly about the struggle against colonialism – a successful one in terms of survival.15
My non-indigenous subjective postcolonial eye/I 16
Whilst my research acknowledges its undeniable non-indigenous position, it aims only to propose provisional alternatives as glimpses of each character during a brief era of cross-cultural encounters in which these characters may have been other than inevitable victims in a war of dispossession. James Boyce17 identified a period of, ‘…thirteen years after official white settlement began… [when]… Aboriginal political, economic and social structures were intact’ and perhaps where, albeit briefly, different outcomes might have eventuated. However the evidence that remains is in ‘smithereens’.18
I aim only to conjure a differently imagined sense of their lives to disrupt the generic Australian metanarrative, offering a tentative account that lies unfixed between silhouettes and shadows with a visual language that engages tenuous and fragile threads and asymmetries amidst the gaps in this history for the present By proposing an incomplete visual narrative my intention is to provoke the viewer to attempt to make sense of the scraps and contradictions before them; to imagine a complete narrative despite the uncertainty as a form of invisible mending towards new interpretations of the past. As a non-indigenous creative practice it aims to recognize the agency of the historic Palawa players and to support the emergent Palawa cultural processes that Greg Lehman identifies as, ‘the contribution of new meanings and the reiteration of traditional knowledge make the emerging Aboriginal narrative essential for transformation of culture and survival of communities.’19
However, given that the extant historical documents and archives that report these individuals’ lives to us have been filtered through the writings of their British educated contemporaries who brought particular cultural biases and axiologies to bear on their reporting, this is a difficult objective. This is further compounded by the fact that two of these people were of Palawa descent: a complication that subsequently requires consideration of cross-cultural complexities as well as issues
88 pertaining to a fundamental class divide. I am also interpreting their circumstances despite a gulf of more than two hundred years which problematizes perceptions of these individuals even further. Given these difficulties and the fact that I am adopting a creative practice as research methodology I have applied an abductive method outlined in Chapter 1 to indicate a scale of plausibility to my interpretations of the antagonistic intimacy of these five individuals.
I am mindful of the need to allow for more open interpretations that question the predictable counter posed terms frequently used in colonial cross-cultural histories which are based upon a closed British-European-centricity that limits the epistemological and analytic interpretations of events to closed and unnecessarily restrictive binary terms such as native and newcomer, settler and indigene, invader and traditional owner which deny alternative readings and little narratives.20 This openness is crucial to the ways in which we might better construct meanings perceive more plausible, unexpected interpretations. The kinds of accidents and unpredictable surprises made possible through a creative practice visual language research approach, allow recognition of similarities as metaphor and associations as metonym not unlike the way Dening proposes historying as an affective means of visually testing other scenarios by suggesting other stories without conclusion. In this way it is possible to imagine a range of plausible alternative events that may exist as versions of Lyotard’s little narratives. We cannot learn truths through prescriptive historical litany – we may uncover other possible visual truths and plausible scenarios by glimpsing them. As Lynette Russell’s research into the vital roles and relationships between the authority of British settlers, sealers, straitsmen and Australian Aboriginal sealers and whalers in the southern oceans in the nineteenth century proposes:
[…] models of interaction that included negotiation, economic imperatives and alliance formations, providing a nuanced understanding of the ambiguities and cross-cultural encounters as these were played out in the maritime industries of the early contact period. Exploring negotiation and alliance building requires an appreciation of the relationships and friendships between the men, between the
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women, and across genders. Those relationships shifted over time and ranged from violent and forced to domestic and settled.21
Without a perspective that recognises and emphasises negotiation we cannot imagine or hypothesize their relationships in other more varied or nuanced ways.
Jacob Hackett Mountgarrett (1773? – 1828)
From memory, my first encounter with Jacob Hackett Mountgarrett (1773 -1828) was a listing in a history book many decades ago, which described him as the ‘Irish First Surgeon in Van Diemen’s Land in 1803, notorious, convicted of theft of livestock and one-armed as a result of a brawl on the docks in Sydney. He had died destitute and dishonoured.’ The bare facts of this entry as read by my sixteen year old self were both mildly amusing (an Irish, criminal, one-armed surgeon was ludicrous to say the least) and equally, mysteriously tragic for here was a tale of shame and a dishonourable fall from grace in these few spare lines. It never occurred to me that he may have been deliberately deleted from the family tree or that this entry directly implicated us in the British invasion of Australia; that we weren't comfortably distanced from the frontier war-zone. It was merely odd. I assumed there was little else to know.
My family only acknowledged our place in Australia’s history from my maternal and paternal great grandparents’ arrival in Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century. They took up land - the euphemism that hid the facts of dispossession.22 It was another decade before I again encountered the name in one paragraph of Robert Hughes’ account of the events at Risdon Cove in May, 1804 in The Fatal Shore – this time the tone was dark and threatening:
Nobody counted how many of the unarmed blacks were slaughtered, but at the end of the massacre the colonial surgeon Jacob Mountgarrett, prompted by some anthropological whim salted down a couple of casks of their bones and sent them
to Sydney.23
The insinuation is one of callous butchery and arrogant disregard for the humanity of the slaughtered ‘natives’ blithely treated like specimens and Imperial cargo.
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Published in 1987, Hughes called Risdon Cove ‘the only true genocide in English colonial history’.24 Consequently his suggestion of Jacob’s brutal contempt for the victims of the apparent Risdon Massacre carried even greater impact which was as I looked closer to become even more disturbing and difficult. The debate that Risdon was allegedly the start of all subsequent violence on both sides of the frontier has been similarly repeated many times by historians from the Nineteenth century through to some within Windschuttle’s orthodox school.25
Within the historiographies written since first settlement, the only common agreement is an acknowledgement of the dispossession of the Aborigines. The issue of dispossession, most recently fuelled by the History Wars was addressed in the previous Chapter. I will return to these debates surrounding the significance of the events of Risdon Cove in due course as it is central in significant ways to the way in which the history of dispossession has been reported, remembered and understood. It is also I believe central to Mountgarrett’s reputation within the colony in his own time and latterly, as a historical figure.
My third encounter with Jacob Mountgarrett was a conversation in passing that revealed that there was more to be discovered about this lost forebear. This began the difficult process of drawing a silhouette around the notorious figure of Jacob Mountgarrett and making at least some plausible sense of the time in which he lived; of following tenuous threads of evidence. Unravelling a larger story of genealogical relationship through ghostly lines of PRONI26 and Parish Records27, provided few reliable traces. The only evidence being Belfast Linen Hall documents, British Naval records and documents from The National Archives in Kew28 and at each point an abrupt shock as a signature appeared; his naval buttons in Hobart29 and a tiny carved sailor previously seen in archaeological records30 from his house at Risdon Cove.31 These small objects were followed by a detailed family tree from 1800; provided to me by a relative who frightened my mother because of his uncanny resemblance to my long deceased father.
Repetitious facts and stereotypical villainy
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Beyond these at first, was little more than repetitious facts32 which underlined the initial impression of Mountgarrett as a dubious character33, a stereotypical villain of the era – one of the British invaders responsible for the dispossession and destruction of the Palawa high cultures in less than a generation. He is described variously but consistently – as ‘being in continual conflict with the authorities and a notorious bad debtor, suspected of cattle stealing and misappropriating stores and medicines’.34 According to many other reports he was ‘dishonest’, ‘infamous’, ‘a damned rascal’35; ‘irrepressibly ambitious’36; ‘an evil-man’37 and according to John
West had even ordered a blacksmith ‘to be flogged for presenting a bill’.38 This poor reputation was repeated consistently by successive historians from the Nineteenth century onwards.
Most importantly, however, his involvement in the Colony’s first reported massacre at Risdon Cove underlined this reputation and in many reports, based on later events, the reliability of his evidence of 1804 is retrospectively called into question.39 As one of three eye-witnesses present, the doubt cast upon the credibility of his evidence is based on the testimony of a convict eye-witness
Edward White40 provided to the Aborigines Committee twenty-seven years after the event which among other issues was investigating the causes of the ‘Black War’.41 It is this key event and the inconsistencies of the testimonies that frames the majority of biographical versions of Mountgarrett’s character that is I believe significant to both the ways we might perceive him and the ways that his fortunes fluctuated over the following twenty-five years.
Risdon Cove Massacre - May 3rd 1804
While there are many elaborate and varied versions of the tragic events at Risdon
Cove42 that have been intensely debated over the past two hundred years,43 space here prevents me from a detailed analysis which can best be found in recent analyses by contemporary historians such as Tardiff44, Boyce45, Reynolds 46, Calder47, Ryan48 and Refshauge49. However, the events might usefully be summarised as follows as a means of locating Mountgarrett’s role at Risdon Cove and identifying
92 the differences between this occurrence and the subsequent violence towards the Tasmanian first people.
Nine months after the first landing of Bowen’s party at Risdon, and while Bowen was absent from the Camp, a fatal encounter occurred between what was most likely a large hunting party of Big River and Oyster Bay peoples and the New South Wales Corps troops under the temporary command of Lieutenant William Moore. Of three eye-witness accounts of the events, the most detailed and lengthy was from convict Edward White in 1830 who claimed that the Aborigines approached the camp peacefully and that ‘there were a great many of the Aborigines slaughtered and wounded; I don’t know how many.’50 The number of Aborigines who approached the settlement early in the morning by Mountgarrett’s report to Rev. Knopwood was ‘not less than five or six hundred’.51 This is, according to Henry Reynolds, most likely an overestimation in an attempt to underline the perception of imminent danger the Aborigines presented and to explain the attack by the soldiers that followed. 52 It is more likely that as a hunting party there were between 160 and 200 people gathered who approached the camp of around seventy four to eighty British. Clearly this was a more than adequate discrepancy in numbers to cause fear amongst an ill-prepared camp.53 The bands of Big River and Oyster Bay54 peoples (accounts vary) who approached the camp consisted of all ages including women and children which suggests that there was initially no intention to attack the camp. It is also likely, I would argue, having walked the site on several occasions, that given the nature of the terrain, the location of the camp and the time of day, that the Palawa people would have had the sun behind them as they approached the camp and the details of the numbers of individuals and their behaviour may have been difficult to discern by anyone looking towards their approach and into the sun. Alerted, allegedly by the third eye-witness, convict Edward White, the officer in charge, Lieutenant William Moore, sent a group of soldiers at eleven am to investigate allegedly with orders not to fire, following soon after with a squad of five additional troops. What ensued is unknown but the first troops, despite orders not to attack, most likely panicked and opened fire probably unprovoked, and a number of Aborigines were killed. How many volleys of Brown
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Bess musket fire occurred and at what distance is also unknown but as Johnson and McFarlane report,55 the unreliable firearm may have had little effect over fifty metres although if a target were struck the effect would be horrendous. ‘Musketry fire would also have left more aborigines wounded than dead’.56 There was also no evidence found in the archaeological dig conducted in 198057 of the many bodies of Aborigines alleged to have been ‘slaughtered and mutilated’ and buried at the
Camp after the ‘massacre’.58
The NSW Corps, however, under the Command of Lieutenant William Moore,59 had already demonstrated their capacity for insubordination and ill-discipline60 and had almost mutinied a month before the Risdon attack objecting to the nature of work they were expected to perform.61 This pattern of behaviour supports the likelihood that the soldiers opened fire without reason or warning. James Boyce’s important observation supports this interpretation in that:
[…] what has been often missed in analysing the Risdon massacre is the deep sense of vulnerability felt by the British in the first year of settlement. The notion that white settlers with guns and technology swept into Aboriginal territory without fear or constraint bears little relation to the experience of the soldiers and convicts clustered along the banks of the Derwent in 1804.62
It is also likely based on Bonwick’s 1870 account of the event that the soldiers, including Moore and perhaps even Mountgarrett, were ‘suffering from an overdose of ‘rations rum’.63 While this allegation has since reflected badly on Moore’s reputation, it is plausible and does further explain the poor judgement of the soldiers leading to the tragic outcome.
Some three hours after the initial attack, Reverend Knopwood64 assigned to Collin’s camp at Sullivan’s Cove across the Derwent River, reported hearing the sound of cannon fire at 2 pm when one of the two carronades held in the settlement was used against the Big River and Oyster Bay People on the advice of battle hardened, ex- Naval Officer, Jacob Mountgarrett. In the absence of Bowen, as Surgeon of the settlement Mountgarrett held superior but non-military rank to Moore, would have
94 known how to load and fire the carronade and may have had better experience of conflict and suitable strategizing.65
Henry Reynolds describes the problems in ascertaining the events that unfolded between 11am and 2pm:
If the most common pattern of behaviour had followed, the Aborigines would have fled the scene in great fear and not returned. Had that been the case the incident would have been over in half an hour or so. Despite much having been written about the incident over 200 years, few writers have addressed what seems to be the most important question of all: What happened after the original confrontation?66
Perhaps the firing of the carronade was organised in response to a perceived retaliation by the Big River and Oyster Bay people as Reynolds claims, ‘Moore made the intriguing remark that during the “time they were in camp, a number of old men were perceived at the foot of the hill, near the valley, employed in preparing spears”’.67 Reynolds goes on to logically argue that the Palawa people having been attacked once may well have re-grouped and were preparing spears for an organised retaliation. Given that the soldiers were most likely fearful to begin with, it is probable that they would be even more afraid and in genuine trouble given the sheer numbers of the opposition. It is reasonable to propose that they would turn to their only other weapon – the carronade in such a dire situation where ‘their lives may have been in serious danger.’68 This plausible scenario reasonably recasts the long-standing historical opinion of British aggressors firing the carronade at innocent Aborigines with murderous intent. It proposes a scenario where over the three hour period the circumstances changed and the weapon was used to deter a large assembly of Aborigines rightfully aggressive, armed with spears and intending to attack. Additionally it recasts both Moore and Mountgarrett’s testimonies as likely being more accurate if we consider they are reporting upon their perceptions of the apparent threat three hours after the initial British assault on the unarmed clans when their circumstances had dramatically changed.
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Whilst the initial British offensive likely resulted in a number of fatalities and the later defence was probably dramatically violent as a result of the use of the unconfirmed loaded canon, it is not reasonable to portray the events as representative of a brutal and deliberate massacre and slaughter of many hundreds of Palawa men, women and children from the outset as has been asserted.69
Before concluding this line of analysis there is a further issue to consider which has recently emerged. James Boyce’s 200870 careful analysis of the occurrences at Risdon in 1804 has encouraged other historians after the History Wars,71 to reconsider these events and to further investigate the historical records to reveal some key discrepancies previously not considered that have altered the way in which the events at Risdon might be perceived. Of these many carefully considered analyses of the Risdon massacre, one significant claim has recently brought into question the whole interpretation of both Moore and Mountgarrett’s testimonies previously held to be dishonest and dubious. Michael Asten’s detailed analysis of the events at Risdon72 follows claims made by Scott Seymour, that neither of them have been able to find any records of the convict Edward White in Van Diemen’s Land in 1804. If this is in fact correct and previous historians who had taken White’s testimony to the Aborigines Committee in 1830 as a genuine true account in contrast to those of Moore and Mountgarrett were in error, it casts grave doubts upon the historical record’s certainties. It would also be a clear case of perjury that has had longstanding effects on our perceptions of this history and the significance of Risdon as a site of a massacre. Moreover White’s key testimony is an example of the many reports of events in the Colony which have become legitimised as ‘historically accurate’ but which are often based on self-interest or elaborate hearsay at best and given human nature, gossip at worst, and which have been reflected in the tangential reporting of more heartless violence in later decades.73 It is now likely that the number of deaths claimed by Moore’s and Mountgarrett’s testimonies - fewer than ten Aborigines killed at Risdon, are reasonably accurate in stark contrast to some of the more elaborate claims made since 1804 which continue to be asserted by many.74
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The recent Palawa versions of the Risdon narrative as a massacre, however are legitimately emblematic of massacres in the following decades as the Colonial frontier advanced especially the many horrendous atrocities perpetrated by Governor Arthur’s officially sanctioned Roving parties and vigilante raids of the late 1820s,75 leading to the Black War which after two decades of settlement exploited increased frontier settler knowledge of Palawa culture and habits to hunt down bands of the Palawa with the intent of annihilation. In 1804 however, I argue, the events at Risdon on May 3rd are of a different kind. I believe Risdon is the first documented example of the kinds of tragic outcomes that arose in early cross- cultural encounters produced by a combination of ignorance, fear and poor judgement that spiralled towards impending disaster and engulfed the colony as settlement proceeded.
Nothing however can change the fact that the encounter was predictable and while different in character from many of the wilful violent attacks which followed, it remains symbolic of the relentless, widespread violence and genocide towards the Palawa that steadily escalated as waves of ambitious settlers arrived in Van Diemen’s Land seeking new futures in the following decades. As previously discussed in Chapter 2, it is also a key example of the kinds of callous reckoning that informs many of the ‘grisly disputes’76 about the numbers of deaths reported in Colonial incidents which importantly use various forms of callous reckoning to avoid offering an account of the lives and circumstances of the people who lived and died on both sides of the frontier. As Ravenscroft has suggested, rather than this calculation of numbers of deaths as a standard form of stitching over non- indigenous assumptions as a typical response to these events77 my analysis here of Mountgarrett’s place in the Risdon events, is part of my research approach which aims to create a different type of tentative and uncertain invisible mending where
‘enigma and doubt are put into effect, in narrative content and form’78 via incomplete, unsettled and fragmentary narratives about the ordinary lives of those caught up in the violence. Once these settings and the others I am also researching, have been located within the historical records later in this Chapter, I will elaborate the details of this creative practice in Chapter 5.
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Nonetheless, despite this callous reckoning, Risdon remains a key foundation narrative for both Tasmania and Australia and remains a site of difficult anguish for both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians within the painful processes of unresolved conciliation. It represents the difficult legacies and burden of the violent history of dispossession as one of the places of first settlement of non- indigenous Australians and a fraught location of unresolved power relations between the contested authority of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Corporation and the Lia Pootah peoples who each have problematic status under both State and Federal Law as well as the profoundly difficult identity as descendants of the first Nations peoples of Van Diemen’s Land.
An Anthropological Whim
Whilst the previous section addresses the debates around the number of casualties during the alleged Risdon ‘massacre’, there are two other accusations made against Mountgarrett that deserve attention as well. The first is the claim as previously noted by Hughes, that Mountgarrett , ‘prompted by some anthropological whim salted down a couple of casks of their bones and sent them to Sydney.’79 This was also noted by Tardiff as being ‘an opportunity for Mountgarrett to satisfy the ghoulish curiosity of other protagonists none more ardent than Surgeon Mountgarrett. He wrote excitedly of his plans to dissect the corpse of one of the victims.’80 Both Hughes and Tardiff’s reports are based on the dubious testimony of White and there is no evidence nor record that this actually occurred in the manner they described. Why Mountgarrett would wish to send ‘bones’ to Sydney, if as claimed, he had a complete anatomical specimen is illogical and further, had this been the case it is more likely that he would have used alcohol rather than lime to do so. White’s assertion in 1830 that Mountgarrett had sent bones to Sydney in casks may have reflected the then frequent use of Aboriginal bones by British anatomists and phrenologists in the UK, that dates back to Cook’s first voyages in the Eighteenth century and to argue a case that Australia’s
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Indigenous inhabitants were members of a pre-historic race doomed to extinction.81
It is possible that in order to curry favour with Governor King in Sydney, Mountgarrett may have sent him the remains of the Palawa man he dissected as he may have known that King had previously sent specimens to Banks in England.82 The argy-bargy of debates83 around this claim by White misses an aspect of the evidence of dissection. Mountgarrett in his note to Chaplain Knopwood invites both Knopwood and Bowden, the Assistant-Surgeon attached to Collins’ staff at Sullivan’s Cove ‘… to see the body of a man who was killd. If Mr Bowden wishes to see him desected I will be happy to see him with you tomorrow.’84 The Hughes proposition that this was some ‘anthropological whim’ is a misrepresentation of the circumstances. This was a not some public event of mere anthropological butchery. It is an invitation to two men, one a religious elder and a fellow Surgeon to witness a private, legitimate Nineteenth century medical process albeit one that was in its infancy as a science. Having been a British Naval Surgeon, Mountgarrett would have participated in hundreds of surgical procedures and been well familiar with the physiology of the human body albeit without the sophistication of contemporary medical understanding. Nonetheless he was well placed to make certain valuable observations about the fact that the Palawa body he was dissecting would have borne the same physiological form as that of his British-born patients. This observation may have enabled him to realise that there was no physiological difference between the Palawa man on whom he had performed the autopsy and the many European patients he had treated in over a decade as a Surgeon. The dissection would have confirmed the common humanity of both the indigenous and non-indigenous races and whether or not this influenced his relationships with his
Palawa contemporaries we cannot know.
Robert Hobart May
There are other claims too,85 that Robert Hobart May86 was the first stolen generation87 child to be taken from his parents. More disquieting is the statement that Jacob Mountgarrett ‘… went on to adopt other Aboriginal children in northern
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Tasmania, including Dolly Dalrymple.’88 Given the panic and chaos which must have ensued after the first unprovoked attack on the unarmed Big River and Oyster Bay tribes, it is very likely that he was the small child whose parents had been killed as Mountgarrett claims and it is not unreasonable for him to have been left behind in the ensuing panic and to have been found and taken back to the camp rather than being left in the bush if his family were nowhere to be seen.
Numerous historical reports suggest that Mountgarrett intended to take Robert Hobart May89 back to England,90 implying the child was seen as a kind of possession, a colonial trophy however I have not found any evidence of this claim and Mountgarrett had already indicated he wished to remain in the Colony as a settler rather than return to England. His reassignment to Paterson’s new settlement in the north of the Island on his return to Sydney after leaving Sullivan’s Cove demonstrates this. Robert Hobart May remained in Sullivan’s Cove after Mountgarrett’s departure for Sydney and is listed on the smallpox vaccination lists in November-December 1805 in Hobart. Boyce91 and Ryan92 propose it likely that after 1805, he was sent to Port Dalrymple ‘to the care of his godfather, Jacob Mountgarrett, who had by then obtained an official appointment to Paterson’s settlement there’.93 Boyce further claims that he died sometime before 1818 (an era when few records were kept). There is no evidence to support this.
This narrative does compare with the common theft of Aboriginal children for labour in all the colonies in later years but at Risdon, the two year old child was in need of care and was not a source of labour. It is also equally plausible to consider this an early example of an evangelical zeal for ‘saving the children of the uncivilised natives’ as a forerunner to the later ‘stolen generation’ children removed from their families. However, Ryan’s claim that this proves that ‘from the outset, the British in effect were trying to eliminate the Aborigines by killing the parents, abducting their children and transforming them into white people’94 is dubious. The attack by the British at Risdon was not a premeditated assault on the Big River and Oyster Bay people assembled in order to steal the child as was the case in later years where children were intentionally abducted by attacking small bands of Palawa people. The evidence does not support this claim - Risdon massacre, if that is what it was,
100 was not premeditated – it was a tragic mistake – the ‘taking’ of Robert Hobart May was not wilfully planned.
There were numerous examples of indigenous children baptised in Van Diemen’s Land between 1804 and 1819. These however were the officially recorded ‘adoptions’ or ‘fostered’ children, and there were arguably as many who did not appear on the official records who remained unknown and whose fates are unrecorded. Reverend Knopwood listed twenty-six baptisms, ranging from one in 1809 to seven in 1819, the year of Sorell’s General Order in relation to ‘outrages by miscreants’ who were attacking Palawa clans in order to steal their children.95 No baptisms were recorded in 1814 the year Governor Davey made a similar proclamation to Sorrell’s and expressed his ’abhorrence at the stealing of children’.96 Shayne Breen and Dyan Summers state that, ‘We are left with the question of how these children came to be living with colonists. It seems likely that at least some of those colonists were humane people who cared for children.’97 But in 1852 John West wrote ‘that child stealing was not uncommon in Van Diemen’s Land’.98 Nicholas Clements’ research indicates the abduction of children was increasingly part of the frontier violence as a source of labour. It is also documented that when the Mountgarretts were married in 1811 that a small ‘native’ boy Charles Mountgarrett was christened by Chaplain Knopwood on the same day.99 After this date there are also no further records of him to be found and both he and Robert disappear from the records. Given the high child mortality rates for non-indigenous children it is not unreasonable to assume that indigenous children living with British settlers might suffer the same fate but of course more sinister circumstances cannot be ruled out either. However, given the fact that the Mountgarretts were childless and Jacob a doctor it is possible that children orphaned in episodes of cross-cultural violence were subsequently taken to the Mountgarretts. We cannot be sure either way. Dalrymple Briggs and her four siblings who seem to have lived with the Mountgarretts at different times all survived.100 I will return to this subject of doubt in later sections which address Bridget Edwards Mountgarrett’s biography and Worete.mete.yenner, Dalrymple Briggs’ mother.
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Yorktown and Port Dalrymple
Jacob Mountgarrett’s subsequent life in Port Dalrymple in the next twenty five years was a litany of disasters – poor judgement, incompetent associates, misfortune and adversity. At first, until 1814, he prospered under Governor Paterson’s patronage, praised highly by Paterson for his services. He was considered to be a ‘man of rank, wealth and respectability’101 involved in extensive surveying of the new colony, dining with Macquarie during his tour of the Colony and gaining substantial land holdings, marrying Bridget Edwards in 1811 and establishing a significant position in the settlement as Magistrate. It is likely that his dramatic fall from grace after 1814, was increased by the amputation of his left arm and his escalating gambling and alcoholism, which may well have been the result of years in the Navy where rum was a daily part of a crew’s sustenance. Rum was also part of his medicinal supplies.102 His gambling habits – originally appropriate to the role of gentleman of the Nineteenth century, likely became a necessary and addictive means to supplement his infrequent salary from the Colonial Office and the fact that Surgeons were expected to treat all members of the community but were only paid for services to the official Government officials and staff and Military. The fact that many settlers were either unprepared or unable to pay added to Mountgarrett’s expenses and faltering income causing him to fall further into spiralling debt.103
Accused in 1814 of assisting the escape from custody of fellow Irishman, incompetent Surveyor and unreliable Harbour Master, Peter Mills104 convicted of ‘a bizarre and amateurish attempt at Bushranging’105 Mountgarrett was sent for trial in Sydney in 1815 with others, ‘to his eternal disgrace and infamy’106 after Mills made serious accusations of corruption in revenge toward many of his former colleagues including Mountgarrett. Although acquitted through a lack of evidence,107 Mountgarrett’s reputation was permanently damaged with additional allegations of tampering with witnesses.108 Whilst in Sydney awaiting trial, he was called in as an Assistant Surgeon to deal with the treatment of injuries of an excessive number of patients, after a brawl on the docks. During one of these operations he sustained an injury to his left hand which resulted in gangrene
102 necessitating the amputation of his left-arm, leaving him permanently disabled.109 Given the primitive nature of nineteenth century amputations, this would have produced ongoing pain requiring alcohol as most likely the only painkiller readily available.110 On his return to Port Dalrymple, after more than two years away, he found his herds stolen, his crops destroyed and assets gone. He was in his own words ‘shattered and incapacitated’.111 Mountgarrett’s misfortunes continued and Lieutenant Governor Sorrell’s disfavour and allegations of neglect of duty and misappropriation of supplies in reports to Macquarie, caused Mountgarrett further grief.112 After having applied to retire on a pension, he waited a year for a response, until in 1817, he found it was refused and without a replacement available he was kept on as Surgeon despite his disability and his alleged infamy.113
By this stage of the colony’s development the earlier limits on growth ended. The previous absence of supplies from Britain because of the War with France concluded and new waves of ambitious settlers were arriving. Boyce notes that the market for produce was ‘increasingly monopolised with more and more farmers excluded from supplying the government store – the Commissariat.114 By 1815 a few wealthy merchants and land-holders controlled the Commissariat and as their monopoly developed, many other farmers were excluded from fair-trading. Unable to sell their produce through the Commissariat, farmers were subsequently forced into debt and bankruptcy, having been obliged to accept credit supplied by the same small elite group. Thomas Archer who had replaced Mountgarrett as Magistrate at Port Dalrymple was in charge of the Commissariat from 1813 to 1817 was one of those in power of ‘dubious character … [who] exacerbated the problem’115 and ‘discriminated against small farmers in both wheat and meat purchases and in so doing enriched his own pocket, laying the foundations for his own subsequent fortune. Archer admitted that when he began to employ tenders, he ‘took respectability into account.’116 Jacob Mountgarrett was no doubt one of the many excluded and indebted. Archer had no qualms with selling his own produce to the Commissariat before others.117 With few safeguards in place to monitor this abuse of privilege, the debt imposed by obligatory credit arrangements
103 required by the Commissariat caused escalating foreclosures of small landholders by the wealthy elites. By 1824 more than half the small farmers were ruined.118
Further notable events in Mountgarrett’s life will be discussed in the following sections of this Chapter including the shooting of Dalrymple Briggs but space prevents me from a more extensive analysis of his experiences in the colony. Instead I think it is important to more critically consider his poor reputation, and allegedly dubious character in light of the social structure and hegemonies of the Colonial order to place Mountgarrett’s notoriety in a wider context of the time. For Mountgarrett and others in the Colonies, alliances and patronage were key to advancement and even survival in this world of strict class-bound British protocols and often false ‘integrity’. While Tardiff claims that, ‘Mountgarrett’s temperament was always better suited to the fast and loose ways of a new settlement. As Port Dalrymple grew he struggled to adjust.’119 But this opinion does not recognise that adjustment involved remaining a member of an increasingly exclusive privileged elite with the stranglehold on the power and profit as the colony grew. How one was perceived, how one behaved, was rigorously surveilled and scrutinised by a small elite unofficial authority and punishment was swift for the slightest misdemeanour. In Jacob’s case it seems that his loss of favour with these authorities for crimes for which he was never convicted was an example of this swift and demeaning condemnation. His difficulties further compounded by the amputation of his arm in the service of the Government in Sydney whilst awaiting trial and despite his acquittal, the refusal to allow him to retire on a full pension was an additional liability.120 While it was assumed and even expected that the convicted under classes and the poor were automatically considered contemptible and inferior, for a member of the educated privileged classes to suffer the ignominy of social disgrace and poverty, even destitution, was a far greater transgression. The privileged classes were expected beyond all reason to sustain the illusion of superiority. Failure was unthinkable and shameful. Ironically those making the determinations of acceptability such as Sorell were, in fact, it could be argued of worse character – Sorell was quietly removed as Governor when it came to light officially that he was an adulterer.121 Macquarie too was almost convicted of fraud
104 in England before coming to the Colony but was saved from disgrace and a court martial by a patron. Double standards were not unusual.
