Naturally Disturbed

A Critical Inquiry into Pastoralist Memory and Environmental History as Realised Through Visual Art

Susan Kneebone BSc, BFA (Hons), MFA

Exegesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy by Major Studio Project

2010

South Australian School of Art

Department of Art, Architecture and Design

University of South Australia

Principal Supervisor: Associate Professor John Barbour

Co-supervisor: Professor Ian North

Author’s Declaration

I certify that except where due acknowledgement has been made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any other academic award; the content of the thesis is the result of work which has been carried out since the official commencement date of the approved research program; and any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third party is acknowledged.

Susan Kneebone

Acknowledgements

This project could not have come to fruition without the support of various individuals and organisations.

I am grateful for the assistance provided by the South Australia Museum, in particular the contribution to the exhibition by Dr Philip Jones and the help of David Kerr, David Stemmer and Maya Penck. I would like to give thanks to Mike Turner and members of the South Australia Museum Aboriginal Advisory Group. Thank you to Andrew Starkey and members from the Kokotha Mula Nations Land Council for their interest, consent, and advice with respect to the display of Aboriginal material culture from the Gawler Ranges. I am grateful to Sandy Morris of Yardea Station for sharing his hospitality and historical knowledge of the station.

A big thank you to Sandy Elverd, Emma Carter, Gavin Malone, Con Bilney, Lexie Monserrat, Professor Kay Lawrence AM, Professor Roger Thomas, Tom Gara, Michael Maeorg, Molly Eatts, John Starkey, Gunther Myer, Dr Gwen Mayo, Alison Hay and Robin Hosking for their help. Also special thanks to Dr Sonia Donnellan, Dr Andrew Dearman, Dr Ruth Fazakerley and all my postgraduate colleagues and friends.

Sincere gratitude goes to my supervisors Associate Professor Dr John Barbour and Adjunct Professor Ian North for their encouragement, assistance and guidance, and to the University of South Australia for scholarship assistance. Thank you to Mary Knights and Keith Giles of the SASA Gallery for their support with the exhibition.

I must also thank my family and forebears whose links to this historical past have made for an interesting and enriching journey. Finally I would like to give special thanks to Barry Patton whose moral support, help with navigating the archives and editing assistance has helped me through this process.

Warning to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People

This exegesis may contain the names and images of Wirangu, Kokotha, Banggarla, Nauo and Mirning people now deceased.

Contents Acknowledgements ...... 2 List of Figures...... 7 Project Abstract ...... 9 Chapter 1 Introduction...... 11 Background ...... 12 Aims and Objectives...... 13 Locus of Research ...... 14 Precis of Chapters ...... 18

Chapter 2 Methodology ...... 21 Bricolage and Photomontage ...... 22 Material Recollections ...... 25 The Responsive Imagination ...... 26 Project Outcomes ...... 28

Chapter 3 Wounded Landscapes and Malignant Memories ...... 29 Pioneer Myth ...... 31 White Amnesia...... 35 The Nature of Culture ...... 38 The Eco-critical Eye ...... 42

Chapter 4 Environmental Art...... 45 Memory and Loss Through a Changed Landscape...... 48 The Anthropocentric Imagination...... 55 Environmental Art Projects...... 58 Cinema and Theatre...... 62 Strangers in the Landscape...... 63

Chapter 5 Land at the Margins: Yardea Station and the Gawler Ranges...... 65 Pastoral Settlement ...... 66 Disruption and Dispossession ...... 71 Yardea Station and the Gawler Ranges in 2009...... 81

Chapter 6 Exhuming the Past - Inland Memories ...... 84 Prosthetic memories...... 84 Feral Nature ...... 88 Conserving Loss...... 92 “Dusky Visitors” ...... 94

Chapter 7 Field Trips ...... 100 Field Trip 1 – Scientific Expedition Group ...... 100 A Visit to Yardea Station ...... 105 Wudinna Agricultural Show ...... 107 Field trip 2 – Pioneer Villages...... 109 On Reflection ...... 120

Chapter 8 Creative outcomes ...... 122 Aboriginal Cultures Collection, South Australia Museum ...... 123 Studio Research 2007 to 2009 ...... 125

Chapter 9 Conclusion ...... 152

Bibliography...... 155 List of Appendices...... 164 Letters of Approval Department of Premier and Cabinet, Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation Division South Australia Museum Aboriginal Advisory Group

Kokotha Mula Nations Land Council Management Committee University of South Australia Ethics Approval State Library of South Australia

Maps “Map of a portion of South Australia north west of Adelaide. Explored by a party under Stephen Hack Esq 1857”. Signed by W.G. Harris, surveyor to expedition. Mortlock Library, S.A. (detail). "Part of South Australia Shewing the Recent Discoveries." Adelaide: Surveyor General's Office, 1859. Mortlock Library, S.A. (detail).

List of Figures Figure 1: Location of Yardea Station north of the Gawler Ranges National Park ______16 Figure 2: Families and workers at Yardea Station, early 1900s______16 Figure 3: Drawing by Thomas Davenport Picton Warlow ______17 Figure 4: Marijan Bekic, Australian Farmer ______32 Figure 5: Charles Water, Our Artist, 1873 ______46 Figure 6: Antony Hamilton, Hung white fox and shadow, 1999 ______49 Figure 7: Kay Lawrence, Water is everything, 2008, SASA Gallery ______50 Figure 8: Julie Gough, The Ranger, 2007, SASA Gallery ______52 Figure 9: Julie Gough, The Ranger, 2007, SASA Gallery ______52 Figure 10: Nici Cumpston, Ringbarked, 2008 ______53 Figure 11: Nici Cumpston, Cultural Landscape, 2008______54 Figure 12: Marian Drew, Possum and Five Birds, 2008 ______55 Figure 13: Shaun Gladwell, One from the red heart, 2007______56 Figure 14: Pascal Bernier, Hunting Accident, 2000 ______57 Figure 15: Yardea pastoral leaseholders James Grey Moseley and Arthur Bailey______65 Figure 16: Dingo Fence, Gawler Ranges______70 Figure 17: Yardea Dam______70 Figure 18: Ruin of old gaol behind Yardea police station built in 1883 ______73 Figure 19: Telegram to the Protector of Aborigines______75 Figure 20: Telegram to the Protector of Aborigines ______75 Figure 21: Edward Russell. Native shepherd, Fowlers Bay, S.A. 1870 ______76 Figure 22: Edward Russell. Government House, Ungutibee, Fowlers Bay, So. Australia, 1873______76 Figure 23: Workers at Yardea Telegraph Station circa 1901 ______77 Figure 24: Whipstick Billy and his camel ______78 Figure 25: Clearing the land to make way for Kooniba mission (date unknown) ______80 Figure 26: Photograph of Aboriginal fringe camp near Kooniba Mission, c.1910______80 Figure 27: Newborn lamb at a roadside paddock fence. Gawler Ranges, 2008 ______81 Figure 28: Bailey Family and friends, Yardea Station______86 Figure 29: Camel train passing through Yardea______87 Figure 30: Sketch of dingo by Leslie Bebbington in Winifred Bailey’s sketch book, 1913 ______89 Figure 31: Bert Bailey (1901-1911) and friend, Yardea Station early 1900s ______90 Figure 32: Ethel and Samuel White at brush turkey nest in Gawler Ranges, 1913 ______92 Figure 33: Night Parrots from the Gawler Ranges______93 Figure 34: Shearers at Yardea Station, early 1900s ______95 Figure 35: Bicycle Lizard, SEG tent, Gawler Ranges, 2007 ______102 Figure 36: Greater Long-eared Bat______103 Figure 37: Yardea homestead with Bailey Family ______105 Figure 38: Remnant equipment from post office and telegraph office at Yardea Station ______106 Figure 39: Image of ice plant growing behind Yardea Station shearing sheds ______106

Figure 40: 1873 steam pump from Yardea Station, Koppio Smithy museum______110 Figure 41: Samples of barbed wire bush grown for fences ______112 Figure 42: Catching a Calf after breaking away when yarding Cattle at Paney Station ______111 Figure 43: Pencil drawing signed Leslie Bebbington, 1910, Paney, Gawler Ranges ______112 Figure 44: Aboriginal artefacts in school room, Koppio Smithy Museum ______113 Figure 45: James Grey Moseley ______113 Figure 46: NAIDOC march, Ceduna, 2008 ______114 Figure 47: NAIDOC march float, Ceduna, 2008 ______115 Figure 48: Equipment in Maralinga Room, Old Schoolhouse National Trust Museum, Ceduna ______116 Figure 49: Sign at Ceduna explaining the myth of Gulliver’s Travels______119 Figure 50: Photograph of King Poojeri and boomerang ______118 Figure 51: Travelling Hawker visiting Yardea, early 1900s ______119 Figure 52: Aboriginal artefacts from South Australia Museum ______124 Figure 53: A theatre of flying insects, 2007 ______127 Figure 54: A delicate menace, 2007 ______128 Figure 55: The coexistence of comfort and threat, 2008 ______129 Figure 56: A cautionary tale of overconfidence, 2007 ______130 Figure 57: Bounty, goat ears, 2008 ______131 Figure 58: Goat Gun, 2008 ______131 Figure 59: Stepping stones, 2008. Untitled, 2008 ______132 Figure 60: Skin Deep, 2008, Palmer Sculpture Biennial, 2008 ______133 Figure 61: Skin Deep, 2008, Liverpool St Gallery, 2008 ______134 Figure 62: Angelfire, 2008 (detail) ______135 Figure 63: Angelfire (detail) ______135 Figure 64: Hearing Loss, 2009, Palmer______139 Figure 65: Hearing Loss, 2009, Liverpool Street Gallery______138 Figure 66: Hearing Loss (detail) ______138 Figure 67: Small rock holes near Mt Ive Station, Gawler Ranges, 2008 ______140 Figure 68: I never reached water, 2009 ______141 Figure 69: Saintly Sinners, 2009 ______143 Figure 70: The Past Remains, 2009 ______144 Figure 71: The Past Remains, 2009 (detail) ______144 Figure 72: For Better or For Worse, 2009______145 Figure 73: Inland reverie, 2009. ______146 Figure 74: Inland reverie (detail) ______146 Figure 75: Projection loop of dingo ______149 Figure 76: Unnatural Causes, 2009 ______149 Figure 77: Unnatural causes (detail) ______149

Project Abstract

This is a creative research project with the main outcome being a body of art works for exhibition supported by an exegesis articulating the theoretical concerns and critical context for the ideas developed in the studio research.

The main proposition in the development of the studio research was to explore how contemporary art may contribute to facilitating a broader cultural understanding of the Australian natural environment and shifts in environmental thinking arising from an investigation into the legacy of white settler culture’s attitudes and belief systems. The practical outcomes of the studio research have been developed through the processes of bricolage and photomontage to destabilise normative references by transforming historical photos, archives and found materials into other unexpected forms or images. A combination of field and archival work informed an ontological interrogation to which I responded by making white settler culture strange in order to create other ways of imagining history.

This line of inquiry was undertaken to interrogate whether current environmental approaches and interventions into the Australian natural environment are reflective of fundamental changes in environmental thinking or are simply perpetuating the mindset and habits of the settler- colonial past. To explore these wider issues at closer range, my research centres on the social and environmental impact of pastoralism in the Gawler Ranges (an area with which my family history is intimately connected) in the mid north-west of South Australia, to investigate the social and environmental legacies of settler-colonial changes of land use.

The theoretical framework takes an interdisciplinary approach investigating the topic through the lenses of Australian history, environmental philosophy, visual art, memory studies and cultural theory. The theoretical discussion has been informed by the work of Robert Foster, Amanda Nettelbeck, Rick Hosking, Christopher Healy, Bain Attwood, W. E. H. Stanner, in relation to Australian history; Ken Gelder, Jane Jacobs, Lisa Young and Ross Gibson in relation to Australian cultural theory; Val Plumwood, Deborah Bird Rose and Kate Rigby in relation to environmental thinking; and Susannah Radstone and Pierre Nora in relation to memory studies.

Australian artists who have informed my studio research include Julie Gough, Nici Cumpston, Kay Lawrence and Antony Hamilton, who explore the intersections between nature and culture, history and memory.

As a non-Indigenous descendant of white settler culture, an intrinsic part of this project was to find a way to represent Aboriginal history from the time of contact with pastoral settlement. This was addressed by working in consultation with Kokotha representatives and in collaboration with the South Australia Museum to integrate into the final exhibition Aboriginal artefacts dating back to the period of early contact in the Gawler Ranges pastoral area. These authentic objects are reminders from a time when the lives and culture of the Aboriginal custodians of the Gawler Ranges were changing dramatically as a result of the incursions of white settlement. It is anticipated the juxtaposition of these artefacts alongside my own visual art forms will allow for a critical engagement reflecting the complexities and shifts in thinking about the Australian natural and social environment since the time of white settlement.

Richard Kearney’s notion of a poetical and ethical imagination as a moral agent of social change has also helped to inform my studio research. I am proposing that a “poethical” imagination as expressed through visual art can help the artist and viewer to be open to other chains of memories and narratives linking the present with the past to see “otherwise”. Throughout my studio practice I have intuitively sought ways to use art as a cultural agent for self-knowledge, understanding, reconciliation and social change. This is not only a personal journey exploring a specific place and time in my family history, but also suggests broader cultural implications.

Through my research I suggest that art works dealing with the complex intersections of memory, history and place may help create other forms of awareness and insights to help us deal with the environmental uncertainties facing us in this moment. Naturally Disturbed aims to recast the past in its complexity by evoking the strangeness of colonial settlers inhabiting a strange land. By holding up a mirror to Yardea’s past, I reveal the layers of coexistence, conflicts and contestations inherent in what became, to use Foucault’s term, a “heterotopic” place.

Introduction

This creative and critical investigation into the shifting cultural attitudes to the Australian natural environment is timely as humanity begins to confront the enormity and urgency of the need to redress rapid environmental degradation brought about by short-sighted public planning, rampant consumer capitalism and political inequality generated by the forces of globalisation. However, there is a paradox here in that while such intervention may be both necessary and desirable, it is debatable as to whether newly “enlightened” attitudes truly reflect a fundamental shift in Western thinking about the natural environment or merely reflect a further reification of colonialist notions of conquering and taming nature.

Current environmental issues are multifarious and complex, with climate change being perceived as the most pervasive and urgent global problem that humanity faces. Australia, as the driest continent on earth and with its ancient and delicate landscape, will, according to scientific predictions, suffer greatly from the effects of climate change. As South Australia faces critical water shortages, one only has to go back to early explorer-surveyors’ journal accounts to be reminded of the precarious nature of the state’s environment. It has also been taken for granted that the “mighty Murray” would sustain urban and agricultural settlement into the indefinite future; but has the reality behind this mantra “South Australia is the driest state in the driest continent” dawned on its non-Indigenous occupants a little too late?

In an interview about his government commission into the costs of climate change, economist Professor Ross Garnaut announced “for an Australian, one of the sad things about this story is

11 that it’s a more serious problem in Australia than in any other developed country.”1 The ramifications of climate warming are particularly pertinent to Australia, which is already suffering from more than two centuries of adverse effects of land management by non-Indigenous users “with limited understanding of the fragility of the resource base.”2

We know that since European settlement, agriculture and pastoralism have been successful in providing food and fibre, however it is now recognised that this has incurred a systemic ecological imbalance which needs to be addressed. In 1994 Kevin Frawley noted that “the management of the inland environment is but one example of the mismatch between the expectations and assumptions of the post 1788 European settlers of Australia and the capabilities of the ancient land they occupied.”3 As a consequence of this unsustainable mismatch, Australia may now be facing the limits of nature as over two hundred years of colonisation deplete it of resources necessary for our survival.

Background The origins of this PhD project evolved out of my masters by research exegesis (2000) which investigated the term “exotic” in relation to eurocentric colonial attitudes to the Australian natural environment.4 The dissolution of colonial settler culture’s utopian dreams in the face of unforeseen environmental consequences has been a resonating theme in my creative practice. Since 2001 I have participated in a number of environmental art projects in regional Victoria and Queensland as a way to engage more directly with local narratives and issues in relation to the effects of introduced farming practices and urban development on the natural environment. Part of my impetus for this PhD stemmed from the observation that, although in the 1990s and into the new millennium a strong environmental movement emerged with growing public support, it has still remained politically marginalised. As a retort to the political denial of a growing number

1 Mark Colvin, "Labor Commissions Climate Change Study," PM, ABC Radio National, 30 April 2007, http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s1910460.htmhttp://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s1910460.ht ml, viewed 4/5/07 2 R. Baker, J. Davies and E. Young, "Managing Country: An Overview of the Prime Issues" in Working on Country. Contemporary Indigenous Management of Australia’s Lands and Coastal Regions, ed. R. Baker, J. Davies and E. Young (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 17 3 Kevin Frawley, "Evolving Visions: Environmental Management and Nature Conservation in Australia," in Australian Environmental History: Essays and Cases, ed. Stephen Dovers (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 55 4 Susan Kneebone, “The Exotic as a Construct of the Colonial Mind and its Contemporary Relevance”, masters exegesis, Victorian College of the Arts, 2000

12 of urgent environmental issues I created temporary, site-specific art works in outdoor urban and rural sites to engage with new and local audiences beyond the traditional boundaries of the gallery space.5 The hope was that the works would have the capability to evoke and communicate the social and political “gaps” of denial in relation to the legacy of human impact on the Australian natural environment. By the time I embarked on this research project in early 2007, this environmental denial quickly dissolved and transformed into a media-saturated concern, engaging society and politics at all levels in a global debate on the impact of climate change and the need to create more sustainable environments. Continuing with this theme of European colonisation and the environment, one of the main motivations to undertake this PhD project in South Australia was the opportunity to visit Yardea Station, a pastoral property once managed by my great-grandfather in the early 1900s. Field trips to these marginal farming lands in the north west of South Australia have fostered in me a deeper understanding of the environmental and social effects of pastoralism. The experience gathered from these field trips has been explored through the transformative tools of bricolage and montage in my studio practice. Yardea as a locus of inquiry has helped to contain the scope and focus of my research while reflecting on broader environmental issues that currently occupy the global stage.

Aims and Objectives

This research project aims to critically examine changing social attitudes towards the natural environment, and develop new understandings through visual art that are capable of representing the complexity of such shifts in thinking.

The fundamental questions addressed in this research are:

• what artistic forms and ideas may best represent the complexity of this moment as we attempt to reshape our attitudes towards the natural environment?

5 These projects included Mildura Palimpsest #4, Mildura, 2001; The Floating Land: International Site Specific Laboratory, Noosa Regional Gallery, 2001; Contemporary Sculptors Association at St Kilda Botanical Gardens, Melbourne, Vic, 2002 and 2003; Strand Ephemera, Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, Qld, 2003; Re>Growth, Redlands Art Gallery, Cleveland, Qld, 2004

• do our newly enlightened attitudes truly reflect a fundamental shift in our thinking about the natural environment or merely reflect a further reification of colonial notions of conquering and taming nature?

As Australian society struggles to overcome the “white amnesia” of its colonial past there has also been a phenomenal shift in green awareness with a collective desire to remediate, restore and arrest the damage to the climate and natural environment. I am investigating this shift by probing the past through the lenses of Australian history, environmental philosophy, memory studies and visual culture. As the environmental decisions made now are influenced by the past, it is important to investigate the history of white settler culture in Australia to engage with the legacies of loss, absence, myth, alienation, denial and forgetting that manifest today in a critically degraded environment. My aim is to unsettle and decentre the surety of colonial power by unravelling white settler misapprehensions of the Australian natural environment through the creative process of visual art. Perhaps contemporary forms of environmental art can contribute to new networks of cultural meaning to help generate a vision for the future different from the past.

Locus of Research

This project is not only a personal, cultural, historical and philosophical investigation of the environment, but focuses on narratives relating to a particular site through the experience of field work and the examination of archival material. Australian environmental historian Michael Quinn suggests that a challenge for environmental history is for “a better understanding of our experiences and adaptation to the environment at different times and places ... History that fails to recognise this complexity is an impediment to change.”6

One aspect that perhaps distinguishes and enriches my studio practice is the personal character of the research through archival investigations and fieldwork in relation to a particular site called Yardea Station once managed and part-owned by my great-grandfather, Arthur Bailey, from 1903 to 1916. Despite these genealogical links, my starting point is from a position of absence

6 Michael Quinn, "Past and Present: Managing the Western Division," in Environmental History and Policy: Still Settling Australia, ed. Stephen Dovers (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 255

14 and distance in relation to this remote pastoral property as the family stories attached to this place and era have been largely lost.

Yardea Station lies in the north-western part of the Gawler Ranges, a transition zone between the temperate coastal area of Eyre Peninsula and the arid regions of northern South Australia. The Gawler Ranges has been an area of long occupation by Aboriginal people and, more recently, nineteenth and twentieth century exploration, pastoral and agricultural use. With its remoteness and long history, this pastoral region provides a provocative location for examining the past and its ongoing implications in managing the Australian natural environment.

Yardea lies just beyond the Goyder line, which was surveyed in 1865 to delineate the rainfall catchment for growing wheat and has now become a symbolic reference to the values and belief systems of the time. Between 1874 and 1879 settlers crossed “Goyder’s line” into more arid lands. They experienced a run of favourable years affirming the old adage that “rain follows the plough”.

Yardea station

Figure 1 Location of Yardea Station north of the Gawler Ranges National Park.7

However, drought was soon to follow and in 1881 the crops failed.8 ABC radio recently ran a story on the Goyder line with the introduction “At a time we are grappling with challenges of climate change, the history of the Goyder line has many contemporary resonances. It’s a kind of parable of European settlement and limits of the land, and for farmers in South Australia, Goyder’s vision is very much a living reality.”9

Only a handful of photos remain with my family from this bygone era of Yardea Station, but the people depicted are now deceased and none have recorded their personal stories.

Figure 2 Families and workers at Yardea Station, early 1900s.

The photograph in Figure 2 has held my curiosity for many years. My felt response has been one of incongruity: women in white attire with long sleeves and skirts sitting on the dirt in the Australian bush with tennis racquets and a note on the reverse saying “Indian in the

7 Gawler Ranges National Park, Department for Environment and Heritage, http://www.environment.sa.gov.au/parks/sanpr/gawlerranges/information.html, viewed 20/1/2010 8 Charles Fahey, "Gold and Land," in Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past since 1788, ed. David Ritter and Deborah Gare (Melbourne: Thomson, 2008), p. 209 9 Tom Morton, "In the Tracks of Goyder," Hindsight, ABC Radio National, 20 May 2007, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/stories/2007/1903977.htm, viewed 22/5/07

16 background”. Another object that remains is a small sketch book once belonging to my grandmother as a child when she lived at Yardea, which contains a few drawings signed by Thomas Davenport Picton Warlow, the children’s school tutor at Yardea, and another by a station hand named Leslie Bebbington working at Yardea around the same time.

Figure 3 Drawing by Thomas Davenport Picton Warlow, c. 1913.10

With only these fragments, where do I go? As Lucy Lippard notes, “When library work precludes field work, the role of place itself is often lost.”11 With this in mind I saw the role of fieldwork as a way to regain an experiential sense of place that is missing from this archival material. French memory theorist Pierre Nora postulates that “memory, insofar as it is affective and magical, only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus.”12 Here Nora alludes to the shortcomings of memory with its highly selective nature. While some memories are nourished and given new life, there are far more that remain dormant or forgotten forever. My own ancestors remain as silent players from a distant past and it is only with the aid

10 From Winifred Kneebone’s sketch and autograph book. Booklet with Kneebone family collection. 11 Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 91 12 Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Memoire," Representations. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, no. 26, 1989, p. 8

17 of limited archival information can I creatively speculate and build upon a narrative framework to give them a social dimension.