Countrymen and Servants - ‘He was a wretched drunk and she was worse’.122
Perhaps they were wretched drunks. We can’t know the circumstances of this claim about Jacob and Bridget nor can we often find answers to the other questions that surface when trawling the archives once opened, when letters are read and the dust of the past is blown about. But in order to create some sense of these lives and by comparison to reflect on aspects of our own, Ross Gibson suggests that:
We need to propose “what if” scenarios that help us account for what has happened . . . so that we can better envisage what might happen. We need to apprehend the past.123
Gibson tells us this requires imagination, involving ‘a readiness to incorporate the unknown…when one encounters evidence that’s in smithereens’, the evidence of the past that lies rooted in a seedbed of doubt.124 His advice has informed my creative practice research process as has David Hansen’s, previously noted that we must allow enough of a space for those from the past to be resuscitated, to walk around for a short time but we cannot tell them how to behave nor what to say.125 What follows are hypotheses I have gleaned through careful critical analysis, detailed extractions from the problematic archives that allow an imaginative and perceptive side-long glance (as von Zinnenberg Carroll proposes126) at these versions of their lives – as a glimpse of little stories and hypothetical suppositions or what if scenarios - as Gibson recommends.
These are incomplete scenarios but they may provide a setting of sorts for the performance of some grief work to help us imagine differently these lives through a postcolonial spy-glass. My objective is to open a space for more plausible suppositions and assumptions albeit incomplete and unprovable fragments with gaps and aporias in which we might imagine these characters walking about. As Greg Lehman says, in Colonial Afterlives, there is more to be achieved by investing in fiction than history for fiction is a more honest endeavour without the subtexts
105 of authority and facts and the agendas of history and remembering and forgetting.127
Bridget (Edwards) Mountgarrett: circa. 1777 – 1829
Of all of these individuals Bridget Mountgarrett remains the most elusive ghost of all. She appears only three times on the Colonial record – once for her marriage to Jacob in 1811; once on the shipping records as a passenger travelling between Hobart and Port Dalrymple in 1809 and lastly, at her death in 1829 as a destitute widow. Jacob Montgarrett had died the previous year. She is recorded at the time of her marriage as being 34 years of age. She ghosts the prosopographies of both Jacob’s and Dalrymple’s records128 which suggest that Dalrymple learnt to read and write and sew. Presumably it was Bridget who undertook the role of teacher ensuring Dalrymple received a basic education more than required of an early nineteenth century servant.129 Dalrymple’s signature on documents in the 1830s is testament to this, enabling her to petition the Governor later in life for assistance for her husband and her mother’s escape from Wybalenna – the only Palawa person to gain their freedom from that captivity.130
In genealogical terms Bridget is a swimmer – a woman who has come to the Colony free. If she were a convict or emancipated records of her servitude would have been kept. The lives of free individuals especially women or those born in the Colony were rarely documented. It is possible she was a widow or related to others who came to the colony as convicts but were not named in records. There were two women and one man whose names are unknown who were settlers at Risdon with Bowen.131 It is possible then that her relationship to Jacob had begun almost a decade before they were married in 1811 and given the fact that others in the Officer class had open relationships with mistresses, Bowen and Collins included, this is feasible. Additionally, the archaeological records of the dig conducted in 1980 by Angela McGowan132 indicate that there were large numbers of pins, needles and other sewing tools found amidst the rubble suggesting the presence of female inhabitants in the house.133 If Bridget were present at Risdon as
Mountgarrett’s mistress, it would also explain who cared for Robert Hobart May.134
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Since the boy remained in Hobart after Jacob’s departure135 and as claimed by Boyce and Ryan, went on to Port Dalrymple when Jacob was finally established in the settlement this also accords with the possibility that Bridget was Robert’s carer and Jacob’s mistress at this earlier stage.
Most significantly like Worete.moete.yenner she is an absent presence without a voice or clear identity.
George Briggs – (1791? – 1854?)
When the Sydney Cove136 sank in 1797, Port Jackson rescue parties discovered extensive colonies of seals in Bass Strait and a new frontier industry rapidly developed and for several decades involved unregulated sealing camps on the islands harvesting the skins for the colonial market distant from authorities and regulation. This was primitive, onerous and dangerous work and sealers soon recognised the traditional knowledge and expertise of Palawa women as vital assets in hunting and procuring the skins. What little we know of George Briggs involves this frontier.
By 1810 the seal populations were largely exhausted which increased the Palawa women’s status and value as exceptionally efficient hunters of the remaining seals. Sufficient seal colonies survived ‘for independent sealers to remain and make their homes on the islands in eastern Bass Strait as sealers with their multiple ‘wives’.137 George Briggs was one of these independent sealers, reported to have had two wives, the first being Worete.moete.yenner. James Kelly describes Briggs in some detail in his journals noting his presence in Bass Strait for many years with his wife and children.138 Numerous records of abduction, barbarity and sustained cruelty have shown the levels of violence overall were common in the industry as Rebe Taylor (2000), Lyndall Ryan (2010) and Nicholas Clements (2013) note.139 By 1829 Robinson observed, ‘surely this is the African slave trade in miniature’.140 However as Daniels and Walters note, Worete.moete.yenner is the only Palawa woman referred to as ‘Mrs. Briggs’ throughout her life and on her death certificate.141 Although, some sources claim Briggs abducted142 her it is more likely that in the early days of the sealing industry, Mannagarlenna presented his daughter to
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Briggs143 as a means of building alliances with the outsiders rather than as a commercial transaction given that Briggs was fluent in language of the Northern and Eastern clans of Trouwunna144 and had known Mannagarlenna for many years. It is the only known exception to the usual patterns of abduction and enslavement of Palawa women.145
George Briggs is known to have been working in Bass Strait as early as 1808 employed by Henry Kable in Sydney one of the first companies in the industry in Bass Strait. Plomley states he came free to the colony in 1806, was born in Dunstable, England but other records list him as ‘native-born’.146 Perhaps both are true – his arrival in 1806 may have been a return – records of the period are incomplete.147 Aside from these reports his origins and nationality are uncertain.
However, when researching British Navy wage records for the period 1795 – 1801 for Jacob Mountgarrett in the National Archives in Kew, UK, another Navy Surgeon’s salary - John Briggs was apparent to me, in service at the same time. (Appendix 2.) Since there were few Class 3 surgeons in the Navy at this time, it is very possible that they knew each other. It is also possible that this John Briggs was George Briggs’ father which would explain Briggs’ excellent seamanship and shipwright skills being employed by Captain James Kelly148 in 1815 as a crew member during his circumnavigation of Van Diemen’s Land in an open
Whaleboat149 and possibly, seasonally as a Shipwright in Port Dalrymple.
If as proposed Briggs was the son of John Briggs, the surgeon in service in the British Navy at the same time as Jacob Mountgarrett, this also links to the choice of name for his first born son and why his wife and child - Woerete.moete.yenner and Dalrymple Briggs came to live with the Mountgarretts in Port Dalrymple around 1811 as servants.150 Briggs may well have had a prior knowledge of Jacob through his father and may have considered his partner and child safe with the Mountgarretts albeit as servants.
Briggs sold Worete.moete.yenner to another sealer John Thomas for one guinea after 1820 presumably having no more use for her given that sealing in Bass Strait was almost exhausted and perhaps also because she had finally borne him a son –
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John Briggs in 1820151 who was taken into the care of James Munroe sometime later. Why Worete.moete.yenner was sold to Thomas and not to Munroe, The Governor of the Straits who was respected by the Bass Strait sealing communities as a spokesperson on their behalf to the Colonial authorities152 is open to speculation. One possible hypothesis is that Thomas may have enabled Worete.moete.yenner to continue as a sealer away from the depleted grounds of Bass Strait. Perhaps she had no choice but the guinea was a means of ensuring she was valued and thereby taken care of as a valuable asset. Or Briggs may have considered her merely a tradeable commodity. We will never know. Darker assumptions haunt this trade and the guinea seen through contemporary eyes could be seen as an ominous sign of betrayal. As David Hansen argues, ‘you cannot take contemporary understandings and judgements back across the temporal border, only contemporary questions.’153
Ships records and archive documents suggest George Briggs lived on for some time after this working as a sailor between Sydney and Port Dalrymple during the 1820s and 30s.154 There seems to have been no ongoing contact with his children and the last known record suggests plausibly that he died in Sydney in 1854.155
Worete.moete.yenner (1797 – 1847)
Critically, Worete.moete.yenner’s life156 is not just part of an historical period. It is an individual story of survival in the face of overwhelming change and of forces arising from the overwhelming dispossessions her people faced during her lifetime that saw the destruction of their lands and their traditional lifestyle. By the end of her life fewer than fifty Palawa people who had known a traditional life remained. George Robinson recorded a limited list of Palawa language words when he was Superintendent of the settlement at Wybalenna where Worete.moete.yenner was incarcerated from 1830. The only word he recorded for Worete.moete.yenner was pore.ne.ner meaning ‘child’.157 It is tempting to believe this was what mattered to her most - the five children she bore by George Briggs her husband from around 1810 until she was abandoned by Briggs and sold for one guinea, to another sealer
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John Thomas.158 She was separated from these children for years although it seems she maintained a connection to both Dalrymple and her son John.159
Worete.moete.yenner is recorded as sealing with Briggs from 1811 until 1820 and Mollison and Everitt160 indicate that she was also working as a servant with the Mountgarretts around 1811 onwards with Dalrymple. Perhaps as Walters and Daniels suggest Briggs161 considered this to be safer for his family than residence on the Furneaux Islands, an increasingly dangerous place for abductions of women and children as seal numbers declined.162 Residence in Port Dalrymple or the islands may have been a seasonal arrangement.
I do not intend to make the same extensive analysis of the accuracy of the historical record in respect of Worete.moete.yenner or Dalrymple Briggs as I have for Mountgarrett, Bridget Edwards and George Briggs because the extant historical record is already distorted by the lens of the colonising British in respect of the Palawa people of this era. It is not my place to make further assumptions in respect of individuals who have already been misrepresented and disenfranchised so completely by Colonisation. The scholarly detailed accounts of Worete.moete.yenner’s I have used are those of her descendants – Greg Lehman, 163 Julie Gough,164 Louise Daniels and Maggie Walter.165 In respect of issues of self- determination in relation to indigenous women’s agency I have referred to scholarship by Lynette Russell166 and Lyndall Ryan167 because this is a key aspect of any interpretation of these two women’s lives. Colonisation shaped every aspect of Worete.moete.yenner’s life. It is easy to assume she became a victim of this upheaval, yet it is possible she may have retained some degree of limited self- determination given her expertise as a sealer but it is clear she was distanced from her children only returning to live with Dalrymple Briggs in the last seven years of her life.168 How much and to what extent events in her life were her own choice or always that of others such as her father Mannargarlenna, her partner George Briggs or others we will never know. Subjective speculations however may allow her some presence but respectfully are best made by her descendants.169
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Greg Lehman,170 Lyndall Ryan171 and Nicholas Clements’172 research into the involvement of indigenous women in the sealing industry suggest that Worete.moeter.yenner’s experience was not unusual – that during the early years of the Bass Strait sealing industry Palawa clans often traded women and kangaroo skins with British sealers in exchange for seal skins, dogs, flour and tea but as the industry rapidly grew it was not uncommon for adjacent clan groups to abduct women and young girls in order to trade them with the sealers. In the latter declining years of the industry violence towards women was commonplace with many accounts testaments to the enslavement and brutal exploitation of many women. Whether Worete.moeter.yenner’s experience was less violent than that of other women is unknown but it was certainly hard.
Two stories of Woete.moete.yenner’s life may serve to illustrate the complex dynamics of her life in the violent cross-currents of the escalating tensions between the Palawa and settlers and to reflect the wider colonial worlds of the Southern Hemisphere. The first story involves her ‘infant girl [who] died in 1811 after being thrown into a camp fire by Aborigines near Launceston’.173 As a Palawa historical figure the story has been recounted in numerous versions to fit the bias of changing settler narratives, the problematic processes of remembering and forgetting174 by non-indigenous Australians. The story varies – to underline her heroism; that the ‘natives’ were savages attacking a baby; that the baby was killed because it was ‘half-caste’;175 that she sought help from Dr Mountgarrett by seeking British sanctuary;176 that she was escaping slavery. 177
The second event only recently told178 occurred around 1825 when she had begun working as a sealer away from the depleted sealing grounds of Bass Strait – by choice or under duress we cannot know. As Walters and Daniels report:
[…] by now she would have had little choice but to continue to live and work in the sealers’ camps as her own people were decimated by disease and frontier violence. But by the 1820’s the sealing industry was also in trouble, with sealers having to travel further and further in search of seals.179
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Archival records from 1825 until 1827 indicate that Worete.moeter.yenner was a member of at least one long-range sealing expedition – a disastrous voyage which ended in Mauritius several thousand miles from her home. After initial stops at King George Sound in Western Australia, and intending to land at St Paul’s, the ship was allegedly blown off course and the crew were eventually landed on the island of Rodriguez waiting for almost a year for their captain’s return.180 The rigors of the voyage and uncertainty of return resulted in the deaths of all three of her female companions and one child. Eventually repatriated to Launceston via Sydney she returned to a Van Diemen’s Land already enduring increasing violence.181 Her deep grief at the loss of her companions was apparent.182 By 1830 she was amongst the first to be incarcerated at Wyballenna where she remained until 1841 when her daughter gained her release. Ironically it was her daughter’s celebrity as a Settler Heroine resisting an attack by Palawa warriors that enabled her to gain her mother’s freedom from Wybalenna.183 Worete.moete.yenner was the only Palawa to return to Van Diemen’s Land as a free woman. She died seven years later.
I have included these narratives with caution as an abbreviated summary that endeavours to avoid the bias of most accounts of her life across two centuries but which still reflect her fraught life.184 The role women played is poorly documented, too often little more than a footnote in the archives, and as a result the voices of the sealing women and their circumstances, while recognised, remain unheard. As Lynette Russell notes it is ‘easy to construct the sealing camps as barbaric, violent and lawless communities…’ however the ‘persistence (and resistance) of the women, their cultural identity and autonomy… adapted and changed the sealing communities’.185
Dalrymple Mountgarrett Briggs: (c 1808–1864)
Dalrymple Briggs is most frequently referred to as ‘Dolly Dalrymple’ in historical records - an odd combination of infantilising and deleting of her family identity. At several stages of her life she signed her name specifically as Dalrimple Briggs186 and later Dalrimple Johnson after her marriage. The change of spelling is notable and
112 may indicate that originally her name was a feminisation of the place of her birth since the first boy born in the settlement was also Dalrymple.187 Whatever the reason for the spelling three things are clear. Firstly, she chose to spell her name with an ‘i’ consistently over many years and secondly this indicates a careful and detailed level of literacy. Lastly, it is clear she did not identify with the name Dolly.188 We will never know the Palawa name her mother gave her. She was probably born on Preservation Island and became famous as, ‘the first child born by a native woman to a white man in Van Diemen’s Land’.189 She was:
remarkably handsome, had skin that was ‘light copper’, ‘rosy cheeks, large black eyes’ with a touch of blue, good eye lashes, ‘uncommonly white’ teeth, and limbs which were ‘admirably formed’.190
Based on observations made sometime in the late 1810s by Lieutenant Charles Jeffreys191 this description was published in 1820, then quoted extensively by George Evans192 making Dalrymple a colonial identity in Europe and the UK193 during her own lifetime although as Nicholas Brodie notes in Miss Dalrymple or Daring Dolly, she was most likely unaware of the fact.194
Her celebrity status was due to several factors – her half-caste identity made her the ideal role-model for a future mixed-race population of the colony neatly fitting the triumphalist narrative of colonisation. Her subsequent fame as Daring Dolly195 arose from an incident in the 1830’s, outside of the range of the dates of this research. In contrast to Jeffrey’s description of her pleasing appearance as a half- caste child, her appearance as Daring Dolly is important because it is a contrasting narrative that reports her heroism as a settler in fending off an attack by ‘natives’ when she was living in Dairy Plains at Stocker’s Hut with her partner the British convict, Thomas Johnson.
… nothing but duck shot
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The original reports of an attack on Dalrymple’s hut related to two incidents at different locations on successive days196 in 1831 at Dairy Plains which were later conflated and confused through both public reporting and scholarly historiography and made Dalrymple famous throughout the Australian colonies.197 A straightforward report of the incidents, a letter written by Captain James Moriarty was printed in full in the Colonial Times.198 Greg Lehman, Tasmanian academic and descendant of Dalrymple, summarized the events stating Dalrymple was:
[…] living near Deloraine with a convict named Johnson. There she was visited by James Cubit who, notorious for his atrocities against local Aborigines, had been speared by them. Dolly and her children were attacked when Johnson was away, and became celebrated as word spread of this 'admirable half-caste' who held out in a six-hour siege until Johnson returned. Dalrymple Briggs was reported as being rewarded with a grant of 20 acres land near Perth and ‘permitted’ to marry her convict partner.199
Lieutenant Governor, George Arthur, published Moriarty’s entire letter ‘in order to show how easily these wretched people may be intimidated and driven off when they are opposed with coolness, presence of mind and determined resolution’. So that, ‘every possible means should be pursued, and preserved in, to conciliate the
Aborigines’.200 Stories of the event and her bravery remained in public memory for many years often emphasising her heroism and British identity as ‘Mrs Johnson’201 without mentioning her Palawa heritage. Around 1837 Jorgen Jorgenson202 describes Dalrymple as ‘faithful Dolly’ in his incomplete A Narrative of the Habits, Manners, and Customs of the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land.203 Jorgensen scrambles anecdote and original details of the event, confusing dates, places and names as have other historians since, most particularly Bonwick.204 As a result as late as the 1990s works by Shane Breen and Lyndall Ryan, reliant on the earlier errors in the historiography further compounded and distorted the conflicting details and dates of the events. While reasonably arguing the narrative, these erroneous facts have been used to represent Dalrymple as emblematic of frontier settler violence against the Palawa205 and include Robinson’s scrambled details of
114 events from his Journals which mention his visit to Dalrymple’s Hut without identifying her.
This confused historiography is an example of the ways that colonial reporting of events has been at times distorted by settler narratives of heroic resistance and confounded by inconsistent and problematic historical reporting and mythologising. Forgetting readily the original narrative’s recorded details.
Dolly Dalrymple Mountgarrett Briggs’ Shooting at Doctor’s Bend
Another story, from 1825 was also documented in Magistrates reports – (Appendix 3)206 and is largely unknown in historical accounts of Dalrymple Briggs as Dolly Dalrymple.207 Equally dramatic but unsuited to promoting heroic settler accounts of overcoming the ‘depredations of the Natives’, this story contradicts the popular narrative of heroic settlers resisting attacks by indigenous peoples. Given Mountgarrett’s notorious reputation by 1825 and the fact that those who accused Mountgarrett of the crime of shooting his black servant were two well respected land-owners of Norfolk Plains, this is a possibly a settler narrative of the kind of power dynamics that Boyce asserts was common in the 1820s – the systematic eviction of both black and white residents of the grassland plains as part of the broader imperial struggle – possession through land title. In this narrative however, Dalrymple not Dolly has a Palawa identity – the settler heroine is absent. The story concerns Dalrymple Briggs’ life as a servant and victim of her ‘Master’ Jacob Mountgarrett who shot her and was reported to the Police Magistrate by witnesses208 confirming she was not the adopted daughter of the Mountgarretts despite being baptised Dalrymple Mountgarrett Briggs in 1814.209
The case against Mountgarrett for allegedly wilfully shooting Dalrymple Briggs involved testimonies of three witnesses - William Brumby, a settler resident of Lake River and James Thornloe of Port Dalrymple. The third witness to testify was Dalrimple Briggs herself by way of a court official who transcribed Dalrimple’s testimony. It is possible that the term ‘Master’ in respect of Jacob Mountgarrett,
115 was added by the court official to Dalrimple’s witness statement and perhaps adds further evidence to demonstrate the way she was stereotypically and automatically perceived as a Palawa servant. The incorrect spelling of her name in the document also suggests a failure to recognise her literacy and this evidence of the possibility of a different identity. By 1825 however, Dalrimple and another child reported to be living with the Mountgarrett’s were most certainly an essential work force in maintaining the then impoverished household. James Brumby and Jacob Mountgarrett were also present and mentioned in the witness statements. Full details of the statements can be found in Appendix 3. The witness statements contain clear contradictions in evidence between the statements from Dalrymple, Brumby and Thornloe about the time of day, the sequence of events and the presence or absence of a pistol. Also, despite the discrepancy of the Colony’s Doctor’s report about Dalrymple’s minor injuries seen three weeks after the shooting, other issues remain.
Dalrymple’s claim that Mountgarrett was shooting at a possum does carry some weight. George Lloyd recalled that, ‘[…] after the Aborigines were gone, brushtail possums ‘soon became so numerous’ that farmers had to keep packs of dogs to protect their wheat’.210 Moreover, firearms at this time were extremely inaccurate.211 As a one armed infirm, most likely inebriated, old man, Jacob Mountgarrett could well have aimed badly in the dark. Dalrymple is not badly injured by anyone’s testimony. It is plausible too of course that she was coerced into making her statement by Mountgarrett212 and was prompted to include these plausible details of the circumstances, but Dalrymple testified against Mountgarrett in another court case not long after this one.213
However there are other more difficult inconsistencies with the evidence as presented. William Brumby claims it is five or six in the evening, yet Dalrymple stated the moon was out and the clock had struck eight. How long were the Brumbys and Thornloe at Mountgarretts? Had they arrived to buy alcohol as they had ‘come to take a glass’ and were angered by a refusal of more, seeking a means
116 to cause trouble? Jacob was known as a supplier of alcohol presumably as a means to supplement his meagre income and inadequate Colonial Office pension.
But more than all of these suppositions, the fundamental issue relates to Dalrymple. If Brumby and Thornloe were genuinely concerned for Dalrymple’s welfare (they state she was bleeding), why did they not remove Dalrymple from this alleged danger? If they genuinely believed that this was a crime – enough to have brought charges against Mountgarrett to the Police Magistrate, why did they not act at the time? If Dalrymple wished to go to Mr. Archer’s – as they claim she stated, either of Archer’s properties are some considerable distance for a young girl with injuries to travel on foot, why did they not ensure she got there? Three able bodied men could surely have taken Dalrymple to safety and overpowered an old, one-armed, infirm man (even one with a weapon) if they suspected Jacob was likely to cause trouble as their evidence suggests. Or perhaps their accusations were more to do with an opportunity to cause trouble for Mountgarrett if they could prove he had broken the law in shooting an Aboriginal girl, his servant, as the Proclamation Boards were soon to demonstrate in 1830. Perhaps there was an opportunity to remove Mountgarrett from this land – Doctor’s Bend, prime river frontage between Brumby’s estate and Archers. After all the Archers purchased the property not long after 1825. Having walked this country, I am aware that both estates are clearly visible adjacent to Doctor’s Bend and Jacob Mountgarrett was in dire financial trouble at this time. So before we assume from a cursory reading of the testimony and authority of the wealthy settler elite that this derelict character is guilty of a crime against an Aboriginal girl214 perhaps we should consider whether this is a stereotypical narrative about harm inflicted upon a Palawa servant girl by a cruel reprobate Master and is instead something other than it appears at face value. The individual, Dalrimple is the same but her identity is no longer Colonial settler heroine ‘Daring Dolly’ – it is now as servant to a notorious and allegedly violent scoundrel. But the setting in which she is cast this time might not be the simple scenario of Master shooting their black servant. It may perhaps be of a different kind – a case of privileged colonial elite desiring more power by manipulating the law, claiming false concern for a black servant girl. The Archer
117 and Brumby families were closely allied with those managing the profits within the colony. These testimonies are arguably flawed and inconsistent. There is reason to consider this as a narrative of more than one predictable kind. A conclusion however is problematic and inevitably uncertain.
There are of course more complex stories of Dalrymple’s life but here in these two narratives – one widely published and distorted, the other hidden and fraught, is evidence of the ways that histories can be constructed and are changed over time. There was never a singular colonial narrative but many at different times made by various ambitions and circumstances. Behind the myth of Daring Dolly hides another story of Dalrimple, like that of another Colonial Palawa girl, Mathinna seen in Thomas Bock’s portrait, her bare feet hidden by the frame added later to change the first visual narrative.215 My research into the Mountgarretts, Briggs, Worete.moete.yenner and Dalrymple aims to unsettle the weight of the established narratives and mythologies of this era, to imagine with my postcolonial eye what else might be there just beside the scraps and fragments left in the archives, by looking askance behind the fixed frames of reference and between the lines of the narrative order.
Summary
Faced with these flawed characters, harsh testimonies and my tentative imagining of these people’s fragile lives, my task was fraught. Following David Hansen’s advice, I have tried to resuscitate these characters, gleaned by trawling the archives and histories to envisage a space for them in which they might for a time walk around again.216 But this procedure, the complicated dissection of fractious facts, is a problematic process through which to interrogate these ghosts long past, about their intercultural traffickings and intimate antagonisms.217 They will never reply nor can we ask them to perform and conform to our problematic scripts that are riddled with blind-spots and aggravating aporias. The legacies of this past are our habits of remembering and forgetting and its task, the uncertain grief work that may always haunt the present. This is the same grief work that Kentridge, Hawksley
118 and Gough also use to cross-examine their own imaginary ghostly casts and crews. We are all left, more or less with incomplete scripts towards little narratives to be staged with contrary hypotheticals and the ragged prosopography218 of all these ghosts and the temporary disguises we imagine for them.
They deserve better than the closed and distorted end notes that history ascribes them because of an absence of other evidence and facts. My temporary alignments of their circumstances leave them adrift on fragile narrative life rafts whose silhouettes and curious substance are in need of invisible mending. If or where they gain a safe harbour is up to the imagination of the viewer and their preparedness to immerse themselves in this impossible fictional sea – this dark, perplexing grief work about this distant past. My drawing and embroideries shape glimpses of these fraught and fragile lives in silhouettes and shadows with tenuous and fragile threads amidst the gaps in their narratives and this history. My speculations about these lives as tentative propositions by way of drawing and textile toward visual narratives is detailed and contextualised in the following Chapter.
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1 Scates, Bruce. ‘The First Casualty of War: A Reply to McKenna’s and Ward’s ‘Gallipoli Pilgrimage and Sentimental Nationalism’. Australian Historical Studies, Vol 38, No. 130, p. 318 2 Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. 1994 p. 111 3 Benjamin, Walter. Excavation and Memory: Selected writings, Vol. 2, part 2 (1931-1934) “Ibizan Sequence” 1932, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland and Garry Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. p. 576 4 Jacob Mountgarrett. Australian Dictionary of Biography http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mountgarrett-jacob-2486 accessed October 2 2015 5 Bridget Edwards Mountgarrett. Australian Dictionary of Biography http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mountgarrett-jacob-2486 accessed October 2 2015 6 George Briggs. Australian Dictionary of Biography http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dalrymple- dolly-12877; http://www.bda-online.org.au/mybda/search/biographical- report/11011045201?f=George&I=Briggs&ol=&i=3&s=&p=1828; 7 Woete.moete.yenner http://www.utas.edu.au/telling-places-in-country/historical- context/historical-biographies/woretermoteteyer-woretemoeteyenner accessed October 2015 8 Dalrymple Briggs. Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dalrymple- dolly-12877 9 Mannalargenna http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/M/Mannalargenna.htm accessed July 2011 10 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. (trans. Annette Lavers). London: Vintage, 2009 11 Bullock, Marita. Memory Fragments. Intellect, Bristol UK 2012. p. 11 12 Prosopography (from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/prosopography): 1. A description of a person’s appearance, personality, career, etc., or a collection of such descriptions: Genet’s prosopography of the members of the University of Paris of the Middle Ages. Origin: 1920s: from modern Latin prosopographia, from Greek prosōpon 'face, person' + - graphia 'writing'. Objective: to understand patterns and relationships by analysing the data. A uniform set of criteria needs to be applied to the group in order to achieve meaningful results. And, as with any historical study, understanding the context of the lives studied is essential. In general a prosopography is determined by the lack of information about an individual beyond a limited outline. 13 Curthoys, Ann. Disputed National Histories from DISPUTING NATIONAL HISTORIES: Some Recent Australian Debates; Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol. 1 No 1, March 2006 http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/TfC/article/viewFile/187/134 14 Thomas, Nicholas. Possessions: Indigenous Art, Colonial Culture Thames and Hudson, 1999. p. 11 15 Lehman, Greg The Palawa Voice from The Companion to Tasmanian History, Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies University of Tasmania (on-line) 2006 http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/P/Palawa%20Voice.htm 16 Ravenscroft, Alison. The Postcolonial Eye. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2012. p. 25 17 Boyce, James. Van Diemen’s Land, Black Inc. 2010. p. 100 18 Gibson, Ross. ‘Places Past disappearance’, Transformations Journal, issue 13-1 2006 (Feb22 2007). http://www.transformations journal.org/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml> accessed October 2015 19 Lehman, Greg ibid. http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/P/Palawa%20Voice.htm accessed October 2012 20 Russell, Lynette. Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790 – 1870. New York: State University of New York Press, 2012. p. 19 21 Russell, Lynette. op.cit. p. 18 22 My maternal great grand-parents ‘took up land’ and settled first in north-eastern Victoria later moving to the dust-bowl pre-irrigation Riverina immediately after the First World War – the euphemism that hid the facts of dispossession. My paternal Great Grandparents arrived first to work in Western Victoria for various squatter pastoralists where it is highly likely that they heard of Jacob’s notoriety given that most settlers in the western Districts of the new Colony of
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Victoria had come from Tasmania. They later lived for two generations in Footscray, the heart of Melbourne’s western inner suburbs. 23 Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia. London: Pan Books, 1987. p. 414 24 Hughes 1987. p. 120 25 Historians reporting the ‘massacre’ at Risdon Cove – 1819 – William Wentworth; 1835 – Henry Melville; 1852- John West; 1862 – George Lloyd; 1870 – James Bonwick; 1875 – James Calder; 1884 - James Fenton; 1899 – H. Ling Roth; 1948 – Clive Turnbull; 1980 - Robert Travers; 1981/2012 – Lyndall Ryan; 1983 – Lloyd Robson Vol.1; 1992 - Greg Lehman; 1995/2001/2004/2011/2012/2014 – Henry Reynolds; 2002 – Keith Windschuttle; 2002 – John Connor; 2003 – Robert Manne (ed.); 2008 – James Boyce; 2010 – Graeme Calder; 2014 – Nicholas Clements; 2015 – Murray Johnson and Ian McFarlane. 26 PRONI – Public Records Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast. 27 The majority of Irish Parish records were destroyed in a fire in the Dublin Public Records Office (PRO) in 1922 however some extant documents survive as microfiche documents in PRONI. The quality of the handwriting makes it very difficult to discern the differences between records for Mountgarrett often written MtGarrett and McGarrett a similarly unusual name in the early Nineteenth Century. 28 National Archives, Kew. ADM 104.12-15 29 Mountgarrett, Jacob. Shaping Tasmania: A Journey in 100 Objects, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Hobart. http://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/object.aspx?ID=20 accessed October 2015 30 Mountgarrett. op.cit. http://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/object.aspx?ID=19 accessed October 2015 31 Armagh Clergy documents place him as the likely grandson of John Mountgarrett, Farmer of Country Antrim and most likely nephew of the Reverend John Mountgarrett, Curate of Drumbanagher. This contradicts the Australian Dictionary of Biography and Phillip Tardiff’s description of Jacob as a member of the Irish Nobility – an easy mistake to make if a search goes no further than the family name Mountgarrett which locates Lord Mountgarret (one ’t’ and the Butler family lineage) as part of the Irish peerage established in 1550 and no relation. Whilst this error is understandable given the difficulty of identifying Irish genealogies after the fires in the Dublin public records office in 1922, the Linen Hall Library documents pre-date the Dublin fires and indicate otherwise. It is more likely that Jacob was the nephew of the Reverend John who enquired about his circumstances via the Colonial Office in 1806. John Mountgarrett (Grandfather) was listed on Parish records born 1710, a farmer from Glendermott, Co. of Londonderry and father of Rev John Mountgarrett b. 1742 according to PRONI documents. It is likely that, as was common in the era with sons of farming families, over the generations, the first born son inherited the farm and subsequent sons either entered the clergy, the army or in Jacob’s case the Navy. The extant public records of the era are confused by the presence of McGarretts and Mountgarretts often abbreviated to M’Garrett on the hand written and ghostly microfiche records. Either way both last names are unusual even in the eighteenth century records indicating that there were most likely few family lineages even then for both last names. Based upon my family’s documents it is very likely that Jacob was also a Freemason as my great-grandfather John Quinn Mountgarrett (at most two generations removed from Jacob’s) arrived in Australia with formal documentation and letters of introduction to the Royal Freemasons Society of Victoria from the Grand Lodge in Belfast indicating that the family had by then a significant relationship to the hierarchy of the Freemasons of Ireland. These documents are now part of the Freemasons of Victoria archives. This would have initially ensured he was well placed with members of the NSW Corps many of whom were also Freemasons however it also raises issues with the disagreements he had with a number of members of the NSW Corps in Port Dalrymple in the early years of the settlement when Magistrate there. 32 HRA Series 3, Vol. 1 pp. 110 variously to 748; HRA Series 3, Vol. 2. 33 As indicated in Chapter 1 and further here http://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/object.aspx?ID=20 34 Australian Dictionary of Biography entry http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dalrymple-dolly-12877nd
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35 Extract from the trial of Charles Barrington; Bench of Magistrates, York Town 1805 (State Records of NSW). 36 Johnson, Murray and McFarlane, Ian. Van Diemen’s Land: An Aboriginal History. Sydney: New South Wales Publications. 2015. p. 91-92 37 Author’s conversation with Antoinette Smith, Senior Curator at Museum of Victoria, July 2012. 38 Tardiff, Phillip. John Bowen’s Hobart: The Beginning of European Settlement in Tasmania. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association. 2003. p. 178 39 Johnson and McFarlane. op.cit. p. 91-92; Tardiff.op.cit. p. 178 40 Boyce, James. Van Diemen’s Land. Melbourne: Black Inc. Books. 2010. p. 38. ‘Most of the evidence concerning the massacre was compiled by a committee that reviewed the events nearly 27 years after they occurred. Moore’s claim, in his official report on the incident, that the soldiers acted in self-defence following an Aboriginal attack on the settlement was contradicted by one eye- witness available to the 1830 Committee of enquiry, the convict Edward White, who claimed that ‘the Aborigines approached peacefully and there were a great many of the Aborigines slaughtered and wounded; I don’t know how many.’ 41 Anon, Copies of all Correspondence between Lieutenant-Governor Arthur and His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Colonies, on the subject of the Military Operations lately carried on against the Aboriginal inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical research Association, 1971), p. 37 42 Johnson and McFarlane. op.cit. p. 95. Casualty figures for example varied from 4 or 5 deaths to many hundreds over the course of two hundred years. 43 J.B.Walker 1889; R.W.Giblin 1939; McGowan, Angela. Archaeological investigations at Risdon Cove Historic Site, 1978-1980. Sandy Bay, Hobart: National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1985 have added important documents. 44 Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Vol 50, No. 4, Dec, 1993 45 Boyce. op.cit. pp. 20-5, 30, 33, 37-41, 184 46 Reynolds, Henry. A History of Tasmania: Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2012.p. 20 - 23 47 Calder, Graeme. Levee Line and Martial Law. Hobart: Fullers Books.2008. p. 289 48 Ryan, Lyndall. Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. 2012. p. 43- 4,47,338,49-52,125,349-50,331 49 Refshauge. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-166091774.html . 50 Van Diemen’s Land: Copies of All Correspondence: p. 259 51 Nicolls, J. (ed.) ‘The Diary of Reverend Robert Knopwood’. In Hobart Town Diary – 15 February 1804 – 28 February 1805. Malvern, Victoria: The Banks Society, 2010. p. 51. Knopwood’s diary reports that the natives, according to Mountgarrett allegedly made a pre-meditated attack on the camp. Jacob Mountgarrett’s note to Knopwood: ‘Dear Sir, I beg to refer you to Mr Moore for particulars of an attack the natives made at the camp today, and I have every reason to think that it was premeditated, as their number farr exceeded any that we have heard of. As you express a wish to be acquainted with some of the natives, if you will dine with me tomorrow, you will oblige me by christening a fine native boy who I have. Unfortunately, poor boy, his father and mother were both killd. He is about two years old. I have likewise the body of a man who was killd. If Mr Bowden wishes to see him desected I will be happy to see him with you tomorrow. I would have wrote to him but Mr. Moore waits. Your friend, J. Mountgarrett, Hobert, six o’clock The number of natives I think was not less than five or six hundred – J.M.’ 52 Reynolds, Henry. 2010. op.cit. p. 20. Reynolds estimates the group was certainly in the hundreds. The figure Mountgarrett claims in his letter to Knopwood, may have been reported to Mountgarrett by Moore since Mountgarrett does not appear to have witnessed the initial encounter but only received second-hand reports from Moore and the soldiers. It is not as is often implied an example of Mountgarrett’s dishonesty. 53 Johnson and McFarlane. ibid p. 97 54 Reports from various Historians and TAC authors state both Big River and Oyster Bay bands. I have chosen to use both terms as it encompasses a larger geographical area of the island although both claims are quite reasonable. 55 Johnson and McFarlane. op.cit. p. 99 56 op.cit.
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57 McGowan, Angela. Archaeological investigations at Risdon Cove Historic Site, 1978-1980. Sandy Bay, Hobart: National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1985 have added important evidence. 58 Lehman, Greg. ‘Our Story at Risdon Cove’, Puggana News 34, April 1992. p. 45. In 1992, the young Indigenous scholar Greg Lehman published an indigenous narrative of Risdon Cove – ‘Close to a hundred were killed that day, Whole families; the exact number will never be known. Bodies were dragged back to the settlement; butchered and boiled down so that the bones could be packed in lime and sent back to Sydney. When the Moomairremener returned to bury their dead many could not be found.’ 59 Moore was later directly involved in the mutiny against Bligh in Port Jackson and was later Court Martialled as a result. 60 Mountgarrett had already made complaints about Moore for insubordination early in 1804 and both Mountgarrett and Bowen testified against Moore in Court proceedings in Sydney. HRA docs HRA Series 3, Vol 1 pp. 120 -1 61 Boyce, James. 2010. op.cit. NSW Corps, p. 21, 30, 40 – 42; Connor, John. Australian Frontier Wars 1788 – 1838. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002 p. 11. The New South Wales Corps has become notorious in Australian History for the supposedly high number of convicts in its ranks, the commercial activities of its officers, and for its role in deposing Governor William Bligh in 1808. However, historians have unfairly maligned the New South Wales Corps in a belief that its composition and behaviour was somehow different from the rest of the British army. In fact all regiments contained some ex-convicts and officers stationed in India, just as their new South Wales counterparts did, engaged in trade. Furthermore, conflict between Governors and regiments was a common symptom of a British Colonial system which gave most governors little control over the regiments stationed in their colony….The New South Wales Corps carried out its military duties effectively and played a major role in the development of the colony. 62 Boyce. op.cit. 2010. Boyce p. 39-40. ‘By May of that year, the British had been regularly exposed – in the heart of a major hunting ground – to the main tool of Aboriginal land management, fire. This was a frightening experience for men and women whose background led them to assume that the firing of the bush was probably targeted against them. Arson had long been the ultimate means of popular protest in England and Ireland.‘ 63 Johnson and Mcfarlane. ibid. 2015. Whilst this witness account has often been disputed as unreliable it is likely that Bowen’s Mistress Martha Hayes was witness to this event and was able to report this observation to Bonwick before her death in the 1870’s as his text, The Last of the Tasmanians; or the Black War of Van Diemen’s Land was published in 1870. p. 101 64 op.cit. Robert Knopwood’s diary p. 29 65 British Naval records indicate that Mountgarrett had entered the British Navy in 1790 and had over five years’ experience in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic conflicts – National Archives Kew. He was amongst the last cohorts of Naval Surgeons trained in service, promoted through the ranks to Surgeon as capacity and endurance allowed. During the Napoleonic Wars, Nelson’s first-hand experience recognised the value of skilled surgeons aboard the ships of the British Empire not only for treating injuries on board ship but also for maintaining the health of the crews and conditions on board overall. This strategy was a vital asset of the British military forces of the era. The dramatically superior health of the crews of the British fleet in contrast to the atrocious conditions on the Spanish and French vessels were decisive in the British success in the battles in the Mediterranean in the 1790s. Nelson changed the protocols for Surgeons after 1800 to training Naval Surgeons at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. During his apprenticeship in the Navy, Mountgarrett would have encountered intense cruelty and suffering of seamen forcibly impressed into the navy, controlled by corporal and capital punishment, exposed to virulent diseases and fed poor quality food, their only solace being the daily issue of grog – watered-down rum. It fell to the ranks of Surgeons to ensure their survival despite horrendous battle injuries and relatively poor health. It is testament to the changes made by Nelson and the Surgeons that the British Navy was able to defeat every enemy they faced for more than 200 years. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/life_at_sea_01.shtml accessed July 2012 66 Reynolds. op.cit. 2012. p. 21 67 op.cit. 68 op.cit. p. 22
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69 Michael Mansell during the 1988 Bicentenary celebrations at Risdon made a claim that ‘over two hundred Aborigines, men, women and children, had been slaughtered at Risdon Cove in the first months after white settlement.’ Calder p. 242; Greg Lehman ‘Our Story at Risdon Cove’, Puggana News 34, April 1992, p. 45 70 Boyce. 2010. p. 38 71 Reynolds, Henry. 2012. op.cit. p. 20-23; Ryan, Lyndall. 2012, p. 49-52; Asten, Michael. ‘The Risdon Cove Site: Birth of a Nation or Site of a Massacre; Bone of Contention or Future Site of Reconciliation?’, Tasmanian Historical Studies, Vol.18(2013), pp. 112-113 and 115; Johnson and McFarlane 2015,p. 91-92 72 Asten has taken great care in reporting his research findings noting, ‘The author gained many insights from discussions with Scott Seymour (Tasmanian born public servant, with a passion for history and research), Tasmanian journalist Reg Watson, Ian Terry (Senior Curator History, TMAG), Liz Tew (Registration Officer for Repatriation, TMAG), Warwick Risby (President, Hobart Town (1804) First Settlers Association Inc.) and Ruth Morgan (Monash University). In particular I acknowledge priority to Seymour for drawing attention to records of deaths at Risdon Cove, and for discussing the lack of evidence for Edward White being present at Risdon Cove on 3 May 1804. The opinions expressed are based on my own reading of sources and in the event they are deemed to be in error the responsibility is mine alone. 73 Graeme Calder’s detailed analysis of the chronology of accounts of events at Risdon Cove on May 3rd 1804 provides many examples of the divergent interpretations of the events; Manuscript 3251 documents the intensity of violence in later decades. 74 Mansell. op.cit. Calder p. 242 75 Clements, Nicholas. Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land. PhD Thesis. Hobart: University of Tasmania. 2013. p. 75 76 Macintyre, Stuart (ed), The Historians Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History. Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2004 77 Ravenscroft, Alison. The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2012. As previously considered in Chapter 2, p. 7 78 Ravenscroft. ibid 79 Hughes. op.cit 80 Tardiff. ibid. p. 147. As recorded in Mountgarrett’s letter to Knopwood, the Surgeon invited Knopwood and the Assistant Surgeon at Sullivan’s Cove, Dr. Bowden to witness the dissection. There is no indication of an ardent, ghoulish attitude in the letter nor that Mountgarrett was ‘excited’ as Tardiff claims. The letter is written in the polite mannered style of the era. See endnote #49 above. These elaborate exaggerations are an example of the ways that particular assumptions about and expectations towards these individuals could be easily distorted by historians. 81 Paul Turnbull, British Anatomists, Phrenologists and the Construction of the Aboriginal Race, c.1790–1830 https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:270293/j.1478-0542.2006.00367.x.pdf 82 A career naval officer and keen amateur naturalist, King was indebted to Banks for his patronage and in the twelve years he spent on Norfolk he sent Banks a wide variety of botanical and animal specimens, who in turn used his influence to secure King’s eventual appointment as the third governor of New South Wales. See A. G. L. Shaw, “King, Philip Gidley (1758–1808),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition, Copyright 2006, updated continuously, ISSN 1833-7538, published by the Australian National University, http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/ A020052b.htm, accessed October 27 2015 83 Especially as debated by Windschuttle in Fabrications, op.cit. Chapter 3 84 Nicolls, J. (ed.) The Diary of Reverend Robert Knopwood, Hobart Town Diary – 15 February 1804 – 28 February 1805. Malvern, Victoria: The Banks Society, 2010. p. 51 85 The didactics on the wall of the entrance corridor to the Parrawe! Parrawe ! – Colonial Frontier Gallery, 3rd floor, Bond Store in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart make this claim. The text is adjacent to the display of Jacob Mountgarrett’s buttons and a carronade similar to those at Risdon Cove in May 1804. 86 Colonial Office. 201/43 p. 117 87 Haebich, Anna. Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800 – 2000. Fremantle, WA:
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Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Chapter 2, p. 65. Haebich notes that Robert Hobart May was the first stolen child in the colonial outpost and who was in many ways typical of those that followed across the 19th Century and on into the 20th Century. 88 Shaping Tasmania: TMAG. ibid. http://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/object.aspx?ID=20 89 A number of historians (Calder. 2008 p. 235, Robson p. 46, Ryan p. 51) insist that the child was christened Robert Hobart May as Chaplain Knopwood’s vanity project but it is more likely that the child was named after Collins’ patron, (as a ploy to please Collins) who was the then Lord Robert Hobart, 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire and the British Under Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. Hobart as Collins’ patron was the person for whom the Sullivans’ Cove camp was named. 90 Collins to King, 15th May, 1804 91 Boyce. 2010. ibid. p. 328 92 Ryan makes the claim but does not site a source. ibid. p. 51 93 Boyce.2010. ibid.p.328 94 Ryan. op.cit 95 Government and General Order, 13 March 1819, Hobart Town Gazette, 27 March 1819. 96 A Return of Baptisms, Marriages and Deaths within the District of Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, from 12 March 1804 to 21 December 1819, HRA Series 3, Vol 3, p. 510. The return was probably prepared at the request of J.T. Bigge. 97 Breen, Shayne, Summers, Dyan. ‘Stolen Places’. Chapter 1, Aboriginal Connections with Launceston Places. Launceston, Tasmania: Launceston Council. 2006. p. 26 98 History of Tasmania, London. 1852, p. 9 -11 99 Charles Mountgarrett, baptised 1811, Rev. Knopwood – Parish St John’s Church of England, Launceston, RGD 32/2. Susan Banter, Notes on the origins of Quamby, Launceston, 11 Dec 2005. 100 Eliza Briggs, Dalrymple’s nine year old sister was one of two ‘half-caste’ girls raped by convicts in 1824 while living north of Port Dalrymple with settlers. Various testimonies, January 1825, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office (TAHO), LC347. Clements, op.cit. details other examples of sexual assault on children. p. 21-22 101 Tardiff. 2003. ibid. p. 178. 102 Other medicines he favoured included Opium, mercury, ‘bark-salts’, castor oil, purgatives such as rhubarb and jalop. Bartlett A. ‘Two Colonial Surgeons.’ in: Richards P.A., Valentine B., Dunning T. (eds). Effecting a Cure : aspects of health and medicine in Launceston. Launceston: Myola, 2006 103 Bartlett, Anne M. Way Back When … People, Places and Events: contributed Stories About the early days of settlement. Launceston, Tasmania: West Tamar Historical Society Inc., George Town and District Historical Society Inc. and Launceston Historical Society Inc. 2013. pp. 27 - 30 One colourful example of Mountgarrett’s and Mills’ gullibility were debts incurred from the purchase of luxury items from an imposter who arrived in Port Dalrymple claiming to be an Heir to the British throne from whom Mountgarrett and others purchased luxury goods. 104 Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mills-peter-2458 105 Tardiff. ibid p. 178 106 Tardiff. ibid p. 178 107 Macquarie blamed Archer for mishandling the evidence. HRA docs Series III, vol.I no. 4. p. 126 108 HRA Series I, Vol p. 74 109 Mitchell Library, Dr. Joseph Arnold’s Journals, July 13, 1815 p.391. HRA Documents – Mountgarrett Jacob July 3 C720. Manuscript file – Jacob Mountgarrett, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 110 This event might also account for accusations by Sorell that he stole medical supplies since his preferred medicines included opium. There are reports however of other Colonial Surgeons of the time complaining that their supplies were often stolen in transit prior to delivery. Tasmanian Historical Society papers. 111 HRA docs Series I, vol. IX. p. 74. Memorial to Bathurst, Secretary of State for the colonies. Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mountgarrett-jacob-2486 HRA Docs Series 3, Vol 2. pp. 696- 697 112 Tentative research in the Caird Library in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and the National Archives in Kew, London in 2011, indicated that a number of Australian colonial surgeons had reported problems with the theft of medical supplies in transit from England which resulted in accusations against them of misappropriation of stores when supplies had to be reordered. It is possible that this situation also affected Jacob Mountgarrett. I have as yet been
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unable to return to check this initial investigation. Additionally, given that Port Dalrymple’s medical attachment was only 2 Surgeons and involved patients from Port Dalrymple and Georgetown, some considerable distance to travel, Surgeons were often reported by disgruntled patients as neglecting their duties when in fact they were obliged to travel long distances to treat patients as demand arose and were not always immediately available. Furthermore as reported to Bigge by Mountgarrett, who proved to be a reliable and credible witness according to Bigge, most patients who received treatment were unable or unwilling to pay, moreover, Doctors in Government service were only paid for treatment of government employees but were expected to treat all civilians. This may also have resulted in limited services from the respective Doctors who themselves may not have had the supplies, financial resources to travel or time to treat all patients. 113 Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mountgarrett-jacob-2486 HRA Docs Series3, Vol 2. pp. 696- 697 114 Boyce. 2010. Ibid p. 108 115 op.cit 116 op.cit 117 op.cit 118 Canteri,Carlo. The Origins of Australian Social Banditry: Bushranging in Tasmania – 1805 – 1818, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Thesis. p. 105. 119 Tardiff, Phillip. Bowen’s Child, Meehan’s weakness and the Risdon settlers who came to Port Dalrymple. Launceston Historical Society, papers and proceedings. Vol 16 2004. pp. 14-21. 120 Arnold, J. Journal. July 13, 1815. Mitchell Library Sydney. CY 1391. 6223733. Dr. Joseph Arnold Treated Jacob Mountgarrett for injuries sustained as Assistant Surgeon. During procedures which required his attendance after a brawl on the docks in Sydney, Mountgarrett sustained an injury to his left forefinger which resulted in the subsequent necessity of the amputation of his left arm. 121 Robson, Lloyd. A History of Tasmania. Vol 1 Van Diemen’s Land from the earliest times to 1855. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983. p. 133. Sorell’s Van Demonian ‘wife and family’ were actually those of a Military Officer in England and his official wife and children had been deserted in the UK and left destitute when he was appointed to the Colony. 122 Julie Gough mentioned this fact re: contents of a letter during my PhD defence in September 2011. The letter was written from the Colony to a relative in the 1820s regarding Jacob and Bridget Mountgarrett. I have been unable to locate this document to date and to verify its contents. 123 Gibson. ibid. 124 Gibson. op.cit 125 Hansen, David. Seeing Truganini. [Calibre Prize Essay.] [on-line]. Australian Book review, No. 321, May 2010: 45 – 53 126 von Zinnenberg Carroll, Khadija. Art in the Time of Colony, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014. p. 3. Von Zinnenberg Carroll argues ‘the fragmentary remains of history after time are fractured, thereby providing “a sidelong glance at a totality” beyond the circumscribed boundaries of the totalizing enterprise of the Enlightenment project.’ This concept is addressed in more detail in Chapter 5. 127 Lehman, Greg. ‘Writing Our Lives.’ In Colonial Afterlives, exhibition catalogue essay. Hobart: Salamanca Arts Centre. March 18 – April 27, 2015. p. 8 128 Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dalrymple-dolly-12877 129 op.cit 130 Colonial Secretary’s Office. CSO 1/886/18804 (Archives Office of Tasmania). Dalrymple Briggs attained her Mother’s release from Wybalenna with the help of Captain James Moriarty who assisted the writing of a letter to the Governor. 131 Robson. ibid. 1983. p. 34 132 McGowan. ibid 133 McGowan. ibid 134 Sydney Gazette, September 2 reported at the time details of the child’s habits that a female carer would be responsible for and would note including his excellent manners. 135 Haebich. op.cit. 136 http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/S/Sydney%20Cove.htm
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137 Ryan. Aboriginal Tasmanians. ibid p. 67 138 Cpt James Kelly. Circumnavigation of Van Diemen’s Land; University of Tasmania Library, Special and Rare Materials Collection. RS99/I Royal Society. 139 Taylor, Rebe. ‘Savages or Saviours: The Australian Sealers and Aboriginal Tasmanian Survival: Journal of Australian Studies, no. 66 (2000); Ryan 2010 ibid; Clements (2013) ibid 140 11 Oct 1829 Plomley, NJB, Friendly Mission, 2nd ed., Launceston, Hobart, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and Quintus Publishing, 2008, p. 91 141 Walter, Maggie and Daniels, Louise. ‘Personalising The History wars: Woretemoeteyenner’s Story’. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies. Volume 1, Number 1, 2008 p. 37 142 Plomley, N. J. B. Weep in silence: a history of the Flinders Island aboriginal settlement, with the Flinders Island journal of George Augustus Robinson, 1835–1839, Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987. 143 Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press. 2014. p. 198 144 Captain James Kelly: University of Tasmania Library Special and Rare Materials Collection, RS99/1. Available online at: http://eprints.utas.edu.au/9819/ 145 Clements. ibid. p. 198 146 Gough, Julie. George Briggs Bass Strait Sealer. https://georgebriggsbassstraitsealer.wordpress.com/ 147 Plomley, N. J. B. and Henley, K. A. The Sealers of Bass Strait and the Cape Barren Island Community Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1990; Mollison, Brian. Tasmanian Genealogies, Vol. 3, PART 2, The Briggs Family Genealogy (to Sept. 1976). Hobart: University of Tasmania. 148 Archival documents indicate the native-born Kelly was apprenticed to Kable in Sydney where he gained his seamanship skills. However Briggs was already employed by Kable in 1806 suggesting that when he began working for Kable he was already substantially skilled. 149 Cpt James Kelly. ibid 150 Mollison, B. and Everitt, C. c. 1978 The Tasmanian Aborigines and Their Descendants, (Chronology, Genealogies and Social Data), Hobart: University of Tasmania. http://www.qvmag.tas.gov.au/upfiles/qvmag/imglib/collections/CHS54%20Drysdale%20Collecti on.pdf 151 Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-13122 Although it seems Worete.moeter.yenner had ongoing contact with her son until 1825. 152 Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-13122 153 Hansen, David. Seeing Truganini. [Calibre Prize Essay.] [on-line]. Australian Book review, No. 321, May 2010: 45 – 53 154 Gough, Julie. ibid. http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/AUS-Tasmania/2008- 08/1217763705 155 WATERVIEW BAY DRY DOCK, BALMAIN. (1854, February 28). Empire (Sydney, NSW: 1850 – 1875), p. 2. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article60149690 TROVE - CORONER’S INQUEST - An inquest was held on Saturday last, at the Wellington Inn, South George-street, on view of the body of George Briggs, then lying dead in the Benevolent Asylum, when the following evidence was given :- Basil Johnson, able seaman, belonging to the brig Sarah, deposed - The deceased was cook and steward on the brig Sarah; deceased, witness, and some other of the crew, went ashore about 7 o’clock on Friday evening last, and returned on board about 11 o’clock, all alone. Deceased had been paid off and discharged, but as it was then getting late, he consented to remain that night on board, and soon after returning on board, deceased as well as all the others, retired to their berths. Witness was roused up the next morning, about 6 o’clock, by hearing some person hail the Sarah; he immediately went on deck, and was informed by a man who was employed us a sail maker on board the Sarah, that the dead body of the deceased was floating under the bows of the brig. Witness, on looking into the water, recognised deceased; he was then quite dead. Information was sent to the police, and the body was soon after removed to the Benevolent Asylum. Dr. Rockcliffe Norris, surgeon, who examined the body, deposed that it bore no marks of outward violence; he believed, from the evidence, and the appearance of the body, that death was caused by suffocation from drowning – finding accordingly. 156 The Companion to Tasmanian History.