During my candidature I travelled to Yardea Station, the Gawler Ranges and Eyre Peninsula region to gain a sense of how familial and pastoral histories have inscribed themselves onto the landscape. These familial connections from a bygone era have helped my research in terms of dealing with the larger picture of white settler belief systems and subsequent impact on the Australian environment. The challenge for me was to make sense of colonial settler society’s treatment of the Australian natural environment by exploring the history behind these images through the lenses of environmental philosophy, post-colonialism and fieldwork. This self- reflective approach draws on a particular place and time in Australian history to understand the agencies at work behind the broader environmental ramifications we are facing today.

Precis of Chapters

This exegesis has been structured over two main sections beginning with the theoretical framework from Chapters Two to Four, followed by a narrative framework from Chapters Five to Eight. Chapters Two to Four discuss the methodology and interdisciplinary concepts of environmental philosophy, memory and history that inform my creative ideas. Chapters Five to Seven are based on the narrative framework developed from my locus of research which includes local history and field trips to the Gawler Ranges area. Chapter Eight brings together my artistic outcomes that have been formed by my studio and theoretical research.

The following chapter on methodology explains how the action-research method is central to my studio research. The transformative processes of photomontage and bricolage are creative strategies used to establish a dialogue between the past and the present and to help to make explicit the expression of a “poethical” or socially responsive imagination. Through these processes I have developed metaphorical works that traverse time, memory and place to convey loss, myths and silences from a disturbed and degraded environment.

Chapter Three examines the myths and conventions behind sovereign white Australian history including a critique on the enduring myth of the pioneer in the context of Western environmental thinking. It speculates on the tensions between memory and history in recalling the past by bringing forth the notion of “white amnesia” in light of certain truths about

18 pastoralism and the dispossession of the Aborignal custodians of this land. This is followed by a discussion about the concept of ecology as a potential agent of social and moral change.

Examples of Australian artists’ projects that thematically inform or materially resonate with my studio research are discussed in Chapter Four. I am particularly drawn to artists dealing with narrative frameworks informed by history and cultural theory. I also discuss how non-Indigenous people can learn from Indigenous artists’ response to the Australian natural environment. An important part of this journey is to locate how effectively contemporary visual art can be an agent of moral and social change by inviting and probing the viewer to thinking “otherwise”.

Chapter Five presents a history of Yardea Station based on historical texts and the recorded recollections and reminiscences of white settler pioneers. It builds up a picture of the pastoralists’ intentions, achievements and failures in trying to settle this land and how in the process the changes of land use displaced Aboriginal people leading to the land being a contested place today.

Chapter Six examines archives and photographs that relate to Yardea Station and the Gawler Ranges. I examine these sparse reminders surrounding my ancestors’ past by drawing upon the theoretical concerns of memory and history as described in Chapter Three. This local investigation also provided a narrative focal point which helped to develop the ideas in my creative research practice.

Chapter Seven records my observations on two field trips to the Gawler Ranges and Eyre Peninsula regions taken in 2007 and 2008 which had an important influence on my studio research. One was a scientific fieldtrip recording the biodiversity at Scrubby Peak in the Gawler Ranges National Park and the other was a road trip taken to small pioneer museums scattered across the region. In light of this second field trip I discuss the role museums have taken on in regard to representing pioneer history. The collaboration with the South Australian Museum is discussed in relation to Aboriginal artefacts that will be selected and displayed with the consent of the Kokotha community for inclusion in my final exhibition.

Chapter Eight discusses my creative outcomes from the studio research. A final selection of the art works resulting from my research will be exhibited in conjunction with and alongside selected artefacts and archives from the South Australia Museum at the South Australian School of Art

Gallery in April 2010. This is the creative component of my PhD submission, accompanied by this exegesis.

2 Methodology

The overarching methodology employed in this practice-based research project is the qualitative action-research method. This provides a rationale for creative exploration through the innovative integration of theory and practice as research where the explicit inclusion of reflection enables this complementary practice of critical inquiry and studio practice.13 Through this circular reflection/action model of inquiry, the development of my studio research can be seen as a distillation of material and information gathered from historical images, archives, critical theory and field trips.

Australian artist Julie Gough notes: With scant evidence comes the need to broaden areas of investigation and processes, toward often unexpected outcomes. Comparative analysis, site visits, recognizing and observing parallel episodes repeated in the present offers windows into the ever receding past.14

With only a handful of ancestral photographs extant, I needed to extend into other avenues of research to find further clues to my forebears’ past. Art educator Wanda May notes how action- research also lends itself to field-based research which incorporates ethnographic methods such as journal keeping, taking photographs, making critical observations and collecting objects or artefacts along the way, all of which provide a rich source of information for practice-based research.15 The two field trips I undertook included working on a biodiversity survey in the Gawler Ranges National Park and a road trip visiting heritage museums throughout the Gawler

13 Estelle Barrett, "Introduction," in Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, ed. Barbara Bolt and Estelle Barrett (London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007) 14 Julie Gough, "The Ranger: Seeking the Hidden Figure of History," in The Ranger, ed. Mary Knights (Adelaide: South Australian School of Art Gallery, 2007), p. 7 15 Wanda T. May, "Action Research: What Is It, and What Good Is It for Art Education?," Studies in Art Education 34, no. 2 (1993), p. 118

Ranges and Eyre Peninsula region. Both trips included visits to Yardea Station to gain a sense of how familial and pastoral histories have inscribed themselves onto the landscape.

In his research on qualitative methods, Nicholas Holt comments on how the action-research model lends itself to conveying subjective responses to in-situ observations affected by history, social circumstances and culture. It enables the artist to reflect at a deeper level on their own experiences in interactions and encounters in the field.16 As an experiential form of writing, autoethnography connects the personal to the cultural by placing the self within a social context. Thus the action-research genre also informs the narrative structure of this exegesis as it shifts from an interdisciplinary terrain to one of self-inquiry through field work and the studio process. Following this framework the writing shifts between the objective and rhetorical voice of academia and the autobiographical use of the first person when describing personal reflections made during field trips, as well as critical reflections on my creative practice.

Bricolage and Photomontage

Central to my studio research was the transformative process of bricolage and photomontage which allowed for new associations to be made by tinkering with the fragmented clues and mnemonic triggers from ancestral photographs, archival material and found artefacts. These processes enabled a mythopoetic approach by creating new connections between the materials. I treated bricolage and photomontage as discrete yet parallel processes where one method intuitively informed the other.

The term bricolage has been used in the context of this project to help describe the process of bringing together disparate objects and archives in order to navigate and thread together other narrative connections between memory and history. Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) transformed the everyday through his assemblages of found objects, where the connection of memory to the everyday has the potential to evoke new social connotations. Art theorist Johnathon D. Katz notes how the epistemological and multivalent nature of assemblage has the capacity to communicate different lines of meaning to different audiences. The inherent instability of bricolage with its juxtaposition of incongruous materials may lead to assembled forms that

16 Nicholas L. Holt, "Representation, Legitimation, and Autoethnography: An Autoethnographic Writing Story," International Journal of Qualitative Methods, vol.2 no. 1 (2003), p. 2

22 challenge the narratives and conventions of history and its inculcated memories.17 Drawing on art academic Estelle Barrett’s notions on creative practice as research, the creative forms that emerge from this process can be “viewed as a vehicle for the externalisation of ideas and knowledge.”18

The hybrid notion of a bricoleur can also be reflected in my theoretical framework which takes on a complex interdisciplinary approach by exploring the intersections between different research disciplines such as Australian history, environmental philosophy and visual art. This melds in with the action-research model which enabled me to travel from the textual and theoretical to studio practice in a way that informed and inspired exploration. This engagement between theoretical and creative practice enabled me to intuitively divert found objects and materials into other meanings, or in Freudian terms, to distort the everyday familiar (heimlich) into the uncanny or strangely familiar (unheimlich).19

Through these methods of inquiry my intention was to explore the mnemonic and historical tensions inhabiting the Australian pastoral landscape. Objects and images gathered from field trips, op-shops, books, family photographs, state library and government archives were explored for their material qualities and historical connotations in relation to the memories and myths of pastoral history.

Found objects were creatively transformed or reassembled to connect them to the past while bringing this past into sharp relief with the present. Materials were chosen that had authentic connections to the land or resonated with stories as gathered through historical texts, archives, reminiscences, photographs and pioneer museums. I was searching for a strangely familiar or uncanny aesthetic that evoked the anterior world of white settlement in Australia and the complex and heterotopic nature of place in Australian pastoral landscapes.

17 Jonathon D. Katz, “‘Committing the Perfect Crime’: Sexuality, Assemblage, and the Postmodern Turn in American Art”. Art Journal, 67, no. 1 (2008), pp. 45 18 Barrett, "Introduction", p. 13 19 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 6. First published in 1899 in Minatsschrift fur Psychiatrie und Neurologic.

A photograph is only a fragment, and with the passage of time its moorings come unstuck. It drifts away into a soft abstract pastness, open to any kind of reading (or matching to other photographs).20

This quote from Susan Sontag’s renowned book On Photography resonates with how I perceived the remnant photographs from Yardea as having receded into an “abstract pastness”, an anterior world embedded in a remote landscape. To explore the temporal gap between the past and present I introduced visual incursions to create narrative disruptions whereby images lose their “moorings” to a specific time and place and drift into other realms. Sontag points out that with the advent of the camera, “the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.” She writes that the photograph, “especially those of distant landscapes and of a vanished past – are incitements to reverie”. Using Sontag’s words, my photomontages could be viewed as “attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.”21

In his catalogue essay for Alan Cruickshank’s exhibition The Arcanum Museum, Richard Grayson suggests Cruickshank’s transfigurative manipulations of colonial photographs “generate alternatives so that we may look quizzically and differently at the histories we know”.22 This search for ways to imagine history “otherwise” resonates with my own intentions and processes where my photomontages are created through the digital manipulation of cutting, pasting, cloning and erasure – processes that mirror Grayson’s polemical discussion on “change and substitution” as an ideological tool kit for social control and change. Grayson writes: “To transform and change these component parts offers not only different histories, but in doing so hypothesises different, future, outcomes: none of which are inevitable.”23

Titles for my works perform as an allegorical aid to guide the viewer into other narrative histories that resonate with the present. The use of titles as a semantic aid is discussed by cultural theorist David Green in his essay “Text, Context and Time”.

20 Susan Sontag, On Photography (Melbourne: Penguin, 1977), p. 71 21 Ibid, p. 16 22 Richard Grayson, "Museum of the Colonial Post Colonial," Arcanum Museum catalogue essay (Adelaide: Experimental Art Foundation, 1997), http://www.eaf.asn.au/cruick4.html, viewed 14/11/08 23 Ibid

The use of words, together with the techniques of photomontage, were the principal strategies whereby the single photographic image could be both physically and semantically recontextualised. In accordance with the task of the contemporary allegorist such methods set out to revitalize the mute fragment, to release it from its exclusive association with that which is past to set it to work in accordance with the needs of the present.24

Material Recollections

With each passing generation salvaged memories become more ambiguous as they are suffused by the texts of others. Those memories that do survive may materialise as part of cogent arguments in the formal texts of history designed to give continuity, meaning and significance to a sequence of events. White settler Anglo-Australian culture tends to remember the past through the collections of authentic objects and archives as found in numerous pioneer and heritage museums scattered across rural Australia. These small bush museums give a sense of identity and place to those pioneers and their descendants who have settled in these regions.

The collections in Australia’s state and national museums have had a different focus from these small regional museums. Australian cultural theorist Gaye Sculthorpe remarks on how ethnographic collections in national museums, for example, tend to represent Indigenous cultures rather than Indigenous histories. With this ethnographic focus, represented by Indigenous cultural objects, national museums have tended to ignore the social dynamics of colonial encounters, including the important contribution of labour by Aboriginal people to pastoralism and national development. Sculthorpe comments on the opportunity to draw on local histories to understand national debates and themes.25 Part of the intention behind my exhibition at the South Australian School of Art Gallery will be to explore the wider issues at closer range through the pastoral history of the Gawler Ranges.

In terms of authentic reminders from the colonial past, I have planned to integrate into the final exhibition Aboriginal artefacts of cultural significance dating back to the period of early contact in the Gawler Ranges pastoral area under investigation. This component of the exhibition will be done in consultation with representatives from the relevant Aboriginal community and be co-

24 David Green, "Critical Realism: Text, Context and Time," in Critical Realism in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula's Photography, ed. Jan Baetens and Hilde Van Gelder (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007), p. 46 25 Gaye Sculthorpe, "Exhibiting Indigenous Histories in Australian Museums," in National Museums, Negotiating Histories, ed. Daryl McIntyre and Kirsten Wehner (Canberra: National Museums of Australia, 2001), pp. 73-84

25 curated by Philip Jones, senior researcher in the area of Aboriginal material culture with the South Australian Museum and author of Ochre and Rust, which illuminates the history behind artefacts collected from colonial encounters between European and Aboriginal people.26

Specimens from the museum’s natural history collection, such as birds procured from the Gawler Ranges, are also intended to be included as part of this material recollection. I anticipate that the juxtaposition of these artefacts alongside my own visual art works will allow for critical engagement by viewers on the complexities and shifts in thinking about the Australian natural and social environment that have occurred since the time of British colonisation. Indeed, I view this exhibition of art works as an important conciliatory gesture in the recognition of the Aboriginal communities as original custodians of this country. With this intention in mind and in accordance with university ethics protocol, I have sought to consult and gain written consent from the relevant Aboriginal communities for the display of Aboriginal material culture from the Gawler Ranges at the University of South Australia.

With respect to Aboriginal cultural heritage, this project seeks to: • meet any customary obligations and restrictions in relation to display of cultural artefacts. • ensure that the appropriate Aboriginal people and communities connected with the cultural artefacts are attributed and acknowledged. • receive written consent from the appropriate custodians approving the display of Aboriginal cultural artefacts from the Gawler Ranges.

I envisage that this component of the exhibition will raise a broader recognition of Aboriginal material culture and cultural heritage in the Gawler Ranges. I hope my research outcomes (publication and exhibition) will contribute to a better understanding of Aboriginal history and culture before and after European settlement of the area and of the effects of pastoralism on Aboriginal lives and culture.

The Responsive Imagination

Although my PhD topic is perhaps polemical, I wanted to engage the viewer primarily through the poetics of imagination. Philosopher Richard Kearney’s study on the genealogy and philosophy of imagination provides an interesting critique on the different kinds of imagination that have manifested in Western thought and speculates on possible forms of imagination that

26 Philip Jones, Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2007)

26 may manifest in the future.27 Drawing on Kearney, I suggest my creative practice subscribes to his theory of a poetico-ethical imagination, or as I prefer, “poethical” imagination. He describes this as an empathic imagination that allows for difference and dialogue in response to the ethical demand of the other in order “to imagine otherwise.” Kearney proposes that a poethical imagination is one that fosters difference, plurality and otherness. In line with my own inquiry into history and memory, Kearney describes this imagination as fundamentally an historical imagination, which “seeks to transfigure the postmodern present by refiguring lost narratives and prefiguring future ones.”28

It is an imagination that resists the tradition of the master narrative of modernity and progress being reimposed onto the present to create a totalising historical experience. Kearney speculates that the poethical imagination has the capacity to overcome the binaries of modernism and to explode post-modernism’s fetish of a self-imploding apocalyptic “timeless present”. It is fundamentally an historical narrative that is committed to the reinterpretation of our cultural memory by recalling the forgotten or silenced narratives of history. A poethical imagination avoids nostalgic and sentimental recursions into the past by helping the Western culture to see in other ways, to become otherwise.

Kearney describes Jacques Derrida’s post-modern notion of a parodic imagination as a state of perpetual mimicry, an endless play where “the opposition between imagination and reality dissolves into the textual play of undecidability from which nothing escapes.”29 Kearney searches for a way to get beyond this speculative “death of the imagination” by introducing a poethical dimension into imagination. Drawing on Kearney’s discussions of a poethical imagination in light of Derrida’s apocalyptic endgame of endless parody, I found myself using parody to appropriate and represent the past in a dark and irreverent way to reveal a complex entanglement of subtexts masked by history.

This inquiry into Yardea Station can be seen as an example of a localised recollection of the past. By situating myself between the past and the present through the combined engagement of

27 See Richard Kearney, In Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-Modern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) 28 Kearney, In Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-Modern, p. 393 29 Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture, p. 290

27 archival material and field trips, I am hoping to reach a more nuanced understanding of the cultural mirage that lies behind the history of white settler culture and its unsettling relationship with the land. Australian writer and cultural theorist Ross Gibson notes how the interaction of self with landscape enables one to undergo alteration through the enfolding of self and place to become “otherwise”. When a place challenges you not only to remember but also to speculate across its absences even as you are informed by your received knowledge, then you are undergoing alteration. You alter a landscape by offering interpretations about it, but you also undergo alteration because you encounter the qualms and quandaries that the scene presents and you are forced to try out new propositions that might settle these qualms and proffer a sense of integrity in the scene.30

Project Outcomes

The outcomes of the studio practice are a significant body of artworks comprising digital images and mixed media (installation and sculpture) works presented in an exhibition supported by a 40,000-word exegesis.

The final exhibition for examination will be held at the South Australia School of Art Gallery, University of South Australia from 6 April to 7 May 2010. A catalogue essay will be published with the inclusion of an essay by the artist, together with an essay by Philip Jones.

30 Ross Gibson, "Remembering a Future for an Australian Landscape," in Figuring Landscapes: Artists’ Moving Image From Australia and the UK, eds. Catherine Elwes, Steven Ball and Eu Jin Chua (London: Catherine Elwes, International Centre for Fine Art Research and Camberwell College of the Arts, University of the Arts London, 2008), pp. 62-3

Wounded Landscapes and Malignant Memories

Environmental history may be able to tell us how humanity has changed the land, but it has become evident that the underlying causes associated with “wounded” landscapes cannot be solved with science and technology alone. Since the end of the twentieth century there has emerged the interdisciplinary discourse of green cultural studies which is indicative of a growing desire to know something more about the nature of culture and environmental thinking. I am searching for my own creative insights into the complex and often adverse relationship between white settler culture and the natural environment by exploring the intersections between Australian history, environmental philosophy, memory studies and visual culture.

In occupying Australia, British settlers not only colonised and dispossessed its inhabitants, but could not yet appreciate the land’s ecology through a holistic concept of nature.31 However, Australian cultural theorist Tom Griffiths has remarked on how the concepts of ecology and empire forged a partnership of great power by radically changing human and natural history.32 It was not just British settlers who were fundamental to imperial expansion but their reliance on European animals and plants to survive in an unfamiliar and alien terrain. From the time of their arrival, colonial settlers let their animals loose to breed and trample the delicate topsoil while native wildlife including seals and kangaroos were being slaughtered for their skins in huge numbers as part of Australia’s first export trade.33

31 Vandana Shiva, cited in Lori Green and Dale Jamieson, Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 35 32 Tom Griffiths, "Ecology and Empire: Towards an Australian History of the World", Australian Humanities Review, no. 7 (1997), unpaginated, http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-August- 1997/griffiths3.html, viewed 10/8/09 33 By 1824 Kangaroo Island was at its peak in skin trade, but the boom had long passed in Bass Strait where seal colonies had been devastated. Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island, Revised edition (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2008), p. 24

The early European settlement of Australia also coincided with the beginning of the industrial revolution and textile industry in Britain which created a world market for wool. Large capital investments enabled rapid development and expansion of the pastoral industry across Australia. A group of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) scientists have noted how the development of this Australian primary industry has been “characterized by adaptation to the harsh, unpredictable climate, and infertile, well-weathered soils prone to salinity.”34 Within two hundred years, seventy percent of the Australian native ecologies had 35 been displaced by the establishment of a pastoral system of rangelands.

This pastoral expansion had dramatic and negative environmental effects upon much of Australia’s ancient and delicate ecology and led to the dispossession of Aboriginal people, with sheep being described by historian Stuart McIntyre as the “shock troops of land seizure”.36 The renowned Australian anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner pointed to pastoralism as having a devastating effect on Aboriginal culture in terms of usurping Aboriginal people’s environment: The great wrecker had been the pastoral industry … pastoralism easily wins and must wear the laurels both for the number of tribes dispossessed and dispersed and the expanse of territory over which this happened. The industry was still expanding into the 1890s and was carrying the chain of like causes and like effects out into the dry zones of the west and centre and into the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys.37

More than two centuries of damage to indigenous ecological systems has promoted massive and sudden extinctions in the wake of this settler ecocide. Australian anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose points to the fact that we “can only inhabit what is for us ‘wounded space’ … much of the past can be known in the present as absence.”38 She also notes that human technological mastery over nature through rational science has caused more concern through its success than its shortcomings.39 In terms of using industrial technology and science to construct a secondary nature for our expansion and survival, humanity has become bound in a Promethean myth

34 Ryan McAllister, Nick Abel, Chris J Stokes and Iain J Gordon, "Australian Pastoralists in Time and Space: The Evolution of a Complex Adaptive System." Ecology and Society, vol.11, no. 2 (2006), p. 4, http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol11/iss2/art41/, viewed 7/09/09 35 Ibid, p. 1 36 Stuart MacIntyre, A Concise History of Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 130 37 W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), p. 197 38 Deborah Bird Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2004), p. 36 39 Ibid, p. 182

30 where the world is depending on science to get us out of the trouble it got us into in the first place.

Pioneer Myth

Despite facing adversity, how did white settler culture maintain its privileged sense of power over nature? The myth of the pioneer taming a harsh and difficult land became so entrenched over the course of the twentieth century that its cultural meme still lingers in popular Australian history.40 A prime example of the pioneer myth still being perpetuated was the recent unveiling of a giant eight-metre-high sculpture as a homage to the Australian farmer at Wudinna, an agricultural town on the Eyre Highway just south of the Gawler Ranges bordering on Goyder’s line. A committee member described the monumental art work as “reflecting the community spirit, the hard times, the good times, acknowledging our pioneers and also embracing the future … So it's there to represent everyone in the community and Australian farmers.”41

40 This was reinforced during the 1970s when there was a strong revival in viewing Australian history through anthologies and pictorial histories to nurture our growing sense of self-importance in the world. These books on popular history took us through a chronological tour of white discovery, industrial progress and cultural growth - for example from ‘The Discovery of Australia’, to ‘The First settlement’ to ‘Birth of a Nation’ and finally ‘Coming of Age’ (post World War II). Contents refer to Thea Rienits and Rex Rienits, A Pictorial History of Australia (London: Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1969) 41 “Wudinna to get 'big farmer' statue”, ABC Online News, 17 April 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/17/2545607.htm, viewed 23/8/09

Figure 4. Marijan Bekic, Australian Farmer, 2009, granite, 8 metres high.42

The term “pioneers” acquired its association with the land in the 1890s and early twentieth century when Australia’s newly formed Federation of states created a proud sense of nationalism out of the achievements of the recent past such as agriculture and pastoralism.43 Australian cultural theorist Lisa Young described the pioneer legend as “the fruit of a populist vision of national history which celebrates white rural settlement as its central theme.”44 The legend was developed through paintings, poems, songs, novels and history books and still lives today as embodied in the Australian Farmer (2009) at Wudinna and in other iconic representations across Australia such as the Stockman’s Hall of Fame (1988) in Longreach, Queensland, and the Giant Merino Sheep (2003) in Goulburn, New South Wales.

Social geographer Nicholas Gill remarks on how the strength of outback mythology provides a “blueprint to what Australian society, landscapes and history ought to be.”45 One only has to take a step back from these monumental tributes to find that the grand narrative of pioneer history is not simply a triumphant story of the conquest of nature, but also ignores an adverse series of environmental failures and conflicts that have left their legacy stretching into the present. The pioneer legend has also contributed to the longstanding myth of hero-victim and settler innocence which stresses the “struggle, courage and survival, amidst pain, tragedy and loss.”46 The sense of dislocation that confounded the settlers as they pinned their hopes on an adverse environment and uncertain future has been described by Australian writer and cultural theorist Ross Gibson as a “purgatorial state” – one of permanent exile where the colonisers’ experience in a strange land became one of constant disillusionment as the links to their embodied past became irretrievable.47

42 Image from Wudinna Hotel/Motel website, www.wudinnahotelmotel.com.au/local.html,viewed 1/11/09 43 Anne Curthoys, "Constructing National Histories" in Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, ed. Bain Attwood and S. G. Foster (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), pp. 185-200 44 Linda Young, "Villages That Never Were: The Museum Village as Heritage Genre," International Journal of Heritage Studies, v 12 no.4 (2006), p. 321 45 Nicholas Gill, "Transcending Nostalgia: Pastoralist Memory and Staking a Claim in the Land", in Dislocating the Frontier: Essaying the Mystique of the Outback, ed. Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2005), unpaginated, http://epress.anu.edu.au/dtf/html/frames.php?page=&chapters=s, viewed 15/5/2009 46 Curthoys, "Constructing National Histories," p. 187 47 Ross Gibson cited in Cameron Richards, "The Australian Paradox(es) Revisited," Journal of Australian Studies, no. 63 (1999), p. 178

Australian history needed the pioneer myth as it provided a foundation to counter some awkward historical truths by obscuring the dispossession of Indigenous peoples almost entirely. While the remaining signs of Aboriginal culture were interpreted as relics of the deep past, modern Australia’s history was to be remembered as white and nothing else. It is now recognised that one of the great errors of early settler culture was to discount Aboriginal knowledge of the land. It is only comparatively recently that a eurocentric Australia has begun to appreciate and turn to traditional knowledge of the land. Despite all the remedies that Western science and technology offer, the recent realisation of the need to cooperate with Aboriginal knowledge, such as the deliberate use of fire to regenerate growth and reduce bushfire loads, serves to highlight the lack of intimate knowledge about the land on which we reside.48

W.E.H. Stanner’s influential lecture “The Great Australian Silence” helped break this twentieth century cult of disremembering: What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned into habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale. 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.49

Stanner remarked that popular folklore “mixes truth, half-truth and untruth into hard little concretions of faith that defy dissolution by better knowledge.”50 His suggestion to deal with the “backlog of unsolved older problems” from history is to “hold up a mirror to our own record and study what is reflected.”51 This resonates with my own speculative journey as I reflect on my ancestors’ pioneering past. However, the fragments of information I have found highlight how little factual detail is known of Yardea’s early history and how new myths through conjecture and imagination serve to fill the historical lacunae left behind. In his influential book Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes remarks on how “myth prefers to work with poor, incomplete images”,52

48 Graham Moore with Jocelyn Davies, “Culture and Communication in Aboriginal Land Management in New South Wales: A Koori Perspective”, in Baker et al, Managing Country, p. 114 49 Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays, p. 193 50 Ibid, p. 193 51 Ibid, p. 211 52 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: J. Cape, 1972), p. 137. Translation of Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil, c1957.

33 which resonates with my creative research and Gill’s comment that myth gets its strength from a “lack of specificity in time and place”.53

It was not until the end of the twentieth century that a culturally reflective and transformative process started to occur when historians helped to destabilise the story of nationhood and the pioneer legend by laying bare its narrative strategies.54 As post-colonial studies flourished in the 1980s, cultural theorists and historians started to give greater emphasis to other narratives behind the colonising process, including stories of Aboriginal dispossession. From the early 1970s Australian revisionist histories started to emerge, including Henry Reynolds’ Aborigines and Settlers (1972) filled with previously unpublished anecdotes from historical texts, government archives, oral recollections and police records that reveal the unacknowledged violence of European settlement.55 This was followed a decade later with Reynolds’ highly influential book The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) which also encouraged Australians to see the darker side of frontier settlement.56 Reynolds later noted that in the late nineteenth century as colonists began to write their own history, Aborigines were eased out of the story as “frontier conflict was an embarrassment for writers who sought to highlight the peaceful nature of Australian settlement.”57 Historian Richard White’s revisionist history Inventing Australia (1981) examined the assumptions about race, nature, class and politics behind Australian identity.58 David Day’s Claiming a Continent: A new history of Australia (1996) is a provocative reinterpretation of the major themes of European settlement in Australia.59 The 1999 Boyer Lectures by historian Inga Clendinnen were published as a collection of insightful essays titled True Stories (1999). Her interpretations from history reject any simple account of Australia’s past by responding to a multiplicity of voices of different individuals’ experiences in different situations.60

53 Gill, "Transcending Nostalgia ", unpaginated 54 Paula Hamilton, "The Knife Edge: Debates about Memory and History," in Memory and History in Twentieth- Century Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 25 55 Henry Reynolds, Aborigines and Settlers: The Australian Experience 1788 to 1939 (Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1972) 56 Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1995; first published Cairns: James Cook University, 1981) 57 Henry Reynolds, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989), p. xii 58 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980 (Sydney George Allen & Unwin, 1981) 59 David Day, Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia (Sydney: Angus and Roberston, 1996) 60 Inga Clendinnen, True Stories (Sydney: ABC Books, 1999)

White Amnesia

Since the 1990s memory studies have been important in allowing for a more discursive analysis of Australian history. Memory theory in cultural studies has initiated a self-reflexive approach to the past that has helped to unsettle and challenge modern history with its dominant rhetoric of progress, nationalism and faith in the future. Post-colonial theorist Ian Baucom remarks that the “amnesiac present” of a recognisable national history conveniently occluded the problem of memory and forgetfulness.61 The notion of white amnesia became of paramount importance in contesting this recursive monologue of Australia’s national history. The “History Wars” of the 1990s, for example, was a contest between “black armband” and “white blindfold” views of history. The Bringing Them Home report (1997) brought confronting evidence through emotive first-person accounts by those from the Stolen Generations who were removed as children from their Aboriginal families.62 This rupture of national sentimentality through private memories tested society’s moral consciousness and cut across the dry and detached rhetoric of national history. Recent scholarly texts examining the contentious nature of Australian history and memory include Forgetting Aborigines (2008) by Chris Healy, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (2005) by Bain Attwood, and Fatal Collisions (2001) by Robert Foster, Rick Hosking and Amanda Nettlebeck.63 Australian post-colonial writer Paul Carter remarks that “empirical history with its emphasis on the factual and static, is wholly inadequate”, because it does not refer to narratives of place or the people.64

In Fatal Collisions, Foster et al. analyse the darker side of early settler memoirs that include adventurous descriptions of murderous encounters with Aboriginal people. They note that the genre of memoir from the 1870s tended to conflate memory, historical event and fiction, with the result that the original stories of these settlers have been transformed and played down in

61 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 54 62 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: A Guide to the Findings and Recommendations of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997) 63 Chris Healy, Forgetting Aborigines (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008); Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005); Robert Foster, Amanda Nettelbeck and Rick Hosking, Fatal Collisions: The South Australian Frontier and the Violence of Memory (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2001) 64 Paul Carter, "Spatial History," in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin and Bill Ashcroft (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 334

35 order that they be posthumously glorified in later biographical accounts.65 This manipulation of memory is reflected in Susannah Radstone’s argument that “any attempt to distort memory arguably leaves its traces in the form of interpretable ‘silences and forms of forgetting’.”66 She argues that late twentieth century memory work explores the equivocations and ambivalency that “occupies the liminal space between forgetting and transformation”,67 whereas nineteenth century memory takes the form of “perceived discontinuities between past and the future.”68

Radstone argues that out of the archival memories of modernity has transpired a new type of memory which, although related to lived experience, is closely related to dreams by emphasising its relation to “fantasy, subjectivity, invention, the present and fabrication.”69 She argues that at the heart of memory work in cultural studies “lies a belief in the relationship between remembering and transformation.”70 Memory-texts such as memoirs, photographs, films or oral histories tend to invite empathy and identification and may be vehicles for transformation of the unconscious. Their interpretation may be shaped by recourse to the poetics of metaphor, whether it is through art, poetry or music to create “the imagistic quality of unconscious production like dreams and fantasies.”71 These poetic, circular, timeless or non-linear responses help expand upon and create different viewpoints to those employed from the more detached and empirical methods of historiography.72

One could speculate that Australia had its first memory crisis the day white settlers set foot on its soil, prompted by fears that their past, in terms of being embodied in cultural memory, was irretrievably lost as they moved to the furthest edges of the empire. Settler society could not connect ontologically to the unfamiliar environment and can now be seen to have occupied a place “outside of history” – a history that had no precedence in eurocentric thought and had not yet been written. According to social theorist Ghassan Hage, the constant awareness of the undomesticable nature of the Australian outback has given Australia’s colonial culture a sense of

65 Foster et al, Fatal Collisions, p. 21 66 Susannah Radstone, ed. Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 12 67 Ibid, p. 12 68 Ibid, pp. 4-8 69 Ibid, p. 9 70 Ibid, p. 12 71 Annette Kuhn quoted in Susannah Radstone, "Reconceiving Binaries: The Limits of Memory," History Workshop Journal, no. 59 (2005), p.139 72 Ibid, pp. 138-9

36 its own fragility. He suggests that the drive to domesticate everything was an expression of anxiety in the face of an “undomesticated ‘cultural otherness’ which has marked the Australian psyche from the very beginning.”73 Australian cultural historians Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs identify this settler anxiety as “being in place and out of place at the same time.”74 They draw on Freud’s example of the uncanny, proposing that the experience of settlement and unsettlement is a combination of the heimlich and unheimlich circulating through each other. Similarly, cultural theorist Homi Bhabha postulates that every nation defines itself by simultaneously gazing inward to regard the “heimlich pleasure of the hearth” and outward to confront and repudiate the “unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other”.75

Heartsick for Country (2008) is an anthology of short stories written by Aboriginal people responding to the harm that has been inflicted on their country such as the effects of logging, grazing, species extinction, agriculture, irrigation and the destruction of significant Aboriginal sacred sites. In one of these personal stories, Palyku elder Gladys Idjirrimoonya Milroy from the Pilbara region of Western Australia and daughter Jill Milroy reflect back to white settler culture the ramifications to the country and Aboriginal people as settlers wandered out of place in another’s land. These story nomads wander about in other people’s stories, mucking them up and changing the endings: disbelieving most, stealing some, selling others. They often come too late to understand what the story is about, starting in the middle of a story but claiming it is the beginning. They may leave before the end, so they don’t have to face the consequences of broken stories. They are the perpetual travellers of the story world because they have “disremembered” their own stories, consigning them to myth, mysticism, religion, allegory, metaphor or narrative: the “not quite true” category.76

Perhaps the afflictions of wounded landscapes symbolise the blind spots affected by white settlers who enter and leave behind a wake of unresolved and forgotten memories now expressing themselves in the maligned forces of nature and the quest for reconciliation. This

73 Ghasson Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: searching for hope in a shrinking society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2003), pp. 51-2 74 Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, "Uncanny Australia," Cultural Geographies 2, no. 171 (1995), pp. 171-2 75 Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London, New York: Routledge, 1990), p.2 76 Gladys Idjirrimoonya Milroy and Jill Milroy, "Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Families Too," in Heartsick for Country, ed. Sally Morgan, Tjalaminu Mia and Blaze Kwaymullina (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2008), p. 29

37 notion meshes with Susannah Radstone’s idea that rather than the past being a subject for us to recapture, the past instead malignantly captures us in uncanny and unsuspecting ways. While the links to a familiar past had become irretrievable, memory arose unbidden and in uncanny forms – forms that demanded new modes of interpretation. Yet at the same time … in the nineteenth century, the belief (or lack of belief) in a liveable, if not utopian future became tied to a struggle with the ambivalences sited within memory.77

Towards the end of the twentieth century, cultural theorists managed to rub away at the veneer of national history to reveal the vexing and mediating role of memory. The empirical conventions of modern history can no longer keep up appearances as the slippery and equivocal nature of memory has caught up with the present and shifted the vision from a safe and scenic past to the dimly lit margins of history.