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http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/W/Woretem.htm Woretemoeteyenner (c 1797–1847), also known as Watamutina, Pung, Bung: a Trawlwoolway woman from Cape Portland. Woretemoeteyenner is the matriarch of many contemporary Tasmanian Aborigines including the Anderson, Gower, Hearps and Johnson families from the north-west coast. At thirteen, in an arrangement sanctioned by her father, Mannagarlenna, Woretemoeteyenner went to live with the Bass Strait sealer George Briggs. She had five known children by Briggs: an infant girl (died in 1811 after being thrown into a camp fire by Aborigines near Launceston), Dalrymple (1808–64), Eliza (1817–37), Mary (1818–39) and John (1820–79). During 1825–27, Worete.moete.yenner's travels with sealers took her as far as Rodrigues and Mauritius. Incarcerated from 1830 in the Aboriginal establishment, at Wyballena, Flinders’ Island until 1841, she was released after her daughter Dalrymple (Dolly) Johnson applied for her release, Woretemoeteyenner left to reside with Dolly and her family, the only Aborigine ever so released. She died at Latrobe in 1847.
Further reading: H Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania, London, 1890; B Mollison & C Everitt, The Tasmanian Aborigines and their descendants, Hobart, 1978; N Plomley (ed), Weep in silence, Hobart, 1987. 157 Plomley, N.J.B.. A Word List of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Languages. Launceston, Tasmania: Government of Tasmania. 1976. p. 182 158 Why Briggs sold Worete.moete.yenner to Thomas and prevented her from staying with her son, John who was living with James Munroe is unknown but perhaps with the sealing grounds of Bass Strait depleted Thomas offered her a better opportunity sealing further afield away from VDL which was experiencing increasing violence on both the sea and land frontiers. 159 Barwick, D. ‘This Most Resolute Lady: A Biographical Puzzle’, in D. Barwick, J.Beckett and M. Reay (eds.) Metaphors of Interpretation, Essays in Honour of W.E.H. Stanner, Canberra: Australian National University Press: Rushcutter’s Bay: 1985.p. 185 – 239. 160 op.cit 161 Walter and Daniels. ibid p. 37 162 Clements. 2014. ibid pp. 194 – 201 163 Lehman, Greg. Colonial Afterlives. Exhibition 2015 Salamanca Arts Centre. Sarah Thomas- Curator. http://www.tendays.org.au/event/colonial-afterlives/ 164 Gough. http://juliegough.net/ 165 Walter and Daniels. ibid 166 Russell. ibid 167 Ryan. 2012. ibid 168 Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/dalrymple-dolly-12877 169 Walters and Daniels ibid. ‘Even a cursory delve into the scattered references to Worete.moete.yenner’s life in the various written accounts of colonial Tasmania quickly finds contradictions and inconsistencies that immediately disabuse the notion of obtaining any ‘one true’ account.’ p. 36 170 Lehman. ibid 171 Ryan, Lyndall. ‘Aboriginal women and agency in the process of conquest: A review of some recent work’. Australian Feminist Studies, 1986. 1:2, 35-43, DOI:10.1080/08164650.1986.10382921. Ryan notes: If the experiences of Aboriginal women during the process of conquest are to be compared with the experiences of women in other cultures at the moment of foreign invasion, it is necessary to understand the political agency Aboriginal women exercised in their own society. There is still apparent disagreement in this area. 172 Clements. ibid 173 The Companion to Tasmanian History. ‘Worete.moeter.yenner’. Maggie Walters, 2006 http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/W/Woretem.htm 174 Authors such as Chris Healy (2008), Greg Dening (2005), Khadija von Zinnenberg Carroll (2014) address the concept of the forgetting and remembering of Australian First Nations peoples in critical ways toward historying. 175 Jeffreys, Charles. Van Diemen’s Land: Geographical and Descriptive Delineations of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land. London: J.M. Richardson, 1820: 118–123.
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176 Jeffreys (1820). op.cit: pp. 118–123 ‘at the residence of a gentleman of that place’. 177 Evans, George. A Geographical, Historical, and Topographical Description of Van Diemen’s Land (1822); West, John. (ed. A.G.L. Shaw) The History of Tasmania. Sydney: Angus and Robertson. 1971. First published 1852; Roth, H. Ling. The Aborigines of Tasmania, Halifax, England: F. King and Sons. 1899. (1901) et al. 178 Gough, Julie.op.cit. Brown Sugar. http://juliegough.net/ 179 Walter and Daniels. ibid p. 38 180 Crew member Taylor’s account of the voyage - Colonial Secretary’s Office. CSO 1.121/3067, #91 Letters from Colonial Secretary’s Office to Commander of Admiral Cockburn, 22 May 1827; CSO1/121/3067#70. 181 Colonial Secretary’s Office. CSO 1/121/3067 #70 182 Letter from E.A. Abbott, Launceston, re: death of one of the women, 25 August 1827; Colonial Secretary’s Office. CSO 1/121/3067 #81 183 Letter from Dalrymple Johnson to Captain Moriarty for assistance in the removal of Mrs. Briggs from Flinders Island, CO280/133 pp. 146-186 Roll 502, 1841, items. These events are addressed in the next section of this chapter. 184 Walter’s own accounts of the story in different contexts include different dates (1811 and 1819) and details. ibid 185 Russell ibid. p. 99. Captain James Kelly’s Journal of 1815 notes the skill and authority of the Palawa women hunting seals obliging the male sealers to submit to their expertise during the seal hunt; Captain James Kelly, ibid. 186 Manuscript 3251 and CSO 1/886/18804 (Archives Office of Tasmania). 187 Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 6 January 1805: p. 4 188 The change of name to Dolly which first appears in Bonwick, published 1870 but was first used by Jorgen Jorgensen in his unpublished manuscript. The name may have been used by the Mountgarretts (or other Irish settlers) because if Dalrymple is pronounced with a Northern Irish accent it sounds like ‘DOL- room- parl’ and may have then been shortened in that colonial habit of abbreviation of names. Alternatively it may be part of the process of Anglicizing and mythologizing her as ‘Daring Dolly’. 189 Evans, George. (1822) ibid 190 op.cit 191 Jeffreys (1820). p. 123 192 George Evans, 1822. A Geographical, Historical, and Topographical Description of Van Diemen’s Land p. 18-20 193 George Evans, 1823. Schilderung der Insel Van Diemensland, einer höchst merkwürdigen Brittischen Colonie in der Südsee, Johann Bernhard Appel, Hamburg; George Evans 1823, Voyage a la Terre de Van Diemen, ou Description Historique, Géographique et Topographique de cette ile, Au Bureau Des Annales Des Voyages, Paris. 194 Brodie, Nicholas. From Miss Dalrymple to ‘Daring Dolly’: A life of two historiographical episodes [on-line]. Aboriginal History, Vol 38, No., Dec. 2014: p. 89 -107 Availability:http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=057430947833503;res=IELAP A ISSN: 0314-8769. [cited 30 Oct 15]. Based upon Brodie noting Pithouse’s reports of 1922. 195 Pithouse, Horace Bond. The Luck of 1825, Melbourne: A. McCubbin. 1922. 196 24 September 1831, the Hobart Town Courier published Government Notice no. 196, which contained a printed copy of a letter written by William Moriarty dated 25 August and was reprinted in newspapers throughout the colonies. 197 State Library of Tasmania, CSO1/316: 941–944. The original letter written by Captain Moriarty is a reasonably straightforward account of both events. 198 Moriarty wrote: There was no person in the hut when the natives first appeared but a woman named Dalrymple Briggs with her two female children, who hearing some little noise outside, sent the elder child to see what was the matter and hearing her shriek, went out herself with a musket; on reaching the door she found the poor child had been speared; [she dragged the child inside] she barricaded the door and windows, and availed herself of every opportunity to fire at the assailants, but as they kept very close either to the chimney, or the stumps around the hut, and she had nothing but duck shot, with little effect, though she imagines she did hit one of
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them. Colonial Times, 7 September 1831: 3; Hobart Town Courier, 24 September 1831: 2; Colonial Times, 28 September 1831: 4; Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 22 October 1831: 3. 199 The Companion to Tasmanian History. Greg Lehman Matriarchs of Survival, http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/M/Matriarchs%20of%20surv ival.htm Thomas Johnson and Dalrymple were finally permitted to marry despite Dalrymple having made numerous requests for him to be assigned to her over many years. 200 State Library of Tasmania, CSO1/316: 944. 201 Lieutenant Foote, an ex-navy settler writing to the Launceston Examiner with an account of the troubles with Aborigines in the Deloraine area, 1847. 202 Danish-born ex-convict, Roving Party leader and ambitious self-proclaimed ‘expert’ on Palawa culture. 203 Plomley, Brian. (ed.) Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen's Land: being a reconstruction of his "lost" book on their customs and habits, and on his role in the Roving Parties and the Black Line. Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1991; Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. CHS 53. Plomley Collected papers 204 Bonwick repeats Jorgensen’s errors in great detail; as does Ryan op.cit 205 There are many examples of these errors in Ryan’s histories but one obvious confusion involves Ryan’s claiming a date of 1825 for Dalrymple at Dairy Plains when she was officially still living with the Mountgarretts. 206 Manuscript 3251 207 Recently reported through a series of contemporary works made by Julie Gough entitled ‘Forcefield’ http://juliegough.net/ 208 Dalrymple in her transcribed account of the event describes Mountgarrett as her Master and he allegedly refers to her as his ‘Black servant’ according to Archer’s testimony in the Magistrate’s reports. 209 This later proved to be an asset when the Palawa people were required to go to Wybalenna – baptised protected natives such as Dalrymple, her sisters and brother John, were exempted. It is likely the black boy she mentions is her brother John who could have been around five years of age at this stage and another young child her sister, Mary. 210 Boyce. ibid. p. 209. Tasmania and Victoria; in the main Aboriginal hunting grounds of the grassy woodlands, a possum population would have had a noticeable impact, as many of today’s landowners of the midlands, still defending trees from possum damage can testify. p. 48 211 Boyce. op.cit. p. 4 212 Julie Gough has claimed this to be the case. http://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/object.aspx?ID=20 re-accessed October 2015 213 Manuscript 3251 214 As Julie Gough and others propose – ‘Julie Gough: We must dig deeper than these token objects or second-hand published histories to find the real Mountgarrett by witness accounts and local histories. eg: Extract below from original witness transcripts to Police Magistrates in Launceston from witnesses to the shooting event of Dalrymple Briggs by Jacob Mountgarrett, whom he calls his 'black servant' (not adopted child) in 1825, Lake River, Norfolk Plains: http://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/object.aspx?ID=20 re-accessed September 2015 215 Russell 2012: 341. Russell, Penny 2012, ‘Girl in a red dress: Inventions of Mathinna’, Australian Historical Studies 43(3): 341–362. 216 Hansen, David. op.cit 217 Both these terms are used by Nicholas Thomas in Possessions: Indigenous Art/colonial Culture. London: Thames and Hudson. 1999. p. 10 – 12 and will be returned to in later Chapters. 218 Prosopography. op.cit
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Chapter 5 - Between the sightlines – fragile facts and fraught fictions
If you want to kill a man draw a rifle,
If you want to kill a people draw a map.
Ann Rutherford 1
‘Histories are fictions – something made of the past – but fictions whose forms are metonymies of the present. Histories are metaphors of the past: they translate sets of metaphors into sets of symbols. But histories are also metonymies of the present: the present has existence in and through their expression. The present – social reality, the structures of our living – has being through representations of the past in coded public forms. We read or hear histories in this double way. We know in them both a present and a past.
Greg Dening2
Imagination is… a complex gift. The great difficulty in philosophy which depends so much on thought experiments that are often preceded by invitation to imagine something or other, is to distinguish between an imagination that appears to make sense of nonsense by picturing it – and imagination that extends our sense of what is seriously possible to conceive.
Raimond Gaita,3
Between history, mythology, theory and practice
I will always be uncertain about this poorly documented era in which events and circumstances are contradicted by historiography and mythologizing and thus resist a stable interpretation and relationship to the present. This in turn means my creative-practice responses to this past informed partly by these facts, remain incomplete like unfinished sentences. Without consistent evidence, a concise objectively positioned body of work which presents a coherent singular narrative was not an achievable nor legitimate outcome for my research process. Consequently, the body of works presented to a viewer are equally unstable and incomplete. Encountering these works as research outcomes requires a viewer to
131 test their perceptions against contradictory and changing relationships between the assembled works as much as mine have been tested through the making of the works. As I have outlined in Chapter 2, it is a process of reading or encounter that brings into focus our particular perception of and navigation through the processes of tentative meaning making drawn from the encounter with the works as fragmentary elements with contradictory relationships. My research outcomes - the final body of work as installation has been fundamentally informed by an process of engagement with the extant limited fragments and imagery of a poorly recorded era unpredictably gleaned at all stages of the research from museums, archives, genealogy and historical sites. The archives and historical locations were the primary available sites of valid evidence to inform and disrupt the overly simplified paradigms that arose from the epistemological dichotomies of this history.
After the passing of more than 200 years the archives and museum collections held fragmentary evidence and clues to confirm and envision these lives and shape a repertoire of intersecting, often ambiguous anachronistic visual, material and aural evidence in the present about the past. The unpretentious objects, tools, dress, uniforms and houses of the era; the creatures, maps and vessels of their likely uncertain encounters, perilous journeys and difficult circumstances were infrequently found in many collections as the archives are generally only repositories of the artefacts of the elite members of colonial society whose possessions were valuable enough to be collected. The research beyond the archives however, at historic sites revealed the scale of the landscape, the light, the distances and the specific textures and colours of the rivers, shorelines and open country otherwise absent from the archival evidence. On-site sound recordings of birds and liminal spaces of coast and river in Tasmania at Longford, on the Tamar River at Yorktown, Georgetown, Tomahawk, Waterhouse Lagoon, Bridport, Risdon Cove and Brickendon and Woolmers’ Estates were combined with recordings made in Belfast, Antrim, London and Paris and provided examples of spoken accents, traditions of Irish pipe and drum marches and dominant British cultural practices of church hymns and anthems as an additional background to enhance the visual and material elements of the installation. Other on-site research engaged traditional
132 artists’ research tools of sketchbook drawing, bush-dyeing and frottage offered many of the most valuable haptic qualities towards representing a credible past which were captured and identified to bring an important immediately tangible character to the final art works via the sketchbooks and collages. This particular fragmentary visual evidence using mineral colour, stains and plant forms offered tangible clues and a nascent visual language transcribed to paper and cloth for use later in the studio. Collectively this research ‘data’ brought into focus particular perceptions of and navigation through diverse processes of tentative meaning making that was drawn from the encounters with the evidence in the historic archives, literature and museum and art gallery collections of the era.
As visual, aural and material evidence was gleaned from the archive and on-site research, the creative practice process within the studio generated deeper understandings of the ways in which the emergent visual languages could be further articulated prompting repeated returns to both the archives and to the landscape for additional evidence previously unrecognized without the discoveries found within the studio practice. Importantly these often divergent, open-ended research methodologies and contingent thinking/making was visual, material, and critical, as each aspect overlapped unpredictably evolving in a process of return that drives the research forward.
Collectively this visual and material evidence gleaned in archival artefacts, maps, built structures as doorways, windows, gables, signposts and remnant liminal spaces provided haptic clues which enabled the envisioning of the history otherwise hidden in both the archives and the landscape but nonetheless still present. Each of these elements resulted in the creation of silhouettes, visual alignments of forms and the tangential construction of distances between the artefacts and objects of the past in the present.
Through juxtapositions of scale and distance, repetition and alignments of contradictory image and form absences and presences were conjured. The collected objects became still-lifes and colonies; the overarching house gables
133 located the settlement as central and dominant site of the antagonistic intimacy of the historical characters. The details found between the pages of each sketchbook and the relationships between centre and horizon-line within the installation and the contrasts of scale of elements from miniature to life-size, aligned material and visual evidence in a loose chronology around the walls and across the exhibition space that implied and suggested the past without fixed conclusion. As an open process of critical, personally situated investigation and scholarly critique, the research has demonstrated the generation, modelling and externalizing of new knowledge as exhibition and thesis. The resulting body of work for exhibition and this documentation aimed to unsettle respectfully and rearrange imaginatively the fragments and narratives of the early colonial era.
The function and role of these creative practice research methodologies which informed and shaped the conceptualizations throughout the creative decision making and the related strategies are identified and detailed at various points throughout this chapter.
The first stage of the research generated a lexicon of fragmentary elements which were adapted as a form of bricolage to represent the individuals in relation to the fraught circumstances of their time. As fragments in varying arrangements they could operate freely and function unexpectedly as an initial impetus for constructing more complex hybrid combinations of elements as meanings within works. The elements could make meanings and change meaning and emphasis readily and unpredictably to be modified, consolidated or overturned. As Kentridge notes, using fragments, torn edges and shadows involves:
always finding something we already know. A rational description would be imperfect and arrived at with difficulty. Recognition is immediate and effortless…It understands that the relationship between seeing and knowing is not simple. It proclaims that one does not have to translate what one has seen into a rationalist model before it becomes a useable piece of knowledge.4
Fragments and shadows are fundamental to my creative research process operating as a means of both implying and interrupting particular readings of motif, material
134 and sign. It is this particular performative transference that shapes the development of my creative practice as research – the accidental and often improbable connections that can arise; and the unplanned disruptions of signification that sometimes result. It is also the way in which a viewer encounters the works as a complex suite of forms within the installation space where meanings change as the space is traversed.
As previously discussed in Chapter 2, this is also based upon Ravenscroft’s proposition of a process which aims to avoid predictable habits of stitching over the gaps and puzzles we automatically resort to when we sense an absence of meaning – when familiar forms and signs are arranged in unfamiliar settings. The objective is to allow the enigmatic and aporitic to remain unresolved at least for a time and as a consequence, the audience may attempt to frame a different understanding of the meanings and relationships between objects, images and materialities through a tentative process which challenges old habits of interpretation and imagination to work with effort and doubt. Following Ravenscroft, this is a process I describe as different from stitching over based upon rapid assumptions and a habitual resorting to statistical records, but is instead a kind of tentative invisible mending within ‘the spaces of reading where interpretation and the imaginative act are tested and risk failure.’5 The idea of invisible mending is fragile and hesitant and works carefully to consider what meanings if any can be gleaned or reconstructed by way of immersion in the complex unstable space of visual relationships in the installation where the cues and meanings of signs and elements are changing. Therefore rather than resorting to habitual automatic and unthinking assumptions and even stereotypical responses, a viewer may reconsider more slowly because of their uncertainty what meanings they might make from the evidence at hand in the gaps between certainties. Invisible mending works in the space which is a kind of limbo, as Kentridge suggests:
This limbo, a space of indeterminacy, is vital. A space where you know understanding is limited, contested and inadequate. Where failure of understanding is a correct understanding.6
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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - Fiona Foley7
As noted in Chapter 2 my initial creative practice tested imagery toward a visual language for this history and identified the potential of the negative spaces that arose through silhouette and symmetries on the pages of sketchbooks while working on-site in Tasmania. Through this process I recognised that the negative spaces and the gaps between fragmented imagery were the narrative. Open spaces could suggest a certain distance, a sense of other possible interpretations or events slowly revealed as opposed to the quick closure of meaning found in complete images that encouraged assumptions and certain conclusions. The gaps and absences between the edges of fragments presented uncertainties and doubts and a viewer was obliged to make some sense of what they encountered – like the open-ended imaginative play of Rorschach blots.
However, while this initial acknowledgment of visual absences was a valuable basis for my creative practice research, the problematic colonial history required a far more adaptable and complex visual and material language that could operate within a space of complex arrangements and alignments. As creative practice this was necessarily a subjective and temporal process of interpreting and negotiating the fragments and gaps of the past. My initial reference points were the art-works of this early colonial period, typical of European genres of the early nineteenth century – the landscape; the still-life; the portrait, anatomical and botanical studies and the journeyman artists’ sketchbooks. These however, were initially seemingly poor resources that suffocated any potential for conjuring different and more complex visual languages to pin-down these characters whom I imagined as distant, ghostly unstable traces just out of view between the sightlines permitted by the historical documents.
As a critical endeavour the notion of a distant past implied a certain definition of the past as present but distanced or obscured. I consider this idea best encapsulated by First Australian artist Fiona Foley, a Badtjala woman, who says that, ‘an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’8 Foley’s notion is of another substantial yet distant past not found in the museum or archive,
136 conceptual and evanescent but nonetheless significant. The simplicity of the phrase refers to the physical landscape of her ancestors translated as marks and forms in her art works; to a temporal expanse of cultural continuity and the present political debates that fearfully deny and silence the stories of our collective shameful past since colonisation.
This simple yet complex phrase also identifies my tangential approach to my research which negotiated similar issues of temporary distances of presence and absence albeit framed by the histories and mythologies of settler narratives which have been selectively forgotten and remembered. Finding the visual means to represent my sense of another presence of absence was the necessary objective of my research. While the predictable conventions of nineteenth century genres of landscape and still-life were not what I was seeking, I have nonetheless, identified strategies to produce adaptable visual forms by incorporating sections, tracings and outlines of these conventional nineteenth century genres and building upon the silhouettes and symmetries from the first stage of the research amongst other approaches. This has included working on-site at historic locations to create equivalent data as evidence in the form of visual and material resources – frottaged and bush-dyed papers and cloth which were later combined with imagery and objects reminiscent of the era drawn on-site in museums and archives and from commonplace objects that remain familiar in the present as previously discussed earlier in this chapter. By aligning these elements as fragments, remnants and relics, as present – they began to suggest relationships and implied meanings without closure. I consider this to be a similar process to what British artist David Musgrave, proposes by saying:
If the dust of drawing is alive, it is both because of its entanglement with language (it ‘describes’ something; there is a flash of energy from image to referent that doesn’t result either in their coinciding or estrangement) and its ability to elicit something less easy to articulate I words, something that happens in the blind- spots of representation.9
This is the process of drawing and textile that underpins the creative practice – it both originates and subsequently propels the practice as initial small sketches that
137 suggested a basic vocabulary of shape and form. Later, by a process of recombination and testing, further drawn, printed, painted, stitched two dimensional imagery was generated which later again, proposed further still-life arrangements. This unpredictable, cyclical process is fundamental to the dynamic emergent question and answer sequences of visual and material languages of most creative practice. Subsequently, responding to a fundamental sense of this period as dark and full of shadows, I incorporated the use of light, as a way of creating another sense of visual distance through cast shadows drawn at large scale on long panels to test extended compositions and visual sequences. Narratives were implied because of the repetitions and reappearances of certain elements and images in different contexts. (Plate31 and 32) Ropes and figures; bottles and ships; overlapping figurative elements; contradictory scale of contrasting forms – silhouettes and distortions drawn over frottage taken from historic sites in Tasmania created more complex visual alignments and larger scale, more complex formal combinations of elements as repetitions between works devised for the final installation of the body of work. (Plates 34 to 48)
By working specifically through a repertoire of drawing strategies I was able to resist learnt, established habits that require a specific intention leading to a predictable outcome and instead test more open visual possibilities by collapsing formal visual boundaries and perceptual distances in a process of translation. This sustained open-ended drawing research led to increasingly complex and layered visual images that gained a momentum and significance of their own akin to Ravenscroft’s processes of reading against the aporias and gaps of understanding. Her reading practice became my creative practice which worked ‘against a notion of knowledge as accumulative reading instead [as] a shift in relations between objects in a field, and between the field and what lies outside the field, a shift that implicates the viewer or reader’.10 The process was also the ‘unexpected moves of mimesis’ that Australian anthropologist Michael Taussig has also addressed in relation to cross-cultural aporias saying:
For just as nature abhors a vacuum so the vertiginous cultural interspace effected by the reflection makes many of us desperate to fill it with meaning, thereby
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defusing disconcertion. To resist this desperation is no easy task. After all, this is how cultural convention is maintained. But let us try. Let us try to uncover the wish within such desperation and be a little more malleable, ready to entertain unexpected moves of mimesis and alterity across quivering terrain, even if they lead us at the outermost horizon to an all-consuming nothingness.11
Both Ravenscroft and Taussig are pointing to ideas of doubt as a willingness to question certainty and convention – as a form of ignorance. It was this process of doubt that enabled the generation of my body of work – from tentative small sketches through to a complex and sustained body of work. Uncertainty and doubt about the subjectivity of my research and the outcomes, enabled a process which produced a shift in relations across the field as a series of visual translations that established reference points as new imagery which cut across conventional representations of the past and clarified a new territory based on the dynamic intersections and cross-referencing of elements in making and materiality. This is the role and significance of drawing and textile materiality and their importance in creating a unique and valuable place/space for thought.
Despite the longstanding fear of not knowing within Western epistemologies the value of ignorance and its attendant uncertainty has recently been acknowledged through the emerging field of research, Agnotology.12 As a means of challenging certainty which may reveal possible flaws and limitations that closed forms of thinking may assume, Agnotology is the study of ignorance which demonstrates the value of highlighting the value of unknowns, that trigger ‘a fertile interplay of questions and answers’ to avoid the dangers that often arise from certainty where errors and faults are overlooked because of assumptions brought into play in research and critical decision making procedures due to over confidence and the blind-spots caused by unquestioning expertise. The fluid dynamics of this encounter with uncertainty and doubt is an aspect of what I am addressing through my creative practice – as a process of questioning relationships to and assumptions about the past via forms of visual and material languages which may create a questioning, generative process as an active animated event both in the making and in the reception/encounter with the work.
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Contradiction, conflict and opposition are useful states of mind
Consequently, a willingness to accept and engage a sense of doubt also requires a certain subjective vigilance and critical reflection on the part of the viewer of my works through a lens that is acutely personal. I have sought to inform my relationship to both this distant past and my research methodology through a wide- ranging, divergent and complex creative practice as research approach. I am aware of the need for a careful vigilance in respect of the boundaries of this perspective from which I am working. My ‘eye/I’13 is a subjective vantage point ontologically and axiologically configured by race, gender, social and economic background and politically determined. While the gendered aspects of my position are not directly influencing my argument, they are nonetheless part of what locates my particular and peculiar subjective relationships with the world and with this history. By folding the past onto and into the present so that the encounter involves an uncertainty about the received histories is as Sullivan argues, it is a process that involves a ‘messy resistance’ with a logic of its own in which:
...contradiction, conflict and opposition are useful states of mind. Indeed these attitudes are necessary in adopting a creative and critical stance for doing visual arts research. In practical terms, whether producing artworks or planning research, there is a need to reconcile differences and rationalise difficulties.14
And as Dening proposes in the introduction to this Chapter, this is a process folded onto the present that questions and disrupts history’s metonymic tropes. Like all creative practice it is ongoing and in many ways a process of working blind or if you will, working in the dark. As Margaret Atwood concluded in the introduction to ‘Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing that the process of writing (and I would argue the creative process in general), involves:
obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often combined with a struggle or path or journey - an inability to see one’s way forward, but a feeling that there was a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision... Possibly then, writing has to do
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with the darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it and, with luck, to illuminate it and to bring something back out into the light.15
Atwood’s observation most succinctly describes my initially hesitant methodological strategies through drawing and textile that have been shaped through a process of navigation of the axiological, ontological and epistemological relationships already addressed in Chapters 1 to 4. In this chapter I will address the strategies I have adapted and tested to manage the temporary alignments, fraught facts and fragile fictions of this history and these shadowy characters from the past.
This chapter will also further locate my thinking through my creative practice in relation to the ideas and works of Kentridge, Hawksley, Gough and theorists and writers such as Atwood. Their understanding and articulation of the complexities and vagaries of creative practice at times complements, contrasts and reflects the circumstances of my own making that have that arisen through this research.
Dissecting ghosts - unravelling disguises
My tools of the trade from thirty years of professional practice – traditional artists’ research strategies involve observational and imaginative drawing, collage and assemblage of found items and dyeing and manipulation of textile materials and stitch are used to create and test imagery and silhouettes of the era. This repertoire of research tools have both directed and initiated the research practice. Journals, notebooks, photographs and gleaning details of archival historic documents enlarged the process of trawling for data. Extensive scouring of museums and archives for objects and imagery of the era including those of Tasmania, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne and the UK, Ireland and France fed my sketchbook habit which was both rewarding and worrying - a sense of dread and doubt arose after every museum and archival search which invariably yielded much about the history, the geography, the art, the artefacts, the tools, the textures but very little about these individuals particularly - aside from a sense that they were
141 always present just off the edge of the page. However I began with sage advice from William Kentridge to ignore my academic need for certainty because:
There is a desperation in all certainty. The category of political uncertainty, philosophical uncertainty, uncertainty of images is much closer to how the world is. That is also related to provisionality, to the fact that you can see the world as a series of facts or photographs or you can see it as a process of unfolding. Where the same thing in a different context has a very different meaning or very different form.16
Unsettling respectfully and rearranging imaginatively
My initial data gathering research from the sketchbooks, observational and imaginative drawing and related visual language devices such as fragmentation, collage, spontaneity, chance were next combined as a series of artist’s book/sketchbook forms. The first was a three hundred page document entitled if ‘if’ is question…’17 as both a hybrid sketchbook and more formalised artist-book compilation (Plates 1 and 15). This array of images informed the next intensive stage of research of historic documents and resulted in a series of four artistbook/sketchbooks to identify a lexicon of images and elements – a sketchbook each for Jacob Mountgarrett, Bridget Edwards and George Briggs and one for the experience of trawling the archives – Salt, Ash and Cold, Cold Winds 2012. (Plates 16, 17, 18 and 19). These were produced after an intensive research trip to the UK, Ireland, France and Tasmania in 2011/12 using imagery drawn from observation in museum collection,18 on-site19 drawings of diverse artefacts found during this period of research included naval items – rigging; ropes; knots; boats and lanterns; and objects of similar character and forms to those of the era – simple intimate domestic items such as worn edged spoons, plain cups, basic chairs, dresses and coats of the period that conjured physical presence metonymically. I noted in a sketchbook at the time Walter Benjamin’s thoughts:
Once you have approached the mountains of cases in order to mine the books from
them and bring them into the light of day … what memories crowd in upon you!20
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This stage of the research formed the basis of the first of two exhibitions which tested the studio-based research outcomes through installation of artist’s books, collage and sculptural forms as relational elements across the larger space of the white-cube gallery – Navigating Tensions: fraught facts and fragile fictions21 (Plate 20) occurred at the end of 2012 followed by Circumstantial Evidence22 in 2014 (Plate 21). One key creative practice strategy that emerged from the research and planning toward Navigating Tensions was an emphasis on sealed books as pillars of a gabled roof house-frame referencing the presumed status and authorial credibility of the Codex ‘Book’ as a receptacle of facts and knowledge. In contrast, the artist’s books eliminated text, but retained a monochromatic palette and revealed and concealed imagery using textile’s materiality by veiling and erasure of drawings. Through a process of chance and accident the sketchbooks engaged an unpredictable narrative sequence of images, drawing on the early Australian colonial documents of cultural damage and associated contentious oral histories and memory. As Victor Shklovsky argued, ‘the technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar; to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged’.23 The re-drawing and re-scaling and unpredictable freely re- combined images produced both new directions for further works as non- representational and ambiguous imagery.
This suite of four artist-book/sketchbooks generated a body of research data and a series of collage embroideries on paper (Plate 22) which informed the next stage of the research as more complex, layered, larger scale imagery which will be discussed in the next section of this Chapter. These were complemented and enlarged by ongoing research on-site at historic places such as Longford, Risdon Cove and Tomahawk in Tasmania and archival research during subsequent research trips to Tasmania in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. Research was also undertaken at the Mitchell Library in Sydney, The Maritime Museum, Sydney, the National Library and the National Museum in Canberra on regular occasions. The process of creating sketchbooks akin to artist-books, for each individual character closely related to
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Bourdieu’s theories of a logic of practice, of “being in the game” which creates imagery which is not fixed or prescribed like:
[…] the map which substitutes the homogeneous, continuous space of geometry for the discontinuous, patchy space of practical pathways [or] the calendar [which] substitutes a linear homogeneous, continuous time for practical time, which is made up of islands of incommensurable duration, each with its own rhythm, a time that races or drags, depending on what one is doing, that is, one the functions
assigned to it by the actions that are performed in it.24
Bourdieu’s game is one where strategies are not pre-determined but emerge and operate according to specific actions and unfolding movements in time as an active negotiation and even perhaps a negation, of habitus. Habitus, Bourdieu asserts is symbolic and accounts for the inculcated continuation and acceptance without question of the dominant culture ‘in the form of durable dispositions.’ Bourdieu asserts habitus acts to:
[…] incorporate the objective structures of society and the subjective role of agents within it.
The habitus is a set of dispositions, reflexes and forms of behaviour that people acquire through acting in society… It is part of how society produces itself.25
According to Bourdieu it is habitus which causes our collective disregard for our own history as Bollard has claimed.26 It is this fixed perception of the past objective habitus and problematic disregard that I was challenging through this research through visual ambiguity and paradoxical relationships between familiar objects in multiple, intersecting, fragmented visual narratives.
Bourdieu’s game of creative practice, the type of focussed attention in which outcomes are unpredictable is usefully exemplified in my research process by way of one series of small, headless sketches - anonymous characters with hands clenched or pointing as if with agency, their feet positioned, as if grounded or weighted in an ambiguous place. Made spontaneously at the end of one day, they were at odds with other imagery underway in the studio - a sustained series of studies of ropes and another of anatomical details as collage. As small rapid
144 impulsive sketchbook gestures these appeared without conscious intent – recognised later to be useful as life size drawings. (Plate 23) Their appearance without warning was congruent with Kentridge’s space of negotiation between himself as artist and most often his animated gestural charcoal line drawings and erasures that build and dismantle worlds and identities such as the Drawings for Projections series. (Plates 10 and 11) He says:
It is from this chaos of excess that the work in the studio happens. It is from the incoherence, from this fragmentation of different thoughts, that coherence has to be made for a particular drawing, in a body of drawings, in a piece of work. An over- abundance of images and impulses constantly swirl around the making that happens in the studio.27
My quick sketches exemplified this also suggesting a certain similarity to Rozanne Hawksley’s sketches of figures in agony – the ‘quick, dynamic drawings and annotations’ she made as works that involve an on-going internal dialogue [about] serious and difficult issues… not immediately visual’28 for a series of studies towards the subject of the First World Wars. (Plate 24) Their rapid gestural qualities were simple, expressive signs. A certain relationship between the intimacy of stitch and suture in another series of research drawings Hawksley made in Portsmouth for the series The Seamstress and the Sea29 also related to my own drawings of surgical tools from the same Wellcome Collection in London30 and my use of early nineteenth century anatomical engravings tested in the sketchbooks to locate Jacob’s experiences as Naval Surgeon similarly through the use of anatomical illustrations from nineteenth century medical books. (Plate 16) By recognising the connection to both Hawksley’s and Kentridge’s methodologies I felt a certain confidence that this stage of the research process was on the right track - whatever that was, additionally confirmed by Kentridge’s observation that:
Image before thought is always the principle, in the hope that somewhere behind lack of thought is some other impulse that combines stupidity and insight. In a sketchbook, one accepts happily an unreflective provisionality. On the hard copper it is expected that an image take responsibility for itself. And some do. But always
the hope is for an image that refuses cross examination, is impervious to it.31
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Another aspect of this second stage of research was seeking a means of representing albeit tangentially the individuals of this time. One solution intuitively identified was the use of commonplace objects – an example of Kentridge’s unreflective provisionality. Although I have included sections of extant art works, conventional maps and convict illustrations of the colony (comparatively few extant images actually exist) as collage elements within the drawings both at sketchbook scale and within large scale drawings, I have also included objects common to both this era and the present as fragmentary remains of history. These qualify as still-life elements from the sketchbooks and imaginatively operate as a form of portraits of the individuals who would have presumably used them on a daily basis. This is an anachronistic strategy – anachronistic here meaning here visual elements that do not fit the colonial narrative given that these humble objects were not worthy or significant objects for the conventions of Enlightenment still-life paintings few of which (if any) were produced in the colony in the first two decades after settlement and nor would these individuals have been likely subjects for portraits. I am following Khadija von Zinnenberg Carroll’s32 lead here, ascribing a value to these objects as both legitimate subjects for still-life and as tangential substitute portraits for these historic characters. As von Zinnenberg Carroll argues ‘the fragmentary remains of history after time are fractured, thereby providing a sidelong glance at a totality’ beyond the circumscribed boundaries of the totalizing enterprise of the Enlightenment project.33
While postcolonial artists who adopt similar strategies to my own are not unique in their anachronistic relationships to the archive, artists such as Julie Gough are
‘intervening distinctively in the colonial record to produce Aboriginal Art History’.34 Von Zinnenberg Carroll further argues that artists, ‘of the archival turn’, such as Gough, ‘ignite the sparking distances between the historical and the contemporary’.35 Given that my research is close to Julie Gough’s in respect of our common interest in this period of history through relationships with our ancestors and other characters of this era – Briggs, Mountgarrett, Edwards, Worete.moeter.yenner and Dalrymple Briggs my use of commonplace objects is
146 related to, but also different from, Gough’s engagement with similar forms. (Plate 9) Stolen, 2011.
Although von Zinnenberg Carroll is concerned with the approaches and agency of contemporary artists such as Gough who address the histories of dispossession by adopting similar means of subversion and mimesis to those of the nineteenth century indigenous artists who were also negotiating their practice through complex cross-cultural settings, I argue this perspective is also partly relevant to the ways I am engaging fragments from the nineteenth century in my own works. While I am not addressing issues of dispossession and cultural disruption as an indigenous artist, I am managing a navigation of dominant colonial visual conventions in order to represent and reimagine the aspects of the past otherwise hidden from view. Von Zinnenberg Carroll’s ‘sparking distance’36 is in many ways similar to Musgrave’s ‘flash of energy from image to referent’37 that is key to my drawing process. My creative practice strategies, also articulated through the formal representational conventions of the period such as still-life, portrait and landscape are equally operating through a similar anachronistic sidelong glance to disrupt the perceived totality of the Enlightenment frames of reference. As von Zinnenberg Carroll further argues:
The ephemerality of much visual material from the nineteenth century in this region demands creatively associative methods of restoration. Associative thinking leaps over gaps, leaves messy trails and open ends that contradict or fail to tell a perfectly coherent story of humanity…[but] contemporary art contributes productively to the revisions of history that has been standardised by the politics and interests of the past.38
Fragments, objects and settings: borrowed, gleaned, aligned and repeating
The concept of the fragment is a key feature of contemporary Western visual languages and culture established with the rise of Modernism, however it is equally fundamental to the character of this research in three main ways. Firstly, the early Modernist artists who adopted and exploited a fractured visual order collaging the scraps and clippings from daily life as signs and symbols of a world shattered and in
147 despair, seeking emblems of remembrance in mourning the destruction of the authority of faith and stability of the previous century in the aftermath of the First World War have significantly shaped the visual languages of most contemporary artists including my own practice. Secondly, half-a century later, the rise of Postmodernism celebrated fragmentation as emblematic of a liberation from fixed systems of order which continues to influence contemporary practice overlaid with critical influences of more recent complex critical debates as aspects of postcolonialism and post structuralism. This of course also influences my practice given its concern with issues of postcolonialism. However, in relation to this research it is also the fragmentary nature of the majority of the available early colonial archival information and evidence from museum collections which is consistently fractured and incomplete, which arguably has had the greatest influence on the character and outcomes of this creative practice.
The role that fragments (as objects, relics, and partial forms) play at the heart of this creative practice research and the great distance between that past and this present also require clarification of my understanding of Walter Benjamin’s concept of the fragment as a dynamic relic of the past – as a form of dialectical imagery. My research in many ways is arguably indebted to Benjamin’s overarching philosophy and theory of trash, alterity, fragmentation and the dialectical image as potentially disruptive triggers in relation to modernity as a site of cultural subversion through unresolved dialectical tensions within the fragment.39
I am also influenced by many of Benjamin’s meditations and writings in relation to concepts of excavation and memory,40 allegory and defacement which have informed aspects of the works which have emerged through this research methodology. My approach to the creative practice as research is not however to devise works in relation to Benjamin’s concepts of the objects as trash, the effect of phantasmagoria, aesthetic public space, and urban spectacle. Rather than a notion of ‘spectacle’ I am however, attempting to create an encounter as an ‘affect’ similar to ‘the fragmentary remains of History after time’41 as ‘fractured, [and] thereby providing a sidelong glance at a totality’,42 which Khadija von Zinnenberg Carroll identifies as previously discussed above.
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My objective consequently was to engage this idea of ‘a sidelong glance at a totality’ through the literal use of the fragments and gaps as formally organised negative spaces within individual images for example as single drawings that were developed on site and in the studio. The works are equally informed by the fragments, gaps, silences and absences of information about these characters as partial and contradictory narratives within larger works, such as the ten metre long drawings and the gaps and distances between imagery seen across the space of the installation from multiple vantage points where repetitions and relationships can be recognised. (Plates 31 and 32) Like von Zinnenberg Carroll, I have considered the historiographical work of historian, Mark Salber Phillips which will be addressed through a consideration of the parts of the final installation in the next section.
Salber Phillips’ work has informed the overall formal order of the installation space against which the elements of the final installation - the colonies of objects, sketchbooks and drawings/textiles are located. The organisation of the whole space is an adaptation of conventional Enlightenment models of spatial order of landscape as two dimensional forms (painting, prints and drawings) and three dimensional architectural order of house to garden and garden to country/horizon beyond. This plan follows Mark Salber Phillips’ proposition of questioning the prescriptiveness in our conventional relationship both to the temporal distance of the past, and the full spectrum of distance-positions from near to far. By reimagining these terms, the nineteenth century conventions of representation of time and distance such as the horizon-line that anchors the conventions of linear perspectives and the allusive structural architectural geometry of the settler house can provide a stable and familiar fundamental gestalt spatial order against which the array of unstable conceptual, formal, affective, spatial and temporal relationships between the complex elements and changing patterns of light and shadow can play out to subvert the sense of time and distance experienced by the viewer. Salber Phillips argues that:
[…]for every historical work we need to consider at least four basic dimensions of representation as they relate to the problem of mediating distance: the genres, media and vocabularies that shape the history’s formal structures of
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representation; the affective claims made by the historical account, including the emotional experience it promises or withholds; the works implications for action, whether of a political or moral nature; and the modes of understanding on which history’s intelligibility depends. These overlapping, but distinctive distances – formal, affective, summoning and conceptual – provide a framework for examining, changing modes of historical representation. 43
From page to wall - across the space as colony: the purpose of hindsight
The reflective critical analysis of my creative practice as research that has brought me to this point in the Chapter is, as Kentridge argues, a problematic reporting because the process that occurs in the studio – the thinking, the observations and decisions are not the same in the game of making as those that seem apparent upon reflection after the event when enlarged and confirmed by a deeper understanding of the works gleaned from wider consideration of critical theory, history and cultural studies. That is not to say that what emerges as creative practice is false or dubious or a lesser form of research but that because the creative practice process concerns itself with the visual language of image and materiality, sign, symbol, metaphor and metonym, what arises from this complex, non-linear thinking and unruly negotiation is by its very nature convoluted and problematic to document as a progressive event as an academic exegesis and is best observed once complete as a final body of work.
Final Installation - Temporary Alignments: fraught fictions and fragile facts
Points of Reference: Mapping the Past - Mapping the Research The outcomes from all stages of the research process are incorporated into the final body of work as installation - the sketchbooks and tentative early forms are visible as embedded elements in the final installation of the work. The first artist book – if, ‘if’ is a question… comprising over three hundred pages of drawings as the first stage of the research is encountered at the entrance to the space. Nearby is a small light-house44 atop a stack of books with layered fragmentary images, reflections and haptic materiality which refers to Rozanne Hawksley’s sculptural textiles and
150 complex narrative embroideries. The embroidered images were taken from the artist’s sketchbooks located on adjacent plinths.
Unlike more traditional creative research practice where drawings and maquettes remain hidden as preliminary studies toward final works, the history of this creative practice is evident and visible as part of the body of work unlike the history the works aim to address. The audience is invited to turn the pages of the open books, leaving fingerprints of their ‘reading’. In this experience of visual narrative, multiple sensations arise from many sources - the materiality of the book forms, as much as from the confusing visual story unfolding – the scrupe of fabric and rustle of pages turning, rows of illegible embroidered text; the lingering aromas of burnt paper; Rorschach-like bush-dye stains; old cloth and the sounds of church bells, birds, wind, water and voices from Ireland, London and France and Tasmania. The textiles throughout the exhibition space may be brushed past, handled or folded to closely observe another side. A viewer moving through the installation, seeing the works along various sightlines may recognise relationships between elements within the installation and perhaps begin to acknowledge the juxtaposition of all the elements of the entire space as a complex and unstable gestalt. However each viewer will frame an individually unique interpretation of this array. Shadows cast by a revolving light source cross multiple free-standing colonies of objects and immerse the audience within the space of shifting, mutable shadows. Any expectation of finding a stable, ordered coherent story between the pages of the sketchbooks and within the installation space is soon lost – the impression of mutability is a deliberate strategy of the overall design of the installation to challenge fixed meanings and interpretations. Images at small scale can be found within the incomplete narratives of the artist’s books and are repeated in a series of large scale drawings and collages around the walls of the space. The imagery with no clear or consistent narrative provokes each viewer to attempt to identify and construct their own idiosyncratic tentative meanings if not a cogent narrative. The images and materials are scattered more like fragmentary clues instead of a fixed and well ordered story so as Sue Rowley observes:
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if meaning does not inhere in objects but is invested in them by those who handle them, and if that meaning is likely to be formed narratively and in relation to contexts, then this suggests an open-ended quality to our perception of our things.45
Rowley here is referring to narratives that emerge over time as objects acquire meanings as material artefacts from use. But there is a place too for brief experiences with objects to attain their own kind of meaning through active encounters. These sketchbooks and the objects throughout the installation are intended as examples of Rowley’s proposition, as objects with a more ‘allusive suggestion of narration to draw us into the act of storytelling.’ 46 Here however they are objects in the performance of haptic encounters and narrative disjunctions as opposed to elements of a coherent, well behaved story.47
House and Gable Roof
The house frame awkwardly dominates the space as a 2/3 scale replica of the cottage the Mountgarretts inhabited in Longford Tasmania which still stands on Woolmers Estate. It reaches the ceiling of the gallery to denote the colony as a place of imprisonment for those who were unable to leave – not as convicts but finally impoverished and destitute. It is also represented on the large wall drawings as frottages taken from the chimney, floors, doors and windows. The pillars of books are a reference to the Codex book as historical authority supporting triumphalist versions of singular histories as previously mentioned. In respect of Salber Phillips’ concepts of distances, the house is an affective site of cross-cultural antagonistic intimacy and a formal symbol of British invasion as a central motif of my creative practice since my first research visit to Tasmania in 2010. Its central position in the installation also refers to Ann Carson’s concepts of the differences
152 between oral narratives which emphasise time and memory (as transient and ephemeral like the shadows moving through the space) and the anchored linearity of written text implied by the books which capture and manage time – ordered purposefully like a garden.48 The colonies of books and objects are distanced between the house and the walls where the hint of a horizon-line is seen in places encircling the installation space like abstract topologies for the island of Tasmania itself. The inclusion of a horizon-line is also a reference to Salber Phillips’ concept of the formal compositional conventions of Western linear perspective landscape genres where a horizon-line is both a key organisational element within an overall gestalt perception of the composition and a means of locating a viewer at a specific distance and vantage point.
Colonies of Objects
As previously mentioned the objects are also included as referents for the individuals who are the subject of this research. The objects are contemporary objects which were also common to the past but are not souvenirs. I am following Susan Stewart’s differentiation of the collection from the souvenir which involves ‘the displacement of attention to the past’49 whereas the collection Stewart argues, offers an example rather than a sample, presenting its parts metaphorically rather than metonymically. A collection she argues:
represents the total aestheticisation of use value […] is a form of art as play… involving objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context.50
These are not representational, collected objects to restore a context or origin as Stewart suggests, but ‘rather the creation of a new context […] standing in a metaphorical, rather than in contiguous, relation to the world of everyday life.’51
My use of them here, in addition to their value as tangential portrait-objects, is that as Stewart proposes, they may suggest the project of the colonists striving to create a new context for themselves awkwardly struggling to replicate the order of British towns in the new colony half a world away from Britain. The objects are however, also contrarily arranged, categorised and mismatched, further distorted by the
153 passing light and shadows. The intimate character of some – spoons, bottles, cups and textile are intended to convey again the strange antagonistic intimacy of this era. These distances between the colonies claim their own meanings like Julie Gough’s use of objects as triggers as she says:
I believe that collections create new contexts. The manipulation of this potential is a central technique in my work, destroying, subsuming and transcending the original context. By utilising the ‘collection’ with its components of reproduction, multiplicity, recognisability, nostalgia, ownership, I intend to connect the household with the museum, the scientific exploration of minute difference with the continuity-factor of basic behaviour through time. The collection is a metaphor for control, containment, order, logic and fear of the unknown.52
Hussifs
Three embroidered panels which occupy the second wall of the installation refer to the three female characters – Bridget Edwards Mountgarrett, Worete.moeter.yenner, and Dalrymple Briggs. In an era just before the advent of photography, there is no means of identifying what these women may have looked like. Given that two have Palawa heritage it is also preferable to identify other respectful ways of representing them. As a result, they are here as life-sized hussifs – a traditional form of mending kit or roll, a housekeeper would carry that contains her tools for household maintenance. Dalrymple is also known to have been taught to read, write and sew. It is also a form of textile which was made by servants in the process of learning to read, write and manage domestic chores from the early colonial period to the mid-twentieth century.53 The cloth has been bush dyed at various historic sites in Tasmania including Longford where these three women were known to have lived at different times. The details of each panel are specific to each woman’s story.
Drawings from Colonies and Sketchbooks
The second stage of the research involved redrawing and tracing at large scale selected images from the initial sketchbook lexicons. The relationships between the fragments of imagery drawn on the walls adapted from the objects arranged as
154 still-life ‘colonies’ remain intentionally uncertain with odd negative spaces and absences within the compositions resulting in a perception of something incomplete arising. These absences as aporias remain as evidence of loss and perhaps even damage on the edges of sense and meaning, anxiously hovering between culturally known images arranged in odd sequences. The symmetrical and asymmetrical compositions refer formally to perceptions of balance and at times imbalance and were further altered, re-aligned and recombined many times in an entwined and braided research process.
My understanding, through the experience of drawing is akin to Kentridge’s description of drawing as being a slow-motion version of thought and that what often starts out with a certain intention does not necessarily end up that way. I would argue this particular way of thinking is very close to my work with textile and stitch as well albeit a different conduit; it is a similar form of thinking without words. Diana Petherbridge, the British academic and artist, describes this thinking though drawing as the ‘thoughtful hand’. This is exactly my perception of the process, where thought propels an action to differentiate it from a demonstration of skill alone. She and I are indebted to Heidegger’s concept of Handlung as:
Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. 54
All the processes of drawing from the sketchbook pages through to the large scale drawings are variously processes of thinking rather than a fixed expectation from the outset of image-making. While one or more elements begin a drawing the following stages are always uncertain and can only be discovered in the process of making – again Bourdieu’s being in the game (I would argue) of being or ‘being present’. This is thinking in time, or just in time, to trace and track ideas. It is the critical value of drawing as fundamental to my creative practice as a means of negotiating meaning from hunch to confidence where the elements and forms that emerge have a ‘sense value’ – a potential that is uncertain and requires further testing through more drawing. In this uncertain creative practice the collected
155 found commonplace objects are still-life time capsules as signs of the past, metaphoric as partial representations of the characters I am stalking and they are also relics of Duchamp’s ready-mades. However the objects are also, by way of a third purpose found through drawing, a vehicle to challenge the dominance and I argue laziness of recent creative practice where found objects are deemed to be adequate simply by being placed in a gallery setting as art-objects, without a further intervention or interrogation by the artists towards more complex forms of expression. The ‘thoughtful hand’ of drawing the objects in the colonies brings them into the present and transforms them through observation and thought and as Petherbridge argues, they also challenge the philosophical and artistic tedium of the readymade. She further argues that, ‘In a sea of tired second-hand and endlessly recycled images the drawn image that springs directly from the visual imagination of the individual is infinitely more potent and subversive.’ 55 She continues:
Drawing is capable of development, being at the beginning and not the end of a chain. It is original instead of iterated, fresh instead of cliched, unfixed and elastic rather than overdetermined; it contains a germ of its opposite; it questions and unsettles reality; it is the dynamic sign of movement and change. It belongs to a politics of change and renewal as well as a poetics of practice.56
The process of drawing involved a kind of tracing the shadows of the colonies and other nineteenth century engravings cast on the wall towards large scale drawings. This intention was also closely informed by Paul Carter’s ideas from Dark Writing, of ‘moving within the constructions of place’.57 He suggests new approaches to regenerating practice and reinvigorating our thinking about place and time, and recommends:
a new thinking (and drawing) practice [which] does not abandon the line but goes inside it. The line is always a trace of earlier lines. However perfectly it copies what went before, the very act of retracing it represents a new departure.58
Carter’s ideas have led my research towards a specific investigation of the ways that nineteenth century proto-Photographic tools, most especially shadows as an
156 absence of light can identify when captured and traced different marks and rhythms of shapes, textures, tones and even negative spaces. The re-figuring of the line requires a demanding, inventive effort and rethinking of the movements and actions of making the marks to translate and in so doing rediscover the forms. As Carter states this is because:
Within every line there is a braid of other lines. The one line that emerges from this quiver of intentions is the reduction of a multiplicity of orientations, invocations, and prayers. To be conscious of this is a start. By re-figuring the line as a meeting place of ambiguous expectations, as the trace of a mental journey – so that drawing the line is not an act of cutting off and conclusion but a process of directed movement, the discourse of place making can be practically re-oriented.59
The drawing that emerges from the tracing of the shadows is an acknowledgement of the ‘dapple of the world’60 as Carter describes it. Our ordinary experience of the world is curved and rhythmic, contingent and fluid not straightened nor static. I argue, this is the nature too of thought in drawing - uncertain and intensely imprecise, a focussed moving towards making meaning without knowing the outcome. This approach enables a different sense of the past through the relics of the era – engraved line that dissolves as shadow and has to be re-found, judged, carefully reconsidered. Certain contours and proportions re-seen as trace, point to new shapes in overlapping shadow and present other meanings otherwise invisible. These are differently distanced observational drawings. Close gesture and sequence navigate a path through uncertainty as a model of the ways we sometimes see meaning in between - where sometimes narrative emerges that recognises the familiarity of the past in the present.