The Nature of Culture

The nature-culture debate appears to have found its way back into critical thought via green cultural studies or “ecocriticism” – an interdisciplinary discourse that has emerged since the late 1990s within literature studies, environmental philosophy and cultural theory.78 According to literary critic Laurence Coupe, ecocriticism examines nature as a critical concept by approaching it in two ways. Firstly it invokes nature to challenge the logic of industrialism which assumes nothing beyond technological progress, and secondly it challenges anthropocentric culturalism which renders other species as subordinate through language and the power of human reason. Ecocriticism challenges these assumptions of industrialism and culturalism in order to have an effect or shift on Western environmental thought about planetary degradation.79

How have Australian cultural theorists interpreted the culture/nature debate to account for two centuries of Australian settler culture’s problematic relationship with nature? Historically, this binary opposition has informed cultural practices of domination and subordination on the part of western European cultures. Since the 1990s the loosely defined realm of “nature” has once

77 Radstone, Memory and Methodology, p.5 78 Two influential books that are precedents for an interdisciplinary dialogue of nature-culture-science are by Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980) and Donna Haraway, Simian, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association, 1990) adapted from a series of essays written from 1978 to 1989 79 Lawrence Coupe, ed. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge,2000), p. 4

38 again come under critical scrutiny by cultural theorists. The pluralism of postmodernity has allowed for a way to deconstruct Cartesian dualism while still adhering to this rationalist faith. However, eco-philosopher Patrick Murphy argues that pluralism has run its course, as post- modernist debates of the twentieth century failed to dethrone anthropocentricism or provide a praxis that enables the application of ecological values in the physical world. Murphy argues that an affirmative praxis may lie in the dialogue between ecology and feminism that works toward decentring anthropocentric humanism.80

Australian eco-feminist author Val Plumwood has remarked that the roots of current systems in environmental management “lie buried in antiquity, even if their historical projects of subduing and colonising nature have come to full flower only in modernity.”81 She has argued that the current ecological crisis is based on the cultural legacy of Cartesian dualism which encourages moral distancing through reason.82 Plumwood emphasised the paradox that what is regarded as rational is in reality a highly irrational response to the world. She has noted that the failure to see ourselves as ecological beings has resulted in a fundamental denial where Western humanity has failed to appreciate the fact that the natural world sustains us, and that we depend on nature to thrive for us to survive. Plumwood saw the ecological crises as “the crisis of a ‘cultural mind’ that cannot acknowledge and adapt itself properly to its material ‘body’, the embodied and ecological support base it draws on in the long-denied counter-sphere of ‘nature’.”83

Environmental philosopher Peter Hay writes that Plumwood deals effectively with the “aura of invincibility” of binary logics by arguing that it is a product of political artefact rather than the natural order of things. According to Hay this shift in perspective helped overcome the self- enclosing tropes of dualistic thought in environmental philosophy.84

Academics have gained much insight into the nature of white settler culture from examining the inscribed historical alterity of Aboriginal people. Post-colonial theorist Leehla Gandhi notes how the Cartesian philosophy of identity is premised upon an ethically unsustainable omission of the

80 Patrick D. Murphy, "Ecofeminist Dialogics," in Ibid, p. 193 81 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 15 82 Ibid 83 Ibid 84 Peter Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 74

39 other as it violently negates subaltern cultures into material and historical alterity.85 Deborah Bird Rose argues that the focus on Aborigines as the defining other produced ideologies that helped “naturalise” the privileged status of the white settler. As native ecologies and Aboriginal knowledge continued to be ignored in favour of transforming and improving the land for sovereign gains, the hard-working pioneer who laboured on the land was promoted as the central character in Australian history. However, Australian historian John Hirst argues that white folklore of Aboriginal culture continues to be the “projected and idealistic need of white culture”.86 Hirst makes the interesting proposition that “we have been living with a re-run of the noble savage ... This is evident from what the admirers of Aboriginal life choose to focus on — in the 1960s Aborigines were deeply spiritual, in the 1970s they practised equality of the sexes, in the 1980s they were conservationist.”87 Today one could argue that the emphasis on Aboriginal cultural eco-tourism also feeds the idealistic needs of white culture.

Ecology as a concept did not enter public debate until the latter part of the twentieth century when issues of human-induced environmental damage were foregrounded through publications such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1965).88 Expansion of ecological thought in the twentieth century began with the concept of human ecology which involves the observation and measurement of human modification to the environment such as deforestation and urbanisation. With this definition, ecology becomes fundamentally the study of the environment and its interrelationships, with humanity being recognised as part of the ecosystem.89 Patrick Murphy notes that ecology is not just about the external environment that we enter and manage for its raw materials at our command, but a study of interrelationship, place and function. He argues that only by recognising the existence of the other as a self-existent entity can we begin to comprehend a “heterarchical” continuum in which all difference exists without binary opposition and hierarchical valorisation.90 Although emerging from the methods of scientific enlightenment, the biological concept of ecology has helped shift Western

85 Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998), p.39 86 John Hirst, Sense and Nonsense in Australian History (Melbourne: Black Inc Agenda, 2005), p. 67 87 Ibid 88 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) 89 Matthias Gross, "Human Geography and Ecological Sociology: The Unfolding of a Human Ecology, 1890 to 1930 - and Beyond," Social Science History, Vol. 28, no. 4 (2004), pp. 575-605 90 Murphy, "Ecofeminist Dialogics," p. 194

40 environmental thought towards overcoming the reductive binary assumptions by revealing the entirety and complexity of nature as a system rather than discrete parts. The word ecology is linked inevitably to environmentalism but has also developed in broader terms to help reinterpret economics, politics and social theory.91

In the 1980s the environmental movement brought attention to the detrimental effects of European farming practices on the Australian environment. Adelaide anthropologist Deane Fergie remarks that the myth of the pioneer legend was disrupted in the 1980s when the identification of pastoralists shifted from national heroes to “heinous destroyers” of the land through the campaigns of the environmental movement.92 At the time Eric Rolls’ anecdotal book They All Ran Wild (1969)93 had been one of the most influential case studies examining the effects of ecological imperialism such as the introduction of European animals and methods of scientific control such as poisoned bait. Land care issues and environmental ethics called for the unusual alliance of farmers and conservationists and in 1989 the Australian Conservation Foundation and National Farmers Federation joined forces to create the organisation Landcare to tackle land degradation. Coming to terms with an understanding of the factors contributing to land degradation required a sober reflection on the cost of achievements of pioneers and the idea of progress itself.94

Scientist Ryan McAllister and his CSIRO colleagues note how Australians are modifying their consumer behaviour and cultural land use to be more in tune with the limitations of their environment and accordingly have broadened their solutions to “maintaining ecosystem services and biodiversity, accommodating Aboriginal interests and climate change.”95 They argue that the “social, institutional and biophysical constraints and challenges that face pastoralists today, have been strongly shaped by the aggregate history of actions and adaptations in the past.”96 This example demonstrates how government scientists are addressing the mistakes from the

91 "Kaldor Public Arts Project Explorer: Land Art and Site-Specific Art," Art Gallery of NSW, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/current/kaldor_projects/themes/land_art_and_site-specific_art, viewed 21/12/09 92 Deane Fergie, "Australian Identity: Unsettled and Terrifying Representations," in Social Justice: Politics, Technology and Culture for a Better World, ed. Susan Magarey (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1998), p. 62. 93 Eric Rolls, They All Ran Wild (Sydney: Angus and Roberton, 1969) 94 Rosemary Clark, Gaining Ground: Landcare in Australia (Melbourne: Australia Post Philatelic Group, 1992), p. 9 95 McAllister et al, "Australian Pastoralists in Time and Space: The Evolution of a Complex Adaptive System," p. 9 96 Ibid

41 past to find answers for a more sustainable and eco-centric approach with regard to environmental thinking.

The Eco-critical Eye In his essay The Three Ecologies (2000), Felix Guattari recognises that culture and nature are now inseparable and we need to find new ways of thinking to remedy the situation through an “ecosophical” understanding. Guattari holds that the ideologies and politics of environmentalism tend to obscure the complexity of the relationship between humans and their natural environment through its maintenance of the dualistic separation of human (cultural) and nonhuman (natural) systems. In response to this, he calls for an ecosophical approach where the challenge is to interconnect the environment with social relations and human subjectivity.97 Guattari views artists as having the facility to offer more profound insights into the human condition than those in scientific and psychoanalytic professions.98

Artists have been important in bringing new points of view and ways of seeing the land and environment as cultural landscapes. The 1960s saw environmentalism and feminism emerge and inspire a new concern for social relationships to nature in reaction to the rapid direction “progress” was taking and Western society’s increasing dependence on technology for everyday life. Land and environmental art emerged alongside this new theoretical convergence, especially in America and United Kingdom with artists such as Robert Smithson, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt and Richard Long. Smithson, who is responsible for perhaps the most famous piece of land art, Spiral jetty (1970) in Great Salt Lake in Utah, provided a critical framework for the movement of land art as a response to the cultural landscape. This was a critical move away from the disconnection of modernism from social issues as represented by the formalist critic Clement Greenberg.99

Following these earth works by predominantly male artists, female artists inspired by second- wave feminist theory and politics sought to define a distinct female world apart from the conventions of patriarchy and rationalism. American feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson typified this impulse of some of the female artists of the 1970s to combine myths, dreams and spiritual rituals linked to pagan and prehistoric matriarchal genealogies that referred to nature. The aim

97 Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (New York: The Athlone Press, 2000) 98 Ibid, p. 12 99 "Kaldor Public Arts Project Explorer: Land Art and Site-Specific Art"

42 of these feminist artists was to offer an “alternative union between human and natural spheres.”100 This presages the eco-feminist debates interrogating the nature/culture divide discussed earlier in this chapter.