Shrouds, Drawings and Shadow-Casting Laces
The drawings traced from the shadows of the ‘colonies’ of commonplace objects and nineteenth century engravings directly and indirectly inform embroideries as fragile stitched line drawings and collages of fragile papers and cloth to build ‘lace- like’ panels which, in turn create further shadows that move across and throughout
157 the installations of objects and drawings on the wall. This relentless movement aims to generate imagery that can imaginatively refer to and disrupt the habits of ‘stitching over’ the gaps and omissions that Ravenscroft suggests have plagued the past and remain so resilient in the present. The outline of the sailor refers to a tiny carved bone sailor object retrieved from the foundations of Mountgarrett’s house at Risdon Cove during an archaeological dig in 1980.61 Small carvings like these were often given to Surgeons and Doctors by Sailors in gratitude for medical treatment especially when unable to pay for services rendered.
These strategies are not simply inimical. Each practice as drawing and embroidery traces process, recording chance and repair offering opportunities to enhance a sense of fragility and to discover unpredictable silhouettes and surfaces that may guide the ‘thinking/testing’. As Nigel Hurlstone states, ‘the processes of both drawing and stitch may […] be seen to act as mediators between the hand and the eye, and through that mediation, we are able “to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known”’.62 The large scale textile panels and the smaller shrouds which envelope smaller objects in the colonies relate to Rozanne Hawksley’s use of textile as a resilient and fragile element which expresses a fundamental visceral relationship and haptic character of fragility and translucency perceived subliminally in relation to the human body. (Plate 29) It operates as a surface with a distinctive character to carry the narrative as layers and textures and when translucent, it captures and projects a different quality of shadow. The cloth also brings a corporeal sense of human scale and haptic presence.63 The small stitched shrouds conceal and imply a certain distance from the forms of the still-life beneath the surface.
Proclamation Boards
These seven panels refer to the seven remaining Proclamation Boards produced by Governor Arthur in 1828 during the Black War.64 (Plate 30) The surfaces of these works comprise multiple layers of images taken from the first series of artist/sketchbooks roughly worn away to unpredictably reveal details of harsh and
158 damaged narratives. They represent displacement and relate to the ways that remnants of historical records often survive despite violent interventions and from those fragments other stories might be gleaned albeit randomly. The original Proclamation Boards were officially created as a false narrative of justice and promised reconciliation and assimilation for the Palawa First Nations while the genocide of the Black War continued unabated.
Camera Obscura
On the first wall of the installation are small camera obscura drawings made on site at Risdon Cove, Cataract Gorge and Tomahawk in Tasmania in 2013 and 2015. As a proto-photographic device this small box – made to nineteenth century specifications enabled a present day view of the horizon-line – water and sky that would have been familiar to a nineteenth century artist documenting the colony for the first time using a camera obscura device. The tondo format of these drawings and throughout the installation also refers to the selective spy-glass view of Trouwunna of the British colonists, the shape of the barrels of their rifles, the trees the cross-cut saws felled, and wheels of their carts - all new devices toward dispossession in Trouwunna.
Shadows and Shadow Narratives – Episodic and Semantic
The rotating patrolling light located at the centre of the installation is a measure of a range of distances. Firstly it is intended to create a sense of forward momentum as temporal distance and relates to the broad chronology of the works on the walls of the exhibition space. Starting, at the entrance to the main darkened chamber around 1800 and rotating clockwise to end around 1830 before returning anti- clockwise to repeat this pattern.
It also implies the distance of surveillance and invasion as the shadows encroach from centre to periphery. It may even evoke the solar rhythms of colonial violence that escalated over two decades. The ‘hundreds of ambushes on Aborigines camps by night, and on colonists’ huts by day’, that Nicholas Clements notes.65 As well as the contradictory relationships between elements in the installation, shadow-play
159 constantly changes the relationships of the elements making it difficult to focus on specific objects alone without being distracted by the slippages of shadow and light. This aims to point to two fundamental human modes of intelligence which Ross Gibson defines as function of narrative where:
[N]arrative is designed to serve…two modes of intelligence – the episodic and the semantic – to entwine them and to let them inform each other. In other words narrative can help us account for experience by representing it with the urgency of the close and fleeting instant as well as with the executive proficiency of the extensive overview. 66
As subjective interpreters we navigate a dynamic linear experience of time and place through fleeting episodic encounters every day to narrate our lives – a form of ‘grammar’ for the unfolding experience in which we are immersed. This I argue is also true for the artist involved in creative practice as it is also true for the reader/viewer of the art work especially with art works as installation and in this case intensified by moving shadows. In relation to this subjective interpretation, Gibson refers to Coleridge’s field notes from 1803:
Thursday Morning, 40 minutes past One o’clock – a perfect calm – now and then a breeze shakes the heads of the two Poplars [& disturbs] the murmur of the moonlight Greta, then in almost direct Line from the moon to me is all silver- Motion wrinkle & light - & under the arch of the Bridge a wave ever & anon leaps up in light… silver mirror/ gleaming of moonlight Reeds beyond-as the moon sets the water from Silver becomes a rich yellow. – Sadly I do need to have my Imagination enriched with appropriate Images for Shapes-/Read Architecture, & Ichthyology. 67
My own research strategy of recording my thoughts whilst tracing the lines of nineteenth century engravings projected to the walls reveal a similar episodic thinking while drawing – the character of the traced marks is a record of both the duration and the gestural response as thought at work:
Monday afternoon – hurry 3 already - The line is gone – panic, this can’t work - fear - clear edge line of the engraving – enlarged…gone – field of spectrum colours –
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worry – do what – too wide – too open – how… this wide space gone line – how - this band of flickering colour, blurred , evanescent…invent, fill, follow, capture this too wide exploded non-line space now – what can work, can move along/across this gone edge – to where - graphite hand is too wirey thin inadequate - use colour, no, stay – roll it sideways, drag, smudge, push, scribble invent a new… translate this - big darker, dense - find… marks to work inside this sparkling colour so soft so blurred - once precise line of rules of engraving…this is Kentridge’s copper plate…(interruption)68
This is also Dening’s interpretation of ‘historying’ at work, as a process that is:
never done, dialectical and dialogical. Gossiping, explaining to the tax-man, pleading not guilty to the judge, eulogising over the grave – historying actions are manifold, each with a moral dimension… our historying is as idiosyncratic as our fingerprints.69
The patrolling light and shadows are historying for the past in the present as our attention is distracted away from each moment. The fluid momentum moving on, across, over, its surveillance interrupts and changes what we notice in the field constantly - trawling adding, slipping away, encircled and returning as if unravelling the movements of time. The immediate, dynamic of the moving details is akin to Dening’s metonyms of history; the grasping for insightful overviews his metaphor.
I have also followed John Berger’s assertion that a fixed linear narrative as a notion of time, as a measured and constant experience is a Nineteenth century view which does not match lived experience of time which is more akin to a process of accretion and dissipation.70 I claim this concept too for the experience of creative practice as an unevenly measured experience – at times intensely registered and at others passing unnoticed. A cumulative detailed process of interruptions - the memory of which remains and at others continues simply, passing without notice. In all it is an encounter with a contrasting braided quality of experience but one in which meanings meander too like these shadow-casting objects and transparent textile works – with gaps and absences as much as tensions, connections and densities. The attempt to capture some sense and meaning through fluid
161 perceptions and complex interactions with shifting relationships across the visual field is fundamental to my understanding of my practice. It was also key to the production of this body of work that endeavours to consider other possibilities in closed colonial histories; to address this dark and overlooked history of colonisation for an audience prepared to immerse themselves in this space for a time.
Thus my creative practice research generates forms which operate as haptic encounters with objects as signs or symbols and as an event where relationships between the elements suggest simple and complex scenarios. This proposes an idea of both the creation of the works and the reception or encounter with the works as a particular kind of performativity. Since any creative arts practice inevitably begins as a transitive verb, as that of an action enacted upon something, in this case as drawings and textiles as installation, it is equally something that must necessarily end with an intransitive verb – an affect – the audience or reader may be unconvinced or thoughtfully pleased by the encounter. Either way, if these art works as research are to attain a legitimate status as creative practice, as a ‘completed performance’ they must attain an effect or meaning with an audience even if that effect is one of uncertainty – as a different register of the past in the present.
Summary
The objective of the complex installation is the creation of a subjective ‘field’ that avoids a coherent, chronologically linear envisioning of this history as a version of the well-known dominant socially informed received history – the one Paul Carter, in The Road to Botany Bay, dares us to avoid.71 Rather than simply re-telling stories or re-staging events about a few powerful individuals based on ‘versions’ from the past, I am following Carter to challenge the viewer to encounter uncertainty, to consider that there may be many meanings and many unsettled stories from multiple view-points with a sense of immediacy. These works in combination aim to disrupt perceptions of a coherent and stable view of Australia’s collective history and in so doing to generate many meanings and point toward many incomplete fragmentary little narratives of the past in the present.
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1 Rutherford, Ann. ‘William Kentridge’s Black Box: The Cog that turns the wheel’. TEXT, Vol. 17, No. 1. April 2013. Kevin Brophy and Enza Gandolfo, (eds.) 2013 http://www.textjournal.com.au/april13/rutherford_prose.htm accessed October 2015 2 Dening, Greg 1996 Making a present out of the past: Histories Anthropology M U press 1996. p. 37 3 Gaita, Raimond 2002 The Philosophers’ Dog Melbourne, Text Publishing. 4 McCrickard, Kate. William Kentridge. London: Tate Publishing. 2012. p. 45 5 Ravenscroft, Alison. The Postcolonial Eye. Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited. 2012. p. 20 6 Kentridge, William. Six Drawing Lessons: Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 2012. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 2014. p. 60 7 Genocchio, Ben. Solitaire: Fiona Foley. Sydney, NSW: Piper Press. 2001. p. 28 8 op.cit 9 Musgrave, David. The Drawing Book: a primary means of expression. (ed.) Tania Kovacs, London: Black Dog Publishing. 2007. p. 209 10 Ravenscroft. ibid. p. 20. ‘that does not stitch up the gap in meaning, but lets’ its enigmatic and aporitic remain. This is reading as a process through which we bring ourselves into uncertainty, through which we cause doubt to fall on our perceptions. This is an idea of reading not (or not only) as that act which brings us into knowledge, but one that puts our knowledge under pressure until we can say: ‘I do not – cannot – know the other.’ And then to hold with this willingness to be an unknowing reader, a willingness to read anyway. That is, against a notion of knowledge as accumulative reading instead is a shift in relations between objects in a field, and between the field and what lies outside the field, a shift that implicates the viewer or reader.’ 11 Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A particular History of the senses, Routledge, New York, 1993. p. 237 12 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/opinion/the-case-for-teaching-ignorance.html?_r=0; http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/metcalfe/PDFs/Son.Kornell.InPress.pdf 13 Ravenscroft. 2012. ibid 14 Sullivan, Graeme. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts. 2nd Edition, Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2010. p. 245 15 Atwood, Margaret. ‘Introduction’, Into the Labyrinth’. Cambridge University Press UK 2002. p. 12 16 William Kentridge, How We Make Sense of the World. https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLouisianaChannel?v=G11wOmxoJ6U 17 This work was devised from of many open-ended experiments as a response to the initial research process that was located almost entirely in historical documents – books and archival papers. The title refers to a story that allegedly comes from the Philosophy Department of the University of Sydney where a question on a Philosophy exam was, ‘Is ‘if’ a question? To which a student replied, ‘If ‘if’ is a question, this is an answer.’ This title seemed an apt one for a sketchbook ranging widely across imagery and materials searching for a suitable visual language. 18 Museum Collections included – the V&A Museum; London; Natural History Museum, London; National Maritime Museum, Greenwich; TATE Gallery; TATE Modern; National Gallery, London; Craft Centre, London; Museum of Fashion and Textile, Bath; Foundling Museum, London, British, Museum, London; Imperial War Museum, London; Imperial War Museum of the North, Manchester, Craft Centre, Ruthin, Wales; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, Linen Hall Library, Belfast, National Gallery, Belfast; Natural History Museum, Paris, Bayeux Museum, Bayeux, Le Havre Museum and Art Gallery, Portsmouth Naval Dockyards, TMAG, Hobart; QVMAG, Launceston –Inveresk; National Maritime Museum, Sydney; Australian Museum, Sydney; National Museum of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery, Canberra; Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australian Museum of Decorative Arts and Sciences, Sydney and many others. 19 Drawings and on-site bush-dyeing of cloth, frottage and basic printmaking techniques were undertaken at various historic sites in Tasmania including: Risdon Cove – frottage and collection of plant materials for dye and colour sampling; Narryna Museum, Hobart; St. David’s Park, Hobart; Cataract Gorge, Launceston; Longford; Woolmers; Estate and Jacob Mountgarrett’s Cottage; Tomahawk and surrounding coastal sites - Waterhouse Lagoon, Blackman’s Lagoon and Eddystone Point, Yorktown, George Town and surrounds. 20 Benjamin, Walter. (1931) Unpacking My Library in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken books, 1969. p. 66 21 Navigating Tensions: fraught facts and fragile fictions, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, November 2012
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– February, 2013. Stage one of research practice testing outcomes as installation. 22 Circumstantial Evidence, HR Gallop Gallery, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. January – February 2015. Stage two of testing outcomes as installation with light and shadow. 23 Shklovsky, Victor. The Formalist Poetics of Victor Shklovsky. Russian Literary Triquarterly. 1972. p. 351-72 24 Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. p. 92. Bourdieu’s theory of ‘being in the game’ is also described as a process of making, ‘caught up in the ‘matter at hand’, totally present in the present and in the practical functions that it finds there in the form of objective potentialities, practice excludes attention to itself (that is to the past). It is unaware of the principles that govern it and the possibilities they contain; it can only discover them by enacting them, unfolding them in time.’ 25 Bourdieu. op.cit. p. 19 26 Robert Bollard, In The Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden History of Australia in World War One, Sydney, NSW: New South Publishing. 2013. p. 29 27 Kentridge, William, William Kentridge: Fortuna Lillian Tone (ed.) London: Thames and Hudson, 2013. p. 25 28 Kay Greenlees (2005) ‘Creating Sketchbooks for Embroiderers and Textile Artists’ in Schoeser, Mary Rozanne Hawksley Ruthin: Ruthin Craft Centre and Lund Humphreys, 2009. p 119 29 Hawkesley, Rozanne. http://www.rozannehawksley.com/ 30 http://wellcomecollection.org/ 31 William Kentridge 2010 The Nose: Thirty Etchings, ‘Nose in Love’. David Krut Publishing South Africa. Unnumbered pages. 32 von Zinnenberg Carroll, Khadija. Art in the Time of Colony, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014. p. 3 33 op.cit 34 op.cit. p. 9 35 op.cit. p. 3 36 Von Zinnenberg Carroll. op.cit 37 Musgrave. op.cit 38 op.cit. p. 4 39 The scope of this exegesis prevents a more detailed consideration of the relationship between my research and Benjamin’s theories of the fragment, however as part of the original stage of this research I gave close consideration to works by Buck-Morss, Pensky, Taussig and Kirby. Buck- Morss’ analyses of Benjamin’s Passagenwerk – The Arcades Project, which argues that, ’Benjamin described his work as a “Copernican revolution” in the practice of history writing. His aim was to destroy the mythic immediacy of the present, not by inserting it into a cultural continuum that affirms the present as its culmination but by discovering that constellation of historical origins which has the power to explode history’s “continuum”. In the era of industrial culture, consciousness exists in a mythic dream state, against which historical knowledge is the only antidote. But the particular kind of historical knowledge that is needed to free the present from myth is not easily uncovered. Discarded and forgotten, it lies buried within surviving culture, remaining invisible precisely because it was of so little use to those in power.’ Susan Buck Morss, Dialectics of Seeing Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass. London, UK: The MIT Press,. 1991. Preface p.x
However, there are a number of aspects of Benjamin’s theories of the circumstances in which alterity can be claimed to occur through the artefacts deemed as ‘trash’ which I do not adopt. My interpretations and use of the fragmentary details and forms of the past in my research does not align with the ways that Benjamin proposes that dialectical tensions arise through the effects of alterity as ‘actions’ of fragments as a dialectic images. I am not engaged with a form of alterity as ‘salvage’ as Bullock for example defines Benjamin’s alterity. She states, ‘Alterity is to be found in the temporal reserves of advanced capitalist culture (in overlooked things and forgotten objects) over and above spatial distance – far away locations, remoteness, travel. Herein lies the obsession with the ‘archive’, with ‘retro’, with ‘vintage’ – the compulsion to reclaim the next ‘cool-ugly’ obsolescent form – the constantly shifting marker of retro-irony and the speedy turnover of the renovated period … While this obsession with temporality and difference of the past is often nostalgic – conditioned by ‘fashion’ and its desire to ‘snare’ difference, ‘originality’ and
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‘distinction’…This engagement with alterity is productive if these appropriations also acknowledge the conditions of the present through which they become desirable.’ Bullock, Marita, Memory Fragments: Visualising Difference in Australian History. Bristol, UK: Intellect. 2012. p. 197.
Many contemporary artists have adopted Benjamin’s meditations on the ‘commodity fossil’, ‘mimesis’, ‘excavation and memory’, ‘the literal translation’ and ‘now-time’ amongst many other examples of his writings, to re-engage Benjamin’s ‘figuration of modernity’ as an emergent and performative strategy as much as a position through which to question and challenge Postmodern theory in relation to representing the past. Significant examples of this can be found in the early works of Julie Gough and aspects of William Kentridge’s practice both of whom will be considered in detail in the following parts of this exegesis in relation to my own research.
Pensky, Buck-Morss, Taussig and Kirby argue (as do many other critical theorists) that Benjamin valued the dialectical image for its value to objectively address the potential of the endless affect of spectacle and illusion of Modernism; that the dialectical moment could freeze-frame this effect and connect the present with what was lost. However, my ‘needs must’ engagement with the fragmentary evidence and its agency in relation to the past is emphatically subjective, partial and intentionally tentative. Rather than engaging the fragment as a form of dialectical imagery to still the momentum of the Modernist spectacle or as a means to release the fragments in a Postmodernist liberation from the specificity of image and symbol, I am ‘playing with’ the flux, the fluidity of meaning between the imagery and the objects in the gaps and uncertainty. I am NOT addressing an inherent or contained potential affect held within the dialectic image/object as Benjamin wished to occur. The works aim to conjure unsettled and actively fleeting perceptions disturbed by changing movement of light and shadow throughout the space of the works. This could be described as a form of ‘spectacle’ as an event but it is not an overwhelming unprecedented spectacle in the Modernist sense of the term. It aims to be both familiar and unfamiliar following Schklovsky; subtle and uncertain, unclear and hesitant. It aims to unsettle closed thinking and fixed assumption – a challenge but without clear message. I am also exploring a particular vexed and overlooked period from within Australian national consciousness hidden behind romanticised narratives of convict driven Nation building. Bullock op.cit. p. 59 40 Benjamin, Walter Excavation and Memory: Selected writings, Vol. 2, part 2 (1931-1934) “Ibizan Sequence” 1932, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings, Howard Eiland and Garry Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. p. 576 41 Von Zinnenberg Carroll. ibid. p. 3 42 op.cit 43 Salber Phillips, Mark. On Historical Distance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. p. 14 44 The Tasmanian oak frame of the house was an early investigation into Jacob Mountgarrett’s cottage which still stands at Woolmer’s Estate in northern Tasmania. This is a scale model of the original. 45 Rowley,Sue (ed.) Sue Rowley, ‘There Once Lived…:craft and narrative traditions’. In Craft and Contemporary Theory. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin. 1997. p. 83 46 op.cit. p. 83 47 op.cit. p. 84 48 Carson, Ann. Eros the Bittersweet: An essay, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 121 49 Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, London: Duke University Press. 1999. p. 151 50 Stewart. op.cit 51 op.cit 52 Gough, Julie. Transforming Histories: The Visual Disclosure of Contentious Pasts. PhD Thesis. Hobart, Tasmania: University of Tasmania, 2001. p. 52 53 The Pioneer Women’s Hut Collection at Tumbarumba includes a hussif made by an unknown Aboriginal girl in domestic service from the 1860s as part of her training. It is both a sign of her identity as much as her indentured labour it includes an usual choice of fabrics for the Victorian period – blacks and blood reds beside conventional floral cottons and uses an inventive meandering pattern of white feather stitch on a red background that breaks all the rules of conventional needlework expected of samplers of the time. These three hussifs were made in
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reference to this object albeit at a much larger scale. 54 Heidegger, Martin. What is called thinking? Trans. Glenn Gray and F Wieck, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1986, p. 16 55 Petherbridge, Deanna. The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2010. p. 432 56 op.cit 57 Carter, Paul. Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press. 2009, p. 8 58 op.cit 59 op.cit 60 op.cit 61 McGowan, Angela. Archaeological investigations at Risdon Cove Historic Site, 1978-1980. Sandy Bay, Hobart: National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1985. 62 Hurlstone, Nigel. ‘Drawing and the Chimera of Embroidery’, Chapter 2, Machine Stitch Perspectives. Alice Kettle and Jane McKeating. (eds) London: A + C Black Publishers, 2012, p. 36 63 Hawksley, Rozanne. (Plate 29) Sir Galahad. This work was begun in 1987 in response to the War in Iraq and completed 2008 with the addition of the veil to indicate her indignation at the lack of public acknowledgment of soldiers returning from Iraq. The veiling also parallels the custom of veiling crosses from Passion Sunday until the Resurrection which was originated ‘ to create an atmosphere of restraint and simplicity’. p. 137 64 Shaping Tasmania: 100 Objects. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart. http://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/object.aspx?ID=37 65 Clements, Nicholas. Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land. PhD Thesis. Hobart: University of Tasmania. 2014. p. ix 66 Gibson, Ross. 26 Views of a Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788-91. Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2012. p. 185 67 op.cit. Gibson refers to Coleridge’s field notes from – Yaeger, Patricia. ‘Coleridge, Derrida and the Anguish of Writing’, in Substance, vol.12, no. 2, issue 39 (1983) p. 91 68 Author’s notes from sketchbook, Jan 2014. 69 Dening, Greg. ‘Performing Cross-culturally’, The Australasian Journal of American Studies 2006, vol 25. No.2 p. 5 - 6 70 Dyer, Geoff (ed.) 2001 John Berger: Selected Essays. First Vintage International edition, New York. p. 483 71 Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: essays in Spatial History. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
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Plate 15
Julie Montgarrett 2011 - 12 if ‘if’ is a question?
First artist/Sketchbook – 300+ pp of initial investigations towards locating a vocabulary of images for ongoing research – drawing from 19th C archival sources, assorted papers, found imagery.
Media: Diverse papers: approx. A3 size – hand drawn, scanned laser-printed copies of archival materials; monotypes; collages/montage; bush-dyed, organically stained papers – made on-site and in studio; various studio resources, hand and machine stitched, assorted papers mirror covers.
Approx: 600mm wide (open) x 350mm high
Plate 16
Julie Montgarrett 2012
Jacob Mountgarrett’s Artist book/Sketchbook. Sequential pages.
Preliminary visual research towards each Character. Nineteenth Century Anatomical details, machine stitch, assorted papers and techniques.
Book: approx. 300mm (h) x 600mm (w) when open. Supporting Pillow – approx. 450mm x 900mm. Hand stitched, assorted bush dyed and found linen, wool and cotton fabrics.
Plate 17
Julie Montgarrett 2012
Bridget (Edwards) Mountgarrett’s Artist book/Sketchbook. Non- Sequential pages.
Preliminary visual research towards Bridget Mountgarrett. Assorted imagery of objects from the archives: details, hand and machine stitched, assorted media and papers and techniques.
Book: approx. 300mm (h) x 600mm (w) when open. Supporting Pillow – approx. 450mm x 900mm. Hand stitched, assorted bush dyed and found fabrics.
Plate 18
Julie Montgarrett 2012
George Briggs’ Artist book/Sketchbook. Non-Sequential pages.
Preliminary visual research towards George Briggs. Assorted imagery of objects from the archives – shoe from Sydney Cove relics, QVMAG; Wallaby sketched from specimen, QVMAG collection: assorted media and papers. Book: approx. 300mm (h) x 600mm (w) when open. Supporting Pillow – approx. 450mm x 900mm. Hand stitched, assorted bush dyed and found fabrics.
Plate 19
Julie Montgarrett 2012
Salt Ash and Cold, Cold, Winds…Sketchbook. Non-Sequential pages.
Preliminary visual research based on documents and microfiche archive materials from PRONI, Belfast, Northern Ireland: assorted media - laser printed tracing papers and polyester tulle; hand and machine stitch.
Book: approx. 300mm (h) x 600mm (w) when open. Supporting Pillow – approx. 450mm x 900mm. Hand stitched, assorted bush dyed and found fabrics.
Plate 20
Julie Montgarrett 2012
Work in progress – Postcolonial eye/I for Bridget 2012
One of seven collage/embroidery works made for Navigating Tensions Exhibition; Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, December – February 2012 -2013. Assorted media and materials – bush dyed and printed cotton rag paper; frottage from on-site research, montage of photographic imagery and assorted found materials over drawn and stitched. Hand and Machine embroidery.
Approx: 594mm x 841mm
Plate 21
Julie Montgarrett 2014-15
Circumstantial Evidence
Second research development exhibition installation and work in progress.
Installation detail: part view of ‘Colony’ of objects and textile including part of 10m drawing behind with projected colony imagery drawn to wall behind.
Drawing on wall approx: 1500mm high x 10,000mm long.
Photograph: James Farley
Plate 22
Julie Montgarrett 2012
Cross-Fire Witness
One of seven collage/embroidery works made for first research exhibition - Navigating Tensions Exhibition; Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, December – February 2012 -2013. Assorted media and materials – silk organza, cotton ticking; bush dyed and printed cotton rag paper; frottage from on-site research, montage of photographic imagery and assorted found materials over drawn and stitched. Hand and Machine embroidery.
Approx: 630 mm x 841mm
Plate 23
Julie Montgarrett 2013-15
Work in progress – drawing from small spontaneous sketch developed to large scale as one of a series of headless figures
Photograph: James Farley
Plate 24
Rozanne Hawksley 2012
Top: Sketch of Halt! Who Goes There 1990 figure towards larger work
Lower: Stitches: Means and Methods and Stitching of Wounds. 2003
Plate 25
Julie Montgarrett 2012
Work in progress – page 27 of Jacob’s sketchbook lexicon - one of 9 sketchbook/artist’s books.
Example of an image from sketchbook later transferred to large wall drawings.
Photograph: James Farley
Plate 26
Julie Montgarrett 2013-15
Work in progress – drawing included in Circumstantial Evidence exhibition.
Image based upon Risdon Sailor figure Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Collection – Shaping Tasmania. Small carved figure recovered from archaeological dig in the ruins of Jacob Mountgarrett’s house at Risdon Cove in 1980. Figure combined with drawings from carronade, lead shot and carronade ball also excavated at Risdon in TMAG Collection – Bond Store Galleries. Drawing also includes silhouettes of figures traced initially at small scale from various 19th century sources – Dowling, Bock, Leseur, Law and others who had made studies of Palawa people of the era. These silhouettes were repeated freehand from memory at life scale.
Approx: 1500 mm high x 630mm wide
Photograph: James Farley
Plate 27
Julie Montgarrett 2013-15
Circumstantial Evidence: detail of view from Colony to Wall – an example of a sight-line and a reference to Salber Phillips’ ‘distances’ – affective, formal, summoning and conceptual.
Work in progress – drawing on wall behind
Photograph: James Farley
Plate 28
Julie Montgarrett 2013-15
Work in progress drawing from 19th C anatomical engravings - 762mm (h) x 599mm (w) and details of two of three stitched textile panels: detail of ‘hussifs’ – each 1700mm (h) x 540mm (w) for Bridget Edwards (lhs) and Worete.moete.yenner (rhs).
Approx: 2000mm long x 450mm wide
Photograph: James Farley
Plate 29
Rozanne Hawksley
Sir Galahad 1987/2008
Work commended in 1987 and completed with the addition of the Shroud in 2008. Wood, clay, and silk veiling.
Mary Schoeser: Rozanne Hawksley. Ruthin Crafts Centre and Lund Humphries. p. 136
Plate 30
Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board
In 1829, George Frankland proposed to Arthur to nail a number of illustrated story boards (later known as proclamation boards) in an attempt to overcome the language barrier and help the Aboriginal people to understand the government laws. These boards were intended to show that British law was equal to black and white alike, however it proved to be one-sided.1.
Approx.: 36.2 x 23.1cm – one of seven known remaining boards
1. http://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/object.aspx?ID=37
Plate 31
Julie Montgarrett 2014-15
Circumstantial Evidence: Work in progress – Detail of drawing of shadows of various objects from colonies and tracings to wall. Graphite and chalk. Frottage from Yorktown historic site marker.
Approx. detailed view of an area approx. 1000mm high x 1500mm wide.
Photograph: James Farley
Plate 32
Julie Montgarrett 2013-15
Circumstantial Evidence: Work in progress – traced outline of Captain Cook’s statue in Hyde Park Sydney, and tracing of archaeological evidence of Palawa flints and stone tools excavated as part of the Risdon Cove archaeological dig in 1980. All elements are repeated as reversed elements. Outline of rope is taken from drawing completed on-site at Portsmouth Naval Dockyard Museum in 2011.
Approx: 2000mm wide and 1500mm high
Plate 33
Julie Montgarrett 2013-15
Circumstantial evidence: Work in progress – Drawing includes frottage taken from Risdon Cove and St. David’s Park, Hobart and St. John’s Park Launceston. Drawing of anchor from Le Havre, France and headless figure from small sketch.
Plate 34
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Entrance to Corridor leading to Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: Entrance to corridor leading to main installation space. In foregorund – first research sketchbook – ‘if, ‘if’ is a question…’; 3 collage work from first stage of research on wall and Lighthouse behind
Photograph: James Farley
Plate 35
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Overview of Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: Entrance view of main Installation space – 2 of 8 artist’s books based upon 6 historical characters resting on textile pillows and kangaroo pelt. Central ‘colony’ of objects visible in mid-ground centre of space – the site of a central rotating light source. One of 2 house gable structures with pillars of found books in background. *The book behind is a facsimile of the foregrounded artist book and altered by the actions of the ocean tides at a key historical site in Tasmania, 2015. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 36
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Overview of one half of Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: overview includies partial views of one 10m x 1.5m. Drawing on back wall; House gable (one of two) with silk organza embroidered hanging and cast shadows; and 3 of 14 ‘colonies’ of objects on plinths including 7 artist books. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 37
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: View of opposite side of organza house gable hanging; sections of 2 wall drawings – 10m (w) x 1.5m (h) Fabriano paper; one drawing – 2.2m (w) x 1.5m (h) and cast shadows on wall and House gable pillar of books. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 38
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: Detail of organza house gable hanging with shadows in motion across the layered transparent textile. Photograph: James Farley.
Plate 39
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: View of colony opposite the organza house gable hanging; sections of 2 wall drawings – 10m (w) x 1.5m (h) Fabriano paper including frottage of chimney from Mountgarrett’s cottage at Woolmer’s Estate; Yorktown memorial plaque and cast shadows of house gabel and textile house gable hanging on wall Photograph: James Farley
Plate 40
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts:
Installation view to the left of entrance – Second house gable with bush dyed silk ‘chimney’; 3 ‘colonies’ of artist’s books (lhs); 2 ‘colonies’ partially visible (rhs); 2 embroidered ‘hussifs’ for 2 historical characters; wall drawings and cast shadows on walls.
Photograph: James Farley
Plate 41
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts:
Worete.moete.yenner’s (Ms. Briggs) and Dalrymple Briggs’ embroidered ‘hussifs’ comprising assorted fabrics and threads including maireener shells, black crow shells, possum skin fur. Bush-dyed and hand and machine embroidered. Artist’s book on plinth is a bush dyed facsimile of the original artist’s book with hand embroidered textile runner. Wall drawings and cast shadows on walls. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 42
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts:
Detail of Dalrymple Biggs’ ‘hussif’ with bush-dyed blanket, bleached cloth, vintage ticking, screen printed illegible text and hand embroidered illegible text overlay.
Photograph: Julie Montgarrett
Plate 43
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: View across installation including central colony of found objects with embroidered shrouds and rotating light source visible between house gable pillars of books. Photograph: Julie Montgarrett
Plate 44
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: View of central ‘colony’ of objects and stitched page of illegible text enshrouding a wooden candlestick seen through the circular opening in the silk organza hanging on House gable. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 45
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: Detail of stitched page of illegible text as a shroud-like form enclosing a candlestick on central ‘colony’ of objects seen in previous slide. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 46
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts:
Detail of central colony of objects with stitches shrouds and shadowsin motion as light circles the platform casting shadows acorss the colony and across the installation.
Plate 47
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: View of corner of the installation and wall drawings based on imagery from the archives; historic maps, frottages from historic locations (cottage chimney and door at Woolmers’ Estate and plaque in Launceston) and imagery based on 19th C anatomical drawings of horses. Shadows cast by installation objects/textile and viewer of the installation. Photograph:Julie Montgarrett
Plate 48
Julie Montgarrett November 2015 – January 2016
Final Exhibition Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: View across installation to the first wall of drawings and ‘Salt, ash and cold, cold winds’ – artist book in view on left hand side of image with entrance (out of sight) on far left.
Conclusion: Antagonistic Intimacies - Remembering / Forgetting1
When writing about Kentridge’s Shadow Procession2 work for Chapter 3, I realised that there would be a certain difficulty with the conclusion of the exegesis. Kentridge in various interviews has stated that he felt that a specific destination for the Shadow Procession ‘felt tendentious.’3 He said:
There have been many iterations of porters and processions …[…] that don’t have end points. In other words, they start across the screen and the journey is to get from one side to the other. I think what’s important to me is the uncertain ending. They are not definitely walking towards utopia at the other end of the screen nor are there necessarily killing fields there. But there is a sense of journeying, of not knowing what’s going to be at the other end which seems to be an important part of where we are in the world now - whether it’s diaspora, whether it’s refugees, whether it’s voluntary migration – that sense of shifting across to an uncertain end at which there may be hope. This is not to say there isn’t hope (as a political standpoint, hope still exists and is very important) But the certainties of the ending certainly don’t seem possible.4
I realised the task of writing a conclusion to this exegesis seemed similarly difficult – tendentious and erroneous as if the alternative – the absence of a conclusion were unacceptable. Not at all what this research practice – the work of drawing and textile as tools for navigation and maps for trawling the archives and galleries and spaces of the worlds of the past and present towards these little narratives had set out to do. The objective and outcome of the research practice was the creation of a space of narrative alignments in which a viewer comes upon meanings that are ambiguous and problematic and importantly incomplete – where certainty about the version of history encountered remains elusive and strange for many reasons. This is a space at once familiar and also equally odd as is our relationship to the past. There are many recognisable familiar objects – ordinary even but their purpose and placement is unexpectedly puzzling as randomly aligned gatherings, despite mundane appearances at first glance.
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This is a space too of partial figures that seem to belong in the past as do their ghostly ships horizon bound... or perhaps approaching. There are books without words but words do appear, erased and blurred, just visible on the walls here and there but why? And so little colour - limited to only a few places, as if the relentless circling light has drained all the colour away, away, … away, as it moves on and returns. Ravelling and unravelling the space and the perception of time. But the light seems to carry other ideas as well - if we can figure out what it is that we think they might be. If only the light would be still…
This perception of momentum is akin to the process that generated these works as well – the research process itself. It has resulted in a space where the material outcomes of the whole research story from the start to this point are present, visible and unsettled by the passing motion of the light. Surveilling the space, the light passes and returns leaving shadow traces that fade like a version of the repeating shifting, changing, fluid relationships of elements in the thinking process that created them in the first place.
Any meanings which seem to arise are only temporary as the movement of the light distracts attention and refuses to wait for us to keep up. Attention to detail is unsettled - dragged away and soon forgotten by the slippages of shadows and movement both behind and in front of us, and across there and beside. Our peripheral vision is constantly nagged by shifting presence of movement of things that are simply - not there. This is reminiscent of the quick world – a transient space of puzzling light and shadow where almost everything in our field of view requires a continual renewal and adjustment of our senses and seems to be only temporarily aligned.
This is also the original space of thinking – the gestalt puzzle of negotiation as myriad forms of the mundane making of meaning we engage with on a daily basis millions of times subliminally and automatically. This is the autonomous process of human hard-wired making meaning. It is also an example of the ways that much of these tangible research outcomes began in, and came from, the studio as products of the processes of thinking that occurred in that space and time. The process that
168 endeavoured to make some tangible narratives about the past as fragmentary scraps of stories informed by the past, have arisen by testing and acknowledging the familiar patterns and signs we use to imagine the past alongside elements and puzzles we do not recognise. This creative practice as research that has questioned the colonial histories proposes here in this installation that there are no fixed meanings to be found. Any certainty we might assume about the histories we will find here – any expectations that we are to meet a familiar version of the past we think we know well from the history books, are misplaced and the errors and misjudgements we discover are worse than we might have otherwise imagined. This is the outcome of the research – this space of intangible small puzzles and little narratives struggling to be still as a place and space in which we move towards making sense and making meaning. Here in the gallery the audience is invited into an uncertain space of complexity and conundrum similar to the conceptual space of research that was navigated in the Studio. The space of thinking that was also informed, challenged and shaped repeatedly by the wider research of critical theory, reading and writing, searching the archives and museums for any and all evidence – about these individuals and their era. All this is an activity of course which too, is a kind of procession without end.
This exegesis has traced the ways in which the circularity of the thinking from visual language to critical theory and back again has proceeded. Where the need to make some sense of the clues and relationships of the fractured unstable cues that remain from the past are demanding and difficult and require a response. Whether readings, writing or making visible, the urgent need to make sense of the fleeting processing of the episodic and semantic is as Gibson says the basis of all narrative including and especially, the meanings we make every day, every moment from all the temporary alignments of the world in which we live. This most basic of human abilities is fundamental to our being - physiological, biological and psychological. It is also our need to make some sense of the space of every moment. Whilst this is an everyday occurrence, the subject matter here is not. It is in this ambiguous space that has arisen through drawing and textile forms and structures and clues
169 from the past, and a rigorous process of critical, personally situated investigation and scholarly critique that the original research outcomes are to be found.
This was why, while reviewing these chapters, that Kentridge’s observations about his theme of Procession triggered the particular perception of the importance of circularity in thinking and the difficulty of a conclusion to this exegesis. It also spoke about the place where this exegesis began – with Hannah Arendt’s thoughts about the significance of the past in lighting a way towards the future against dark times. So, here at a point of obligatory conclusion the exegesis has brought me to – I am back to that place of commencement. But with a deeper knowledge of the value of creative practice supposition through the intensive process of reflection upon and research into the past; the analysis of the many critical debates and interpretations of its archives and habits of remembering and forgetting and most importantly, a better understanding of my relationship to all these as the foundation for the research. I have come to better appreciate Dening and Gibson who said in The Archive of Unclosed Action that there should never be a ‘shut-up proof that concludes the tale’ of history.5 Moreover, I consider that what is important is the telling and retelling of these stories by being in Bourdieu’s game – as forms of creative practice that enable a critical interrogation of our habitus and which continues its own version of Kentridge’s Procession.6
Revisiting country - circumstance and consequence: hidden in plain view
My research thesis while acknowledging the conflicts between contrasting concepts of history and the past, has focused upon the possibilities of testing this foundational scholarship by way of divergent and contradictory reading as forms of narrative. It has addressed the ways in which a viewer, experiencing these incomplete narratives, must work to make sense of the fragments and incomplete ‘gaps’ that do not readily convey a straightforward meaning. Its intention is to generate a problematic encounter – through a variety of ways of encountering or reading of the scraps, fragments and colonial imagery scavenged from the archives and museums. Oddly aligned and combined with commonplace objects – they became, through a process of creative practice, another view of the past
170 imperfectly framed, incomplete and folded into the present. This is the work of art and aims to create a form of tentative imagined invisible mending – as differently shaped little narratives, as Lyotard proposed, and as artist and art historian Khadija von Zinnenberg Carroll7 suggests, are also an example of the way in which Art can address history not as Art History but as Art referring to and recreating the evanescence of history out of time.8
I have claimed von ZInnenberg Carroll’s idea of ‘historical distances (which) allow moments of intimacy and the study of affect’9 and John Berger’s assertion that a fixed regularly measured linear narrative, does not match the sense of accretion and dissipation of lived experience.10 I consider that these ideas locate both my creative practice research process of making and the effect of the works a viewer may encounter within the installation as an unevenly measured experience. A cumulative detailed process of interruptions - the memory of which remains and at others continues simply, passing without notice. In all it is an encounter with a contrasting braided quality of experience but one in which meanings meander too like the shadow-casting objects and transparent textile works found in the installation – with gaps and absences as much as tensions, connections and densities. This attempt to capture some sense and meaning through fluid perceptions, complex interactions and shifting relationships across the visual field is fundamental to my understanding of my practice. It was also key to the production of this body of work that endeavours to consider other possibilities for narrative in closed colonial histories; to address this dark and overlooked history of colonisation for an audience prepared to immerse themselves in this space for a time.
I have followed Ravenscroft’s lead by testing, […] enigma and doubt … in narrative content and form… [which] favour[s] the fragment over the whole, unsettlement over uncertainty …[to]… give a formal place to non-knowledge and invisibility.11 I am throughout this research process emphatically not an Historian nor am I an illustrator of certain conclusions. Both Ravenscroft’s and Boyce’s acknowledgement of the need for us to recognise and accept the extent of our gaps in understanding of both the historical and cross-cultural landscapes of the past is reflected in the problematic aesthetic character of the final installation of my body
171 of work as an uncertain and liminal visual narrative. The darkened space and shifting shadows moving across the installation space has been planned to suggest the perception of presence and absence created by the gaps and open spaces between the overlapping fragments and asymmetrical drawings on the walls and the odd arrangements of objects within the colonies. I consider the space to be best defined by Homi Bhaba’s12 notion of the hybrid and problematic Third Space but akin to Robert Young’s particular interpretation of the concept, which is as he claims, ‘[…] not a space, nor is it a place. If anything, it is a site…a site of production[…] of anxiety, an untimely place of loss, of fading, of appearance and disappearance […] but an emptiness which at the same time enables the articulation and assertion of their own subjectivity’.13
It is this incommensurate reflective uncertain terrain that I have encountered most clearly over the course of this research through questioning this particular history that is represented in the space of the installation. It is this aspect that Robert Young identifies of Bhabha’s third space that I have endeavoured to conjure through this complex installation that methodologically engages fragmentary elements and shadows using drawing, textile/embroidery and colonies of objects as fundamental elements to provoke an audience to re-envision this past.
This research practice asserts that encountering these works as a form of creative practice research outcome as drawing and textile requires a complicity on the part of the viewer as does history itself. Meaning is gleaned and cross-referenced visually, materially and spatially. Indexes and signs by repetition in the disjunctions of fragments and patterns of coincidence are dependent upon individual perception, cultural memory and bias to reveal unforeseen, even inconsistent narratives and outcomes. The works are informed as much by the histories of drawing, embroidery and Colonial Australia as by contemporary ideas and issues from theorists such as Paul Carter and Ross Gibson who argue for approaches to creative practice where both the making and audience reception is reliant on a ‘process’ of speculation, as an incomplete narrative or the asking of what if? questions. However they say this requires imagination, involving a preparedness to navigate a seedbed of doubt when the proof of the past is ‘in smithereens’.
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Nonetheless this speculative terrain has proved to be a fertile site for my research despite the doubts Gibson underlines, as it has required a more critical process of testing and re-testing the limitations brought into play by the fraught and contradictory prosopographies of my ghosts.
The background to this research is the History Wars, the most recent demonstration of competing concepts of Australian history that fiercely debated the patterns of denial or acknowledgement of colonial frontier warfare and its brutal outcomes. Underlying most of the scholarship that surrounds these debates is a callous reckoning and ‘grisly disputes’14 about the numbers of fatalities. Such debates refuse to acknowledge the human subjects or to offer an account of the lives and circumstances of those who died on both sides of the frontier. Nicholas Clements’ recent research15 is an example of the focus of emerging scholarship on the colonial era in response to the debates of the History Wars. Clements, like Greg Lehman and Julie Gough, endeavour to question the experiences and perspectives of those on both sides of the conflict in Van Diemen’s Land, to acknowledge the human subject typically missing from the competing concepts of the majority of top-down received histories of previous decades. Like Ravenscroft, Macintyre and Clements, my objective has also been to reconsider the extant narratives of this history albeit through a creative practice research model that tests incomplete and uncertain narratives about the ordinary lives of those caught up in the violence.
As a nation we need to recognise a shared responsibility to reconsider alternative narratives of these colonial histories that are both painful and unavoidably conjoined. A retelling of histories would challenge the entwined settler narratives that Curthoys has identified and which reveal a more complex dynamic of habits of forgetting and remembering which Stanner coined as the Great Australian Silence. The habits of Remembrance perennially renewed which hide a darker operation of denial of the events of the Colonial era that Healy argues continue into the present. Rather we need to encourage new forms of critical analysis to contradict our current myths and problematic debates surrounding the last two centuries that have in that time readily allowed for a softening of the hard facts of history. As Ross Gibson, Reynolds and other indigenous and non-indigenous historians, cultural
173 critics, academics and anthropologists have identified, the colonial myths of heroic settler narratives of transcendence, of stoic resilience despite overwhelming adversity and debilitating uncertainties of frontier survival, obscure legitimate and nagging doubts about the justice and honesty of both the project of colonisation and the ways in which we remember it.16 Gibson further argues we must not be lulled to sleep with the temporary balm that myths afford by keeping an eye on history’s capacity to disturb that rest.17
My research has created a suite of open visual narratives to identify an alternative narrative model that falls somewhere between the contradictions of myth and the hard truths of hidden histories - to provide a more creative and adaptable site for proposing new epistemologies. The objective was the presentation of multiple viewpoints – as a complex of intersecting overlapping, unfamiliar, challenging incomplete narratives of survival prompted as much by chance as self- determination. The Colonial period presents great opportunities to represent the past with an aim to creating a challenging, visual re-imagining of different, and more complex, perspectives of varied circumstances to revise and re-conceive our sense of both the past and present informed by the writings of these authors, critics, artists and many more. This is a necessary ambition because the attitudes and behaviours of settler epistemologies that drove two centuries of oppression that consequently enabled the genocide of their ancestors of contemporary First Nations Australians, continues to thread through our culture.
Narratives with the capacity to remain incomplete, accept doubt and in so doing, allow for alternative versions of history to remain open to questioning, are fundamental for a re-evaluation of national mythologies and for better understandings of collective relationships to place and country. By challenging closed patriotic assumptions of remembrance, we may rebut any singular dominant history by engaging in an open process of conversation and debate. Rather than fixed assurances, an element of ignorance and uncertainty that allows other possible explanations to emerge for consideration is vital to the slow emergence of worthwhile and enduring understandings of the relationships between the past and present.
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The conceptual and ontological framework I have borrowed from Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, proposes that non-indigenous Australians better name our atopos topos, our collective commonplace and to give a truthful account of our own story.18 Their contention that this extends beyond injustice on a moral or ethical plane, but is in fact ‘an ‘ontological violence’ against the Indigenous other as well as ontological terror against ourselves’19 is supported by Gibson, Dening, Healy, Ravenscroft, Thomas and Langton. Their respective identification of complex interstitial forms of this ‘intercultural trafficking’ have problematized my research ontology in valuable ways and have informed the framing of my research methodology. I believe it is well defined by Dening’s interpretation of historying at work, as a process that is, ‘as idiosyncratic as our fingerprints’.20
By seeking a shared ongoing historying alongside cultural narratives that evoke all kinds of human experiences, such as the universal loss and grief of cruel separations, historying as dialectical, dialogical and continuing, may help to underline the dangers of alienating otherness that refuses acknowledgement of a shared common humanity. Historians Lynette Russell and Nicholas Clements have reported the various overlooked experiences and everyday lives of those individuals written out of the histories. By challenging stereotypical relationships between ‘natives and settlers’ as dichotomous and only in conflict they have identified ‘models of interaction that include negotiation, economic imperatives and alliance formations, providing a nuanced understanding of the ambiguities of cross-cultural encounters’.21
By actively endeavouring to reconsider what has been wilfully erased and forgotten by agendas of historiography and mythologies and myopic triumphalist histories, we may indeed encourage valuable, alternative forms of grief work akin to those devised by Kentridge, Gough and Hawksley. Acknowledgement of our brutal past is fundamental to our collective future. Our established models of Remembrance have always been too narrow and too carefully edited to offer a sufficiently generous space in which to consider this confronting and difficult past with its ragged truths we avoid.
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My creative practice research process has also been informed by curator and Academic, David Hansen’s advice that, we need to resuscitate the peoples from the past but our contemporary understandings and judgements are not the cargo we can take to the past – only contemporary questions to make sense of the past in the present.22 My hypotheses were gleaned through careful critical analysis, detailed extractions from the problematic archives that provide a side-long glance at the fragmentary, fractured remains of this history’s totality as von Zinnenberg Carroll proposes.23 In this way I have approached my own research and apprenticeship to ghosts in ‘doing history’ in the spaces occupied by artefacts and suggested by the archives, engaging a visual and material language that lies between myths and histories. The prosopographical conundrums proposed by the limited biographical and historiographic details of these characters’ lives allow little more than fleeting glimpses. I have respectfully and carefully reconsidered and rearranged the remnants of their lives, in contrast to other stereotypical versions permitted by dominant histories and mythologies of nationhood.
These are incomplete scenarios but they may provide a setting of sorts for the performance of some grief work to help us imagine differently these lives through a postcolonial spy-glass. My objective is to open a space for more plausible suppositions and assumptions albeit incomplete fragments with gaps and aporias in which we might imagine these characters walking about. As artist and academic, Greg Lehman contends, in Colonial Afterlives, there is more to be achieved by investing in fiction than history for fiction is a more honest endeavour without the subtexts of authority and facts and the agendas of history and remembering and forgetting.24
The objective of this complex installation was the creation of a unique subjective field that avoids a prescriptive illustrative, chronologically linear envisioning of the received history which indeed Paul Carter, in The Road to Botany Bay, dares us to avoid.25 Rather than simply re-telling stories or restaging events about a few powerful individuals based on versions from the past, I have followed Carter to challenge the viewer to encounter uncertainty, to consider that there may be many
176 meanings and many unsettled stories from multiple view-points that tease out expectations of meaning and resist a sense of stability. In combination, they aim to disrupt perceptions of a coherent and stable view of Australia’s collective history and in so doing to generate many meanings and point toward many incomplete fragmentary little narratives of the past in the present. The legacies of this past are our habits of remembering and forgetting and its task, the uncertain grief work that may always haunt the present. This is the same grief work that Kentridge, Hawksley and Gough also use to cross-examine their own imaginary ghostly casts and crews. We are all left, more or less with incomplete scripts towards little narratives to be staged with contrary hypotheticals and the ragged prosopography26 of all these ghosts and the temporary disguises we imagine for them.
There are many dangers in my practice not the least of which is a foolish assumption that imaginative readings of the fragmentary historical archive will recover the past. That these imagined versions of events and experiences are somehow accurate substitutes for the missing archives. Like the assumptions we make about photographs - that they visually and materially record facts as documents of certainties - they cannot. Neither do these works - all they might do is offer a consideration of the ways non-Indigenous Australians readily stitch-over and smooth out this problematic history of remembering and forgetting which confuses the present by underlining the unease we feel in the face of what we do not and cannot know.
While my research has reached a point of conclusion here, it is also not at an end. It is a temporary alignment that gathers together for a time, for consideration a body of work as a field of encounters with an underlying coherence and order determined by the research as this exegesis has detailed. The process of its making - its creative practice as research, is such that it will continue in new and varied forms spiralling out and away to circle back and re-gather and entwine anew. That of course is the nature of creative practice but at present, this is to be considered as a body of work as a research outcome and its materiality and visual complexity is the original contribution and outcome of the research process that has questioned the extant fragile facts and fraught fictions of the past through creative practice.
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This accompanying exegesis, traces and documents the other invisible patterns of thinking behind the scenes so to speak. However, this research has highlighted the need for further investigation and elaboration of many other “little narratives” which address other aspects of the past which the scope of this particular research is unable to accommodate. One area of further research is a close consideration of the ‘antagonistic intimacies’ of the respective women in this colonial setting and the wider questions regarding their agency and the degree to which they may have managed certain forms of self-determination as proposed by Lynette Russell. This will be addressed in due course.
As detailed in the previous chapters Barrett and Bolt and many others as discussed, claim that creative practice as research, as an open process of critical, personally situated investigation and scholarly critique, is legitimate research because it has demonstrated the generation, modelling and externalising of new knowledge as exhibition and thesis. This is how the creative practice has occurred and the chapters of this exegesis have questioned the various locations in which these particular ghosts of mine might be located within the histories and current critical debates around the frontier wars and the habits and agendas of Remembrance. Moreover my research has underlined the value of small stories that can unsettle the past to address larger issues. While some new details of these characters lives have been discovered as propositional tools as outcomes of this research as a means for questioning differently their lives and circumstances, the history remains inconclusive. These details are only of value as a means of setting in place other points of view and sightlines to the past and the lives and circumstances of these people as more credible human beings beyond the stereotypical dress history to date has allowed them.
The exegesis has also underlined the urgent need for a multiplicity of little narratives such as those generated by this research to acknowledge the unresolved contradictions and errors in the ways we relate to and think about the larger narratives from the past on which our perceptions of the present and future are based. Whilst it is true that storytelling through art never changes the world, small narratives of encounter which present puzzles about ordinary plausible lives might
178 challenge us to change some of our habits of imagining the past and in turn we may challenge others to think differently through other small stories. Only people can change people and perhaps little narratives such as these might gather the means towards changing our sense of the past as fixed and stable to something more fluid and open.