Australia’s introduction to land art was realised by Sydney art patron John Kaldor in 1969 when artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude went to Sydney and wrapped the rocky coastline at Little Bay in New South Wales, making it one of the first major land art projects anywhere in the world. British artist Richard Long was also invited to Australia by Kaldor in 1977. Long proceeded to make one of his famous walks engaging with a remote landscape outside Broken Hill in NSW. He also created A line in Australia – an ephemeral line of red stones in a now unknown location, recorded as a colour photograph.101

The 1980s saw environmental art start to play a critical role in engaging with concepts of the environment as an ecosystem by bringing to attention the scale of human impact through large- scale socially responsive art. For example, the German artist Joseph Beuys planted 7000 trees from 1982 to 1987 throughout the city of Kassel for Documenta 7. This social sculpture titled 7000 Oaks (1982) was a time-based ecological work to raise awareness of human relations with nature.102 In 1982 American artist Agnes Denes transformed landfill into a wheatfield in lower Manhatten to bring attention to the impact of human values, global inequalities and ecological concerns.103

From the 1970s Australian environmental art also grew out of environmental and feminist concerns. Australian performance artist Jill Orr’s work Bleeding Trees (1979) utilised the body in the landscape to articulate environmental concerns and raise feminist debates.104 In 1980 Sydney-based artist Bonita Ely produced an artist’s book Murray/Murundi exploring the river

100 Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, eds, Land and Environmental Art (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 1998) p. 34 101 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects, Art Gallery of NSW, 2 October 2009 to 14 February 2010, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/current/kaldor_projects/projects/, viewed 18/01/10 102 Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, pp. 164-5 103 Ibid, pp. 160-1 104 Jill Orr, Bleeding Trees, 1979, http://www.jillorr.com.au/bltrees.html, viewed 10/04/2007

43 landscape as a visual metaphor of the human condition in the context of oral history and mythology.105

As we exhume Australia’s ecocidal past it has become apparent that Australian history has tended to be preoccupied with the social and political actions of white settler culture while nature became subsumed, denied or othered as the picturesque backdrop. It is ironic that while the native ecology was being decimated, native flora and fauna were being rendered in paintings, documented in journals of natural history, and used as iconic emblems to represent Australia’s emerging national identity. Visual culture theorist Mimei Ito argues that the tendency to polarise nature and culture may be implicit in the mode of visual representation of nature as something exterior to ourselves and that one of the challenges to overcome this is “to build a bond between visual culture and environmental philosophy”.106 Australian cultural theorist Susan Best notes that in the case of Australia, “remembering and representation become of crucial importance in the context of profound forgetting.”107 Perhaps artists using memory and history to represent and illuminate the blindspots of social and environmental denial can also be agents for regenerating social change through the poethical and imaginary forces of art.

105 Bonita Ely, Murray/Murundi (Adelaide: Experimental Art Foundation, 1980) 106 Mimei Ito, "Seeing Animals, Speaking of Nature," Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 4 (2008), p. 132 107 Susan Best, "Your Are on Aboriginal Land: Landscape after Land Rights," in Postcolonial + Art: Where Now?, ed. Charles Green (Sydney: Artspace Visual Art Centre, 2000). Unpaginated

4 Environmental Art

Artists who explore the intersections between nature and culture, history and memory, may help to open up new spaces for the social imaginary by producing a poethical response in terms of visualising or revealing the unknown or forgotten from within the history of place and landscape. Artist Julie Gough notes that contemporary artists can play a role in stimulating questions about our preconceived notions of the past by interrogating and representing “what others can’t or won’t face and articulate.”108 Perhaps the capability of visual art to move outside the formal boundaries of text-based conventions gives it the potential to activate “chains of memory and narratives in viewers that have not been anticipated.”109 Thus one could speculate that visual art has the potential to challenge and unsettle the convictions underlying narratives about white settler history by revealing mnemonic silences and gaps through aesthetic expressions that redirect the viewer’s engagement into other modes of cultural understanding.

This chapter looks at examples of artists whose themes, materials and methods touch on the equivocal spaces between nature and culture, history and memory, Indigenous and non- Indigenous myths. How can visual art explore, evoke or reflect the history and belief systems of white settler culture to reveal its enduring effects on the environment? The capability for visual art to traverse time, space and disciplines may allow for the expansion of insights into our cultural relationship with the natural environment. Perhaps art that moves between myth,

108 Gough, "The Ranger: Seeking the Hidden Figure of History," p. 7 109 Penelope Edmonds, "Imperial Objects, Truths and Fictions: Reading Nineteenth Century Australian Colonial Objects as Historical Sources," in Rethinking Colonial Histories: New and Alternative Approaches, ed. Penelope Edmonds and Samuel Furphy, Melbourne University Conference and Seminar Series (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2006), p. 73, http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=277202120621407;res=IELHSS, viewed 19/6/09

45 memory and history to reveal subsumed narratives from within the landscape is a way to direct us into newer understandings of culture and nature in this post-industrial age.

Figure 5 Charles Water, Our Artist, 1873 110

During the colonial period artists often depicted the landscape with Picturesque renderings while ignoring any social discord or man-made “ugliness” in the landscape.111 Evidence of this colonial attitude to the environment is given by Tim Bonyhady in his book The Colonial Earth in which he interprets an 1873 etching of an artist with a tomahawk by Charles Water, a “Country Photographic Artist”, whose patrons were local landholders. Bonyhady explains how the photographer used the tomahawk to cut his way through thick undergrowth to discover and record the “romantic and picturesque” surrounds. Through analysing the narratives underlying this image, Bonyhady conveys the duplicity of colonial artists’ relationship to nature, that while in the process of reifying and revering nature, they were literally cutting it down.112

If we compare this example to John Wolseley’s recent series of art works made in response to the logging coups in Tasmania (2004), we can find that in some contexts little has changed. Paul Carter describes how Wolseley’s works could be deciphered in two ways depending on the

110 Engraving from Illustrated Australian News, 1873, reproduced in Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), p. 190 111 Michael Organ, "Landscape Art of the Illawarra Region of New South Wales, Australia 1770-1990. A Catalogue of Works," www.michaelorgan.org.au/illart1.htm, viewed 10/7/2007 112 Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, pp. 191-218

46 cultural position and intentional readings of the viewer. He notes that Wolseley’s work is about the destruction of natural resources and the loss of vital clues to give our present bearings. The irony, Carter points out, is that the forestry management did not see the conflict or tragedy of the logging, but instead saw the images as a possible “picturesque apologia for inevitable change”.113 This example underlines the difficulties for an artist seeking to bring about positive social change with new perspectives.

How can Australian artists probe or reveal such cultural contradictions in relation to the Australian natural environment as set down by European colonisation? Australian artist and curator Ian North notes how from the 1960s non-Indigenous artists began to see the negative associations between the landscape genre and imperialism and thus turned away from their “cultural and physical inheritance”.114 It was around this time that there began a revival of Aboriginal art which not only allowed Aboriginal culture to speak for itself but also to act as a visual nexus for the need of non-Indigenous people to appreciate and understand Aboriginal notions of caring for country. North touches on the possibility that Aboriginal art may foster a “trafficking between cultures (once) radically different in their histories and presumptions”.115

Aboriginal art allows the public to gain certain insights and appreciation of their culture. Traditional designs which were done on the body or in sand for ceremonial purposes and then wiped away have now been adapted to the permanency and portability of Western painting materials. However, Aboriginal story tellers have to limit themselves by avoiding revealing secret/sacred content by painting stories that are not culturally sensitive or are narratively obscured and therefore “safe” for the public to see.116

In March 2009 I was fortunate to participate in a five-day workshop organised by Better World Arts and Womadelaide as a collaborative dialogue between Anangu artists and ten non-

113 Paul Carter, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), p. 19 114 Ian North, Expanse: Aboriginalities, Spatialities and the Politics of Ecstasy: An Exhibition: Jon Cattapan, Rosalie Gascoigne, Antony Hamilton, Kathleen Petyarre, Imants Tillers (Adelaide: University of South Australia Art Museum, 1998), p.5 115 Ibid 116 Jo Plomley, "Mr Patterns: Study Guide," accompanying guide to Mr Patterns (Sydney: Film Australia, 2004)

Indigenous visual artists and musicians from across Australia.117 The focus was on aspects of three stories from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands and the wider community in the far north-west corner of South Australia: Seven sisters, Perentie lizard, and the Emu story. Anangu artists Nellie Patterson, Margaret Richards, Mulykuya Ken and Inawinytji Williamson, all from the APY Lands but now living in Adelaide and working regularly for Better World Arts, took part in the program. Bill Edwards, who has lived and worked on the APY Lands, contributed translation skills and personal knowledge to the proceedings.

Over the five days I watched the Aboriginal artists sing the land and its stories as they painted. Dreaming stories such as the Seven Sisters cover vast tracts of country, from the central desert country down to Iron Knob and as far east as the famous Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains, and then up into far North Queensland – uncanny distances pointing to geographical features far from their APY Lands. These stories are envisioned from an aerial point of view to describe the origins and spirituality of a vast land through performance, painting and song. To see the artists touch their paintings and tell their story through dance and song shows how their cultural memory is kept alive. These stories that circulate vast distances are imperative in keeping the country alive through the continuity of dynamic belief systems. How can non-Indigenous and Australian Aboriginal artists forge a dialogue through their art to find different or newer ways of understanding the full implications of our environmental history?

Memory and Loss Through a Changed Landscape

Drawing upon Ian North’s idea of cultural “trafficking” through art, I suggest that other forms of poetic engagement and understanding of the environment have emerged with contemporary Australian artists of non-Indigenous and Indigenous heritage connecting directly to cultural memories of the land. Examples of Australian artists whose works touch on the delicate intersections of Aboriginal lore, colonial myths and the materiality of the Australian natural environment include Antony Hamilton, Kay Lawrence, Julie Gough and Nici Cumpston.

117 Womadelaide helped fund Better World Arts to conduct this cultural exchange between the Anangu artists and non-Indigenous artists for five days in February and March 2009. Non-Indigenous artists were invited to respond to the Anangu stories using their own ideas and materials which were displayed alongside Anangu art works as part of the Better World Art site during the Womadelaide festival.

Figure 6 Antony Hamilton, Hung white fox and shadow, 1999, fox, fencing wire, carcass hooks. Beltana, South Australia

Antony Hamilton is a non-Indigenous artist who deals with colonial mythology and the melancholic darkness of the colonial past while also managing to incorporate Aboriginal lore into his work by “focusing particular attention on the amorphous and highly contentious zone between Indigenous and non- Indigenous ways of seeing”.118 Peter Timms describes Hamilton’s work Hung white fox and shadow (1999) as “a kind of visual poem, concise, elegant and compact … It is the metaphorical crossing of five carefully chosen elements (feral animal, fencing wire, meat hooks, spotlight and surrounding darkness) when juxtaposed and arranged brings out contrasts that animate our imagination”.119 Timms notes that although Hamilton’s concerns are universal they are specifically located through his experience of living on arid and remote land in South Australia. Through his art he is linking the personal to cultural memory which allows for these poetic connections. Hung white fox and shadow, although full of metaphysical intrigue, leaves itself open to interpretation without being prescriptive. Hamilton’s “situation” (as he prefers to call his object-based installations) lends itself to a spectral and sensorial experience rather than relying on didactic textual interpretations.120 Hamilton’s response and manipulation of found materials to create new “situations” from within the landscape resonates with the site visits and field work I undertook as part of this project to help nourish and give dimension to my own search for cultural memories.

118 Sarah Thomas, Antony Hamilton: The Mythology of Landscape (Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia, 1999), p. 10 119 Peter Timms, What's Wrong with Contemporary Art (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2004), p. 104 120 Ibid, pp. 104-6

Kay Lawrence is a non-Indigenous artist who manages a delicate and nuanced relationship to Indigenous art and people through the careful choice of materials in her work. Through her contemporary textile practice, Lawrence explores and interweaves Australian colonial and Aboriginal histories. As part of the exhibition This everything water (2008), Lawrence displayed traditional pearl shells from the South Australia Museum and those by Bardi artist Aubrey Tigan from Djaridjin and Nyigina law man Butcher Joe Nangan.121 These iridescent shells were traded between Aboriginal groups from the coast to the desert. Shell was traditionally used for an array of purposes including initiation ceremonies, rain making rituals, tribal law, medicine and love magic.122 By interweaving Indigenous traditions with the history of the Broome pearl shell industry, Lawrence has transmuted the idea and use of the pearl shell into metaphorical works that allude to the white trade of pearls and the transformation of landscape by “whiteness”. Through her art practice Lawrence opens up metaphors about whiteness and blackness in relation to the different cultural uses of the pearl shell as a material reminder from the natural environment.

Figure 7 Kay Lawrence, Water is everything, 2008, broken pearl shell. SASA Gallery, Adelaide.123

Lawrence’s floor installation Water is everything (2008) is a shimmering ellipse of broken pearl shell echoing the salt pans across Australia which is said to symbolise “the ‘dream and bitter

121 Kay Lawrence, Aubrey Tigan and Butcher Joe Nangan, This everything water, South Australia School of Art Gallery, University of South Australia, March 2008 122 Kay Lawrence, "This Everything Water," in This Everything Water, ed. Mary Knights (Adelaide: South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, 2008), p. 11 123 Image courtesy of SASA Gallery

50 reality’ of the changes made to land by the pastoral industry.”124 Diana Wood Conroy suggests Lawrence’s work unsettles the viewer by making “visible an almost invisible condition, a way of being that underpinned the unconscious assumptions of colonial settlement.”125 This exhibition played a large part in my own decision to include Aboriginal artefacts from the Gawler Ranges to create a visual dialogue in which white-settler and Aboriginal histories and stories rub against and circulate around each other through the juxtaposition of Aboriginal cultural material with my own interpretations of the past.

Brenda Croft remarks how every Indigenous person living today has a personal history replete with two centuries of colonisation: “What we reveal, unveil, uncover, like long-festering sores, are reminders of the attempts to eradicate us. By our very existence we challenge. We are not meant to be here, we were meant to vanish, to give truth to the lie of Terra Nullius”.126 Today there are a number of contemporary Aboriginal artists who address the effects of colonisation by exploring place, land and identity in terms of the legacy of white settler occupation. These artists include Judy Watson (Wannyi, Queensland), Fiona Foley (Wondunna, Queensland), Troy-Anthony Baylis (Jawoyn, Northern Territory), Julie Gough (Palawa, Tasmania) and Nici Cumpston (Barkindji, South Australia) just to name a few. I will discuss Julie Gough’s and Nici Cumpston’s work in more depth because their research into place and historical narratives connects with my own inquiry into the environmental and social legacy of white settlement.

Julie Gough’s work, stemming from her maternal Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage (Palawa), reconfigures found objects and natural materials such as wood, seaweed, shells, sponges and bark into narratives that relate back to their original environment and ancestral memories. Her investigative approach into the time-gone aims to reveal what is usually omitted or erased in the field of historical research and how these gaps “are not in fact silent after all”.127 Each of Gough’s material choices and actions is a response to the fragmentary past which she notes may reveal as much about the artist in the present as those persons under historical scrutiny.

124 Ibid. Lawrence is here quoting Ernestine Hill from The Great Australian Loneliness (Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens Ltd, 1948) 125 Diana Wood Conroy, “Cloth and Shell: revealing the luminous”, in This Everything Water, ed. Knights, p. 19 126 Brenda Croft, "Missing," in Shards, ed. Mary Knights (Adelaide: SASA Gallery, 2008), p. 8 127 Gough, "The Ranger: Seeking the Hidden Figure of History," p. 7

Figure 8 Julie Gough, The Ranger, 2007 (detail), SASA Gallery.128

Figure 9 Julie Gough, The Ranger, 2007, SASA Gallery. Left: Gallery installation. Right: detail129

Gough’s exhibition The Ranger (2007)130 is based on the story of an Aboriginal woman who lived alone on King Island during the 1830s and 1840s and built her dwelling from found clothes and furniture washed up from shipwrecks in Bass Strait. She had been sighted and documented as “The Ranger” by John Scot, a sealer living at the same time on the island. Gough seeks to investigate and uncover stories that parallel her own ancestry to find the elusive “Indigenous voice from which to draw fresh or fairer conclusions about frontier life.”131

128 Photograph by Nici Cumpston, from the exhibition The Ranger, SASA Gallery, 2007 129 Photographs by Nici Cumpston from the exhibition The Ranger, SASA Gallery, 2007 130 Julie Gough, The Ranger, SASA Gallery, University of South Australia, 12-28 September 2007 131 Gough, "The Ranger: Seeking the Hidden Figure of History," p. 7

As a volunteer helping to install this exhibition I worked with Gough to source materials, enabling me to witness her methods and actions. Gough had not prepared materials prior to this exhibition at SASA Gallery. She spent much of her time carefully arranging collected second-hand furniture, seaweed, clothes, coal, branches and text in the space so the site-specific installation came together in a way that would engage the viewer’s eye on a path of discovery. Natural materials from the shoreline and bush were incorporated into second-hand furniture to give a sensorial aesthetic that evokes a material conjunction between nature and culture. Materials were meticulously arranged while also evoking the remnants of washed-up detritus and eventual absence. Gough notes how the material reconstitution of this story through visual art practice enables a dialogue between the past and present and helps to solve the dilemma of being out of context with respect to time and place. Her practice of recuperating cultural memories from historical archives by using natural and found objects referring back to the narrative site helped to inspire and inform my own material responses to a specific place and history.

Figure 10 Nici Cumpston, Ringbarked, 2008, archival print on canvas, hand-coloured with pencil and watercolour, 75 x 205 cm132

The subtle colours of Nici Cumpston’s hand-painted photographs recall the picturesque past of Australian landscape painting, but over a century later the picturesque is now an insidious, dark and ruined landscape of her country’s ancestors. As a Barkindji woman whose heritage is

132 Image from Odette Kelada, "Nici Cumpston Attesting," Flash, no. 2 (2009), http://www.ccp.org.au/flash, viewed 30/11/2009

53 connected to the riverland, Cumpston bears witness to the haunting evidence of Aboriginal habitation as Nookamka (Lake Bonney) drains to surrender its secrets that have endured and survived environmental exploitation. Cumpston can be seen as a mediator of memories from between the colonial past and her own Aboriginal heritage, a counterclaim of survival in the face of the silent scream of the landscape and her people. Cumpston describes what she sees along the lake’s edge: As I wander along the water’s edge I think about the trees I can see, and most are either dead or only stumps remain. In the past they were used as fuel to power the paddle steamers along the Murray, but I try to imagine why people would make a decision to take every last one.

Interestingly, most of the remaining trees bear scars, depicting canoes, shields or coolamons. There are also many ring trees, which were made by tying young branches together to form a ring shape. As the tree grows the ring rises and remains a “sign” within the tree branches. The reason for doing this is varied and apart from speaking with Elders, there is very limited information available on this practice. A few trees have scars as well as rings and some trees have more than one ring. These trees are always near places of abundance, where there is a lot of food and protected shelter.133

These “signs” in the landscape are evidence of Aboriginal occupation and reflect the connection people have had with this place over thousands of years.

Figure 11 Nici Cumpston, Cultural Landscape, 2008, archival print on canvas, hand-coloured with pencil and watercolour, 75 x 205 cm (detail)134

133 Nici Cumpston, exhibition statement, The Haunted and the Bad, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 4 July - 10 August 2008. http://www.lindenarts.org/show/2008/0704/cumpston.php, viewed 10/01/10 134 Mary Knights, ed. Shards, exhibition catalogue, SASA Gallery, Adelaide, 30 September – 24 October 2008, p. 12

These Australian artists manage to combine narrative, sites and materials to apprehend our various histories and voices from within the landscape. Perhaps this mobility of stories through materials allows for unexpected outcomes and newer forms of engagement that challenge hegemonic narratives underpinning Australia’s national and environmental history.

The Anthropocentric Imagination

Patrick Murphy has raised the question of how we may render the “non-human” as a speaking subject, whether in artistic or other texts.135 This section looks at several contemporary artists dealing with animal life, to raise questions about human-animal relationships. In her pictorial homages to Australian wildlife, Marion Drew has united the idea of still life paintings in art museums with the imagery of the animals she has found killed on roads in Australia: “By imitating the historic painted forms of the 'Still Life', but replacing paint with photographic verisimilitude, and familiar European animals with Australian native species, a discord is exposed.”136 This discord, through the familiar but uncanny representation of Australian fauna in classical European contexts, harks back to Edenic attitudes that nature is there in its abundance for human use and consumption. Here the implicit revelation is that these animals have died unnecessary and unnatural deaths due to cars and other human incursions of urban expansion and technological development.

Figure 12 Marian Drew, Possum and Five Birds, 2008, archival pigment on hahnemule cotton paper, 70 cm x 90 cm137

135 Murphy, "Ecofeminist Dialogics," pp. 193-4 136 "Every Living Thing", Hill Smith Gallery, www.hillsmithgallery.com.au/gifs/artist/drew_marian, viewed 12/11/09 137 Ibid

Unlike the interior, almost claustrophobic photos of Drew, Shaun Gladwell presents an iconic Australia with an expanse of open road, emptiness and desert. Gladwell is known for his videos and images of skateboarders, an aestheticised record of urban youth culture with its sense of risk taking. In the video still (Figure 13) from Maddest Maximus, a youthful figure in black motorcycle gear and anonymous with full-face helmet gives the sense of being “out of place” in this vast and endless landscape. Richard Grayson notes how the Mad Max figure in motorcycle gear is a filmic idiom that we recognise as an outlaw from a dystopian future, but here the image speaks of a transcendent Pieta-like religious narrative, perhaps a symbolic act of redemption with the environment.138 There is something uncanny in the juxtaposition of this anonymous figure carrying the dead kangaroo at the scene of the crime. This mise-en-scene mirrors the emotive rawness of the moment just following death; it is a lamentation, an act of grief for the “unnatural” death of nature from the human-made.

Figure 13 One from the red heart. Production still from Shaun Gladwell's video Apology to Roadkill, 2007, from Maddest Maximus.139

138 Richard Grayson, "In an Other Australia: The Australian Pavilion in Venice", Contemporary Visual Art and Culture Broadsheet 38, no. 3 (2009), pp. 169-70 139 Andrew Frost, “Screen Tests”, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 November 2007, http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/screen-tests/2007/11/23/1195753288664.html, viewed 1/12/09

Two international artists who take on the topic of natural history and the anthropomorphic imagination as a form of separation from nature are American Bill Scanga and Belgian Pascal Bernier. Australian social and cultural theorist Jane Goodall reflects on the ambivalent realm between natural history and science: “The popular-professional polarizations in natural history may be strategies of denial in that they mark a declared space for the anthropomorphic imagination at an extreme distance from the scientific domain.”140

In her essay for the 1999 Australian Perspecta exhibition, Goodall describes Beatrix Potter’s work as a schizophrenic divide between the children’s characters and the author’s practice of collecting, dissecting and preserving specimens in formaldehyde. Goodall then discusses how Bill Scanga reflects this anthropomorphic thinking by displaying a series of the same species of frogs preserved in formaldehyde, however each is individualised with their own identifiable pair of boxer shorts, as an expression of genetic breeding. Goodall writes: “When any natural phenomenon is collected as a specimen, it acquires a cultural clothing and enters an environment thoroughly invested with human cultural values.”141

Figure 14 Pascal Bernier, Hunting Accident, 2000142

Pascal Bernier also takes moral responsibility for human nature by “repairing the damage” with visual metaphors. There is humour in his works, and the absurdity in the scale of the elephant with bandages is an apparent attempt to rectify the damage done by humans. Art critic Denis

140 Jane Goodall, "The Nemesis of Natural History," in Uncertain Ground: Essays between Art + Nature, ed. Martin Thomas (Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1999), p. 114 141 Ibid, p. 114 142 Denis Gielen, "Pascal Bernier's Fatal Toys," http://www.pascalbernier.com/writings.php, viewed 30/8/08

Gielen writes that Bernier's fatal toys come from a disenchanted world that has lost the innocence of its “paradise”, which is now depicted for us by Bernier as a “vast laboratory of violence.”143

These artists’ works and Goodall’s insights resonate with my experience from the Scientific Expedition Group (SEG) field trip taken to the Gawler Ranges (discussed further in Chapter Seven). In the science tent I observed the ambivalent tension between scientists’ simultaneous over-identification with and dissociation from the animals collected, put down and dissected in the interests of science.144

Environmental Art Projects

This section examines how ecological and environmental issues have developed as a curatorial theme in Australia. In Australia environmental art was an important theme in the Mildura Sculpture Triennials from 1970 to 1988, but did not generally take hold as a central theme in international curated art events until the late 1990s. In Australia ongoing regional events such as the Mildura Palimpsest (now Murray-Darling Palimpsest), Noosa’s site-specific Floating Land Project