Little narratives may enable us to try to mend our discomfort with the past usefully, carefully and with hesitation lest we repeat the errors of avoidance by the past by forgetting yet again, instead attempting some form of repair with stories that acknowledge our complicity in this history. This is what is meant by invisible mending that is different from the habits of stitching over the gaps in understanding of the past with callous reckonings and debates of calculated deaths. Invisible mending is a tentative and careful process of thinking and imagining differently that continues without an end to its threading through small stories. This is the nature of invisible mending where the presence as absence in narrative may at least counter the destructive certainty of the claims by some non- Indigenous Australians that everything of the past has been erased and is lost irretrievably. I am not an illustrator of certain conclusions about our colonial history. I am only a tentative invisible mender with drawing and textile - one of many diverse storytellers in many processions that continue uncertainly but with a necessary underlying purpose as Kentridge proposes:
To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.27
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1 Thomas, Nicholas. Possessions: Indigenous Art/colonial Culture. London: Thames and Hudson. 1999. p. 10 – 12 2 Kentridge, William. Fortuna. (ed.) Lilian Tone. London: Thames and Hudson. 2013. p. 250-256 3 op.cit. p. 251 4 op.cit. p. 256; Kentridge, William. A version of the text quoted in S. Sollins et al, art21 - Art in the 21st Century Season 5, New York: Art21, Inc., 2009, p. 28 5 Gibson, Ross. ‘The Archive of Unclosed Action’ in Circus Oz Archive – Vault: the Non-Stop Performing History of Circus Oz. Catalogue. Melbourne: Melbourne Arts Centre. 2014. 6 Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1990. p. 92 7 von Zinnenberg Carroll, Khadija. Art in the Time of Colony. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014. p. 1 8 op.cit 9 op.cit. 10 Dyer, Geoff. (ed.) John Berger: Selected Essays. New York: First Vintage International edition, 2001 p. 483 11 Ravenscroft. 2012. op.cit. p. 15 12 Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. 1994 p. 53 - 56 13 Young, Robert. ‘The Void of Misgiving’. In Communicating in the Third Space, Karen Ikas and Gerhard Wagner. (eds.) New York: Routledge, 2008. p. 81 - 83. 14 Macintyre, Stuart. (ed). The Historians Conscience: Australian Historians on the Ethics of History. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2004. 15 Clements, Nicholas. Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land. PhD Thesis. Hobart: University of Tasmania. 2014. p. 5-6 16 Gibson, Ross. 26 Views of a Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788-91. Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2012. p. 227 17 op.cit. p. 228 18 Nicolacopoulos, Toula and Vassilacopoulos, George. Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier, re.press Melbourne. 2014. pp. 11 -14 http://re-press.org/book-files/978098081971- The_Being_of_the_Occupier.pdf Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos. ibid. p. 61 ‘The violence perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples constitutes more than an admittedly serious injustice on a moral or ethical plane… the distinct significance of what we are referring to as ‘ontological violence’ concerns the fundamental question of mutual recognition…[of] the violent dispossession of the Indigenous peoples [through which] white Australia did more than merely fail to acknowledge the status of Indigenous Australians as the country’s original owners, as has been suggested. Further: See, for example, Genevieve Lloyd, ‘No one’s Land’.
Lloyd, Genevieve, ‘No one’s Land; Australia and the Philosophical Imagination’, Hypatia, vol.15, no.2, 2000, pp. 26 - 39. The Indigenous-white Australian encounter is not just a matter of the latter denying to the former their rights of control over their lands. Instead, white Australia has denied Indigenous Australians recognition as sovereign beings, as self-determining subjects and as sovereign peoples. This is not to suggest that the Indigenous peoples depend upon the white Australian state for recognition of their sovereign being. As Tony Birch explains, sovereignty within Indigenous communities themselves is not reliant on either European law or occasional state paternalism. It is maintained through pre-existing, pre-European models of governance. p40. Tony Birch, ‘The Invisible Fire’, p. 107. Nevertheless, this self-sustaining internal sovereignty has been rendered inoperative in Indigenous-white Australian relations and the refusal fully to recognize Indigenous property-owning as being a constitutive feature of the relationship. 20 Dening, Greg. ‘Performing Cross-culturally’, The Australasian Journal of American Studies 2006, vol. 25. No.2, p. 5 - 6 21 Russell, Lynette. Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790- 1870. New York: State University. 2012. p. 18 22 Hansen, David. Seeing Truganini. [Calibre Prize Essay.] [on-line]. Australian Book review, No. 321, May 2010: 45 – 53 23 von Zinnenberg Carroll, Khadija. Art in the Time of Colony, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014. p. 3. Von Zinnenberg Carroll argues ‘the fragmentary remains of history after time are fractured, thereby
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providing “a sidelong glance at a totality” beyond the circumscribed boundaries of the totalizing enterprise of the Enlightenment project.’ This concept is addressed in more detail in Chapter 5. 24 Lehman, Greg. ‘Writing Our Lives.’ In Colonial Afterlives, exhibition catalogue essay. Hobart: Salamanca Arts Centre. March 18 – April 27, 2015. p. 8 25 Carter, Paul. The Road to Botany Bay: essays in Spatial History. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. 26 Prosopography. op.cit 27 Kentridge, William. ‘Anything is possible: William Kentridge’ PBS Documentary art21. USA. Accessed: ABC i-view March 2013
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REFERENCES
Abbreviations AOT Archives Office of Tasmania CSO Colonial Secretary’s Office HRA Historical Records of Australia ML Mitchell Library SLV State Library of Victoria TAHO Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office THRA Tasmanian Historical Research Association
Bibliography
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— CON45/1/1 Convict Department, Alphabetical register of applications for indulgences — CSO1/316 Colonial Secretary’s Office, General Correspondence — CSO1/886/18804 Colonial Secretary’s Office, General Correspondence — GO/26/3 Governor’s Office, Letterbooks of despatches sent to the Under- Secretary of State — CSO1/316: 944.— CON13/1/2 Convict Department, Assignment lists and papers Letter from Dalrymple Johnson to Captain Moriarty requesting assistance for the removal of Mrs. Briggs (Woete.moete.yenner) from Flinders Island, CO289/133: 171-171a Description of Woete.moete.yenner’s circumstances and enquiries by the Review of the Aboriginal establishment at Wybalenna, Flinders Island, CO280/133;
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troubles with Aborigines in the Deloraine area, 1847. Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser - Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 22 October 1831: 3.
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Plates of Work
Plates of works are located at the conclusion of Chapters 2 and 5.
Plate 1.
Julie Montgarrett if ‘if’ is a question? 2011 – 12
Diverse papers to A3 size - monotypes; collages/montage; bush-dyed, organically stained papers – made on-site and in studio; various studio resources, hand and machine stitch, assorted papers mirror covers. Approx: 600mm x 450mm
Plate 2.
Rozanne Hawksley Pale Armistice 1991
Imperial War Museum, London Wax flowers; women’s, men’s and children’s gloves and bleached bones. Imperial War Museum Collection, London. Approx: 900mm diameter.
Plate 3.
Rozanne Hawksley
(upper) Penitance 1: the Garter of Penance 2006 Leather garter laced with fish hooks. Dimensions unknown
(lower) Alice’s World Drawing on canvas 2006 Drawing on canvas. Dimensions unknown
Plate 4.
Rozanne Hawksley Continuum 1987
Leather glove, rusted nail, wooden plank
Plate 5.
Julie Gough Dark Valley 2008
Collection of Art Gallery of NSW Coal pieces, nylon fishing rope, wood
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Plate 6.
Julie Gough She loves me, she loves me not… 1995
13 plastic roses, 13 synthetic slippers, 13 found Govt. photos c.1962, plastic magnification inserts, variable dimensions
Plate 7.
Julie Gough Pedagogical (Inner Soul) Pressure 1996
40 pairs of second hand school shoes, lights, slides, found photos, stilts, shoe shine box, acrylic on wood. Approx: 3000mm x 4500mm x 600mm
Plate 8.
Julie Gough The Consequence of Chance 2011
TMAG Collection calico, pine, cardboard, lights. Approx: 2400mm x 1500mm x 2400mm
Plate 9. Julie Gough Stolen 2011 enamel on pewter, steel
Plate 10.
William Kentridge Drawings for Projection Series: MINE 1991
Charcoal on paper. 16mm animated film transfered to video (colour, sound), 5:50 min. duration
Plate 11.
William Kentridge Drawings for Projection Series: Felix In Exile 1994 – 2001
Charcoal and poster paint on paper. Approx: 500mm x 640mm Still frame from 35 mm animated film transferred to video (colour, sound). 8:43 min. duration
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Plate 12.
William Kentridge Shadow Procession 1999
35 mm animated film transferred to video (colour, sound). 7:00min. duration
Plate 13.
William Kentridge Drawings for Black Box/ Chambre Noir: 2003
Chalk, charcoal, assorted papers.
Plate 14.
William Kentridge Black Box/ Chambre Noir: 2003
Miniature Theatre, timber, drawings on paper – mixed media. Video projection. Dimensions unknown.
Plate 15.
Julie Montgarrett if ‘if’ is a question? 2011 – 12
Diverse papers to A3 size - monotypes; collages/montage; bush-dyed, organically stained papers – made on-site and in studio; various studio resources, hand and machine stitch, assorted papers mirror covers. Approx: 600mm x 450mm
Plate 16.
Julie Montgarrett Jacob Mountgarrett’s Artist book/Sketchbook 2012
Diverse papers and fabrics - monotypes; collages/montage; frottage; bush-dyed, organically stained papers – made on-site and in studio; various studio resources, hand and machine stitch, assorted papers. Cover: Horse hair and Linen, screen printed. Supporting Pillow: Navy Blue Wool, bush-dyed canvas, Union Jack stitched in red thread. Approx: 600mm x 450mm
Plate 17.
Julie Montgarrett Bridget Mountgarrett’s Artist book/Sketchbook 2012
Diverse papers and fabrics - monotypes; collages/montage; frottage; bush-dyed, organically stained papers – made on-site and in studio; various studio resources, hand and machine
207 stitch, assorted papers mirror covers. Cover: Cotton Ticking. Supporting Pillow: bush-dyed wool felt; Hand stitched vintage cotton, bush dyed wool blancket. Approx: 600mm x 450mm
Plate 18.
Julie Montgarrett George Briggs’ Artist book/Sketchbook 2012
Diverse papers and fabrics - monotypes; collages/montage; frottage; bush-dyed, organically stained papers – made on-site and in studio; various studio resources, hand and machine stitch, assorted papers mirror covers. Cover: Sail cloth; Supporting pillow: Vintage hemp Sail cloth. Approx: 600mm x 450mm
Plate 19.
Julie Montgarrett Salt Ash and Cold, Cold, Winds… Artist book 2012
Diverse papers and fabrics – archival tracing papers laser printed; assorted rag papers laser printed; silk and ployester tulle, thread, Bush dyed playing cards. Cardboard covers, linen; hand and machine stitch. Approx: 600mm x 450mm
Plate 20.
Julie Montgarrett Work in progress – Postcolonial eye/I for Briget 2012
Assorted media and materials – bush dyed and printed cotton rag paper; frottage from on- site research, montage of photographic imagery and assorted found materials over drawn and stitched. Silk organza. Hand and Machine embroidery.
Plate 21.
Julie Montgarrett Circumstantial Evidence 2014 – 2015
Photograph of installation and drawing: Found objects and lace; Fabriano rag paper 1500mm x 10000mm. Dimensions unknown. Photograph: James Farley.
Plate 22.
Julie Montgarrett Cross-Fire Witness 2012
Assorted media and materials – silk organza, cotton ticking; bush dyed and printed cotton rag paper; frottage from on-site research, montage of photographic imagery and assorted found materials over drawn and stitched. Hand and Machine embroidery.
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Plate 23.
Julie Montgarrett Work in Progress: figure 2013-15
Graphite on Japanese Hosho paper. Approx: 2000mm x 900mm. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 24.
Rozanne Hawksley
(upper) Drawing for ‘Halt! Who Goes There?’ 1990 Graphite on paper
(lower) Stitches: Means and Methods and Stitching of Wounds. 2003 Graphite, ink on paper
Plate 25.
Julie Montgarrett Jacob Mountgarrett’s Artist book/Sketchbook 2012
Diverse papers and fabrics - monotypes; collages/montage; frottage; bush-dyed, organically stained papers – made on-site and in studio; various studio resources, hand and machine stitch, assorted papers mirror covers. Cover: Horse hair and Linen, screen printed. Supporting Pillow: Navy Blue Wool, bush-dyed canvas, Union Jack stitched in red thread. Approx: 600mm x 450mm
Plate 26.
Julie Montgarrett Work in progress - Circumstantial Evidence: Risdon 2013-15
Graphite and chalk on Fabriano rag paper 1500mm x 10000mm. Frottage on Japanese rice paper. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 27.
Julie Montgarrett Work in progress - Circumstantial Evidence: Colony/Ship 2015
Orange thorn branch; Fabriano paper, Graphite and chalk on 1500mm x 10000mm. Frottage on Japanese rice paper. Photograph: James Farley
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Plate 28.
Julie Montgarrett Work in progress - Drawing and Hussifs 2013-15
Graphite on Arches Rag paper. 800mm x 500mm. Hussifs left and right: assorted fabrics – wool, cotton, linen and silk; assorted threads. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 29.
Rozanne Hawksley Sir Galahad 1987 – 2008
Timber, clay, silk threads and silk tulle
Plate 30.
Governor George Arthur’s Proclamation Board 1828
Pine packing case board. Gouache and varnish. 36.2cm x 23cm x 1cm
Plate 31.
Julie Montgarrett Circumstantial Evidence: Work in progress – Emu 2014 – 15
Graphite and chalk on Fabriano rag paper 1500mm x 10000mm. Frottage on Japanese rice paper. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 32.
Julie Montgarrett Circumstantial Evidence: Work in progress – Cook 2014 - 15
Graphite and chalk on Fabriano rag paper 1500mm x 10000mm. Frottage on Japanese rice paper. Photograph: James Farley
Plate 33.
Julie Montgarrett Circumstantial Evidence: Work in progress – Anchor 2014 – 15
Graphite and chalk on Fabriano rag paper 1500mm x 10000mm. Frottage on Japanese rice paper. Photograph: James Farley
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Plate 34
Julie Montgarrett Entrance to Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
Entrance to corridor leading to main installation space. In foregorund – first research sketchbook – ‘if, ‘if’ is a question…’; 3 collage work from first stage of research on wall and Lighthouse behind. Photograph: James Farley.
Plate 35
Julie Montgarrett Overview of Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary
Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
Entrance view of main Installation space – 2 of 8 artist’s books based upon 6 historical characters resting on textile pillows and kangaroo pelt. Central ‘colony’ of objects visible in mid-ground centre of space – the site of a central rotating light source. One of 2 house gable structures with pillars of found books in background. *The book behind is a facsimile of the foregrounded artist book and altered by the actions of the ocean tides at a key historical site in Tasmania, 2015. Photograph: James Farley.
Plate 36
Julie Montgarrett Overview of one half of Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
Overview of installation includies partial views of one 10m x 1.5m. Drawing on back wall; House gable (one of two) with silk organza embroidered hanging and cast shadows; and 3 of 14 ‘colonies’ of objects on plinths including 7 artist books. Photograph: James Farley.
Plate 37
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
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View of opposite side of organza house gable hanging; sections of 2 wall drawings – 10m (w) x 1.5m (h) Fabriano paper; one drawing – 2.2m (w) x 1.5m (h) and cast shadows on wall and House gable pillar of books. Photograph: James Farley.
Plate 38
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
Detail of organza house gable hanging with shadows in motion across the layered transparent textile. Photograph: James Farley.
Plate 39
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
View of colony opposite the organza house gable hanging; sections of 2 wall drawings – 10m (w) x 1.5m (h) Fabriano paper including frottage of chimney from Mountgarrett’s cottage at Woolmer’s Estate; Yorktown memorial plaque and cast shadows of house gabel and textile house gable hanging on wall. Photograph: James Farley.
Plate 40
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
Installation view to the left of entrance – Second house gable with bush dyed silk ‘chimney’; 3 ‘colonies’ of artist’s books (lhs); 2 ‘colonies’ partially visible (rhs); 2 embroidered ‘hussifs’ for 2 historical characters; wall drawings and cast shadows on walls.
Photograph: James Farley
Plate 41
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
Worete.moete.yenner’s (Ms. Briggs) and Dalrymple Briggs’ embroidered ‘hussifs’ comprising assorted fabrics and threads including maireener shells, black crow shells, possum skin fur. Bush-dyed and hand and machine embroidered. Artist’s book on plinth is
212 a bush dyed facsimile of the original artist’s book with hand embroidered textile runner. Wall drawings and cast shadows on walls. Photograph: James Farley.
Plate 42
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
Detail of Dalrymple Biggs’ ‘hussif’ with bush-dyed blanket, bleached cloth, vintage ticking, screen printed illegible text and hand embroidered illegible text overlay. Photograph: Julie Montgarrett.
Plate 43
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
View across installation including central colony of found objects with embroidered shrouds and rotating light source visible between house gable pillars of books. Photograph: Julie Montgarrett.
Plate 44
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
View of central ‘colony’ of objects and stitched page of illegible text enshrouding a wooden candlestick seen through the circular opening in the silk organza hanging on House gable. Photograph: James Farley.
Plate 45
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
Detail of stitched page of illegible text as a shroud-like form enclosing a candlestick on central ‘colony’ of objects seen in previous slide. Photograph: James Farley.
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Plate 46
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
Detail of central colony of objects with stitches shrouds and shadowsin motion as light circles the platform casting shadows acorss the colony and across the installation.
Plate 47
Julie Montgarrett
Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
View of corner of the installation and wall drawings based on imagery from the archives; historic maps, frottages from historic locations (cottage chimney and door at Woolmers’ Estate and plaque in Launceston) and imagery based on 19th C anatomical drawings of horses. Shadows cast by installation objects/textile and viewer of the installation. Photograph: Julie Montgarrett.
Plate 48
Julie Montgarrett Final Exhibtion Installation – Temporary Alignments: fraught Fictions and fragile facts: November 2015 – January 2016
View across installation to the first wall of drawings and ‘Salt, ash and cold, cold winds’ – artist book in view on the plinth on the left hand side of image with entrance (out of sight) on far left.
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Appendix 1:
Summary of Historiography of Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania
The first of a series of nineteenth Century Tasmanian histories of the ‘The Black War’ was by Henry Melville – History of Van Diemen’s Land (1835). Melville, as Editor of the Colonial Times during the War was well informed by and able to report on the settlers’ perspectives of the period. His work reflected on these attitudes including considerable negativity towards Arthur’s conciliatory policies towards the ‘natives’. The next significant history to be published was John West’s excellent, seminal History of Tasmania (1852) which remains the most detailed, valuable and accessible record of the period. James Bonwick’s Last of the Tasmanians (1870) while sympathetic to the Palawa and extensively researched is according to many historians unreliable and requires secondary confirmation of its many claims. It appears that Bonwick accepted without question and transferred a number of incorrect facts and narratives from an unpublished document written by Jorgen Jorgensen which have subsequently relayed errors to future historians and confused debates around certain Colonial events. An example of this is addressed in Chapter 3 in relation to Dalrymple Briggs. James Calder’s, Some Accounts of the Wars Extirpations, Habits, etc. of the Native Tribes of Tasmania published (1875) remains a valuable source and James Fenton’s History of Tasmania (1884) is indebted in many respects to Wests’ earlier text. H Ling Roth’s outstanding Aborigines of Tasmania (1890 revised 1899) is an extensive, detailed compendium of Aboriginal life despite the fact that Roth did not have access to Colonial Papers nor of course, George Robinson’s papers at the time of writing. Both Ling Roth and John Wests’ histories are considered to be the foundation for any historical research into Tasmanian colonial history and consequently they have formed a reference point and backdrop to much of my reading and research towards my creative practice. However since many of the details and claims cannot be verified they have been used with caution. The depth and extent of historical research in Tasmania is remarkable in contrast to the comparative absence of similar scholarship by historians across the mainland of Australia. However both
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Tasmanian and mainland historical accounts are absent from the historiographical records during the first half of the twentieth century until the publication of Clive Turnbull’s (1948) Black War: The Extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines, Black War, Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire Ltd) an anthology of selected government correspondence. More than thirty years passed before the publication of Robert Travers’, The Tasmanians: The Story of a Doomed Race (1980) reiterated the older claims for the passing of the Palawa peoplesand Lyndal Ryan’s Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981, revised 2012). These works have been followed by a proliferation of texts that have addressed Tasmanian History and included sections on the frontier War. These include Lloyd Robson’s A History of Tasmania: volume 1, Van Diemen’s Land from the earliest Times to 1855 (1983); Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Van Diemen’s Land : creating an Antipodean England (1992); Henry Reynolds (1995; 2001; 2004; 2011; 2012; 2014); Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume 1, Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1847 (2002); John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788 –1838 (2002); James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land(2008); Ian McFarlane, Beyond Awakening: The Aboriginal tribes of North-Western Tasmania: A History (2008); G. Calder, Levee, Line and Martial Law: A History of the Dispossession of the Mairremmener People of Van Diemen’s Land 1803-1832 (2010); Patsy Cameron, Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures on the Colonial Sea Frontier (2011); Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (2014). Murray Johnson and Ian McFarlane, Van Diemen’s Land: An Aboriginal History (2015) There are also numerous post-graduate Theses and those that have been latterly published are listed above. Details of all publications and theses are included in the bibliography of this exegesis.
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Appendix 2:
National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom
National Archives, Kew. Royal Navy Salaries – 1790- 1800. ADM 104.12-15
Accessed November 2011.
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Appendix 3 -
Manuscript 3251 –
https://manuscript3251.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/ms-3251-1825-31-black-natives-also- paton-vs-gregson/
Transcripts of Witness evidence in Case between Brumby vs Mountgarrett re: shooting of Dalrymple Briggs
To Wit,
The information of Mr William Brumby who being sworn saith, I am a settler and reside on the Lake River, at the back of Norfolk Plains, Doctor Jacob Mountgarrett also resides at a farm on the Lake River; on Saturday afternoon thefifteenth or sixteenth day of last July between five and six o’clock, I was riding along the Road near Dr Mountgarrett’s house I heard the cry of murder, soon afterwards I saw a half caste native girl called Dalrymple, who has lived with Doctor Mountgarrett some years, running from his House towards the Road, I heard the report of a fowling Piece, Musket or Pistol and saw a Man standing at the corner of Doctor Mountgarrett’s House from whence the shot came, he had a blue coat on and a white night cap; I rode up to the Girl, she was crying, I observed one of her legs was bloody, she said I will go to Mr Archer my Master has shot me. I immediately rode to Doctor Mountgarrett’s House; he was outside the house; and wore a blue coat and a white night cap; he had no gun in his hand; nor did I see a gun of any sort near him, I asked him why he shot the black Girl, he replied why cannot I correct my black servant without you interfering; after some more conversation he ordered me off the farm, I do not know what became of the coloured Girl.
WM Brumby
Sworn before me at Launceston this fifth day of August 1825
PM Hargrave JP
______
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The information of Mr James Thornloe, who being sworn saith, I am free, and clerk of the Commandant of Port Dalrymple; on Saturday evening the sixteenth day of last July I was riding on the Road near the House of Doctor Jacob Mountgarrett at Norfolk Plains; I heard violent screams issue from his house, and soon afterwards saw a half cast native Girl running from the House toward the Road, at the same time I saw a person in a dark coloured coat and a white night cap at the corner of the house by whom a shot was fired towards the Girl, who was then about thirty yards from the said Person; I rode up to the Girl, she was weeping bitterly, and said he has shot me; I examined one of her legs (I think her left leg) there were two punctures from which blood ran down to her heels, they resembled wounds inflicted by small shots. *[inserted: She complained after I had examined her leg that she was much hurt on the hinder and lower part of her let side, to which she frequently applied her Hand, whilst I spoke with her] She complained after I had examined her leg that she was most hurt on the hinder and lower part of her left side, to which she frequently applied her hand, whilst I spoke with her. Mr William Brumby and Mr James Brumby junior were with me. I rode up to the door of the House,
Doctor Mountgarrett was standing in the Porch, he wore a dark coloured coat and a white night cap, he had something under the upper part of his left arm over which a handkerchief was loosely thrown, and which projected a few inches in front of his Body, and five or six inches behind his Body; I believed it was a Pistol, he came outside of the Porch. I thought he was intoxicated; I told him I was going to leave the neighbourhood and had called to bid him farewell, he said goodnight young gentleman two or three times, Mr William Brumby came up at the moment, and the Doctor returned into his House. I returned to the girl that had been shot, who was coming towards the House, she was still crying weeping bitterly, I looked back and saw Dr Mountgarrett at the corner of his House he came toward me I said “you have shot the girl Doctor, you ought to know better”, he desired that I would not interfere between him and his servant; and requested that I would leave his Farm; the handkerchief and it’s contents was still under his Arm. The two Mr Brumby’s and I rode away. I am not certain but I think the girl was standing about twenty yards from the Doctor when we rode away, she did not say anything to us. I did not examine the girl’s side.
James Thornloe
Sworn before me at Launceston this fifth day of August 1825
PM Hargrave JP
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______
The information of Dalrymple Briggs who being sworn saith I live with Dr Mountgarrett with whom I now reside on the Lake River as long as I can recollect I am above twelve years of age. I am a servant to Dr Mountgarrett.
I recollect that upon a Saturday about three weeks ago I saw two of Mr Brumby’s sons and a Mr Thornloe riding on the road near Dr Mountgarrett’s house. I at the same time saw an opossum upon a tree close to the House, I ran to my Master and told him of it, I went away to another tree about twenty yards from the otherformer tree, my Master fired at the tree upon which I had told him there was an opossum, five of the shot struck my right leg and foot my leg did not bleed, the shot only just went through the skin they did not hurt me much. I did not cry. I went into my Masters House neither Mr Thornloe nor either of the Mr Brumby’s spoke to me before I went into my Master’s House. Mr Thornloe did not examine my leg I did not complain of my side being hurt I never told Mr William Brumby that my Master had shot me after I went into the house the two Brumby’s and Mr Thornloe galloped up to the door.
Mr William Brumby and Mr Thornloe told my Master who was at the door that they were come to take a glass of grog with him my Master said that he would not let them into the House at that time of the night, the clock had just struck eight, Mr William Brumby then said he would double my Master up and throw him into the river. Mr Thornloe and Mr William Brumby both got off their Horses they both appeared tipsey they both called my Master all they could lay their tongues to they called him audacious names. Mr William Brumby took up a stick and threatened to strike my Master the younger Mr Brumby did not get off his horse or say anything, my Master ordered them off the premises three or four times they said they had as much right on the farm as he had, my Master replied if they did not go away he would get his Brother and his men and start them out of that. Mr Thornloe and Mr William Brumby got upon their horses and with the younger Mr Brumby galloped away. They made a great noise as they rode along the road. I am lame of my left side the lameness was occasioned by a fall more than a year ago, my Master was sitting on a sofa in the house reading when I told him there was an opposum on the tree there was no noise or screaming in the house at the time. No person has ever told me what I was to say regarding this affair I never said that I would go to Mr Archer’s there has not been a Pistol in my Master’s house at the Lake River since I lived there. My Master and Mistress did not quarrel on the before mentioned my Mistress did not go to the door during the altercation between my Master, Mr Thornloe and Mr Brumby’s, there was no person in the house besides my Master Mistress I and two young children. A black boy found
220 the opossum my master shot before Mr Thornloe and Mr Brumby came up to the house the moon was just rising the opossum was upon the tree a high gum tree when it was shot the opposum was near the top of the tree. The tree I was at when the shot struck me was twenty yards from this tree, my mistress took the shot out of my leg I hardly felt it.
Sworn before us at Launceston this eighth day of August 1825
** no signature or mark by Dalrymple
H Simpson JP
PA Mulgrave JP
The information of Richard Rowland Priest Esquire being sworn saith. I am colonial surgeon at Launceston. I have this morning examined the legs and side of Dalrymple Briggs there is the scar of an old wound upon the left Hip, there are no remains or vestiges of any wounds on her legs there is the mark of a very small shot on the skin on the sole of her right foot.
RR Priest; Surgeon
Sworn before us at Launceston this eight day of August 1825
H Simpson JP
PA Mulgrave JP re Jacob Mountgarrett Shooting Dalrymple Briggs
Dismissed August 8th 1825
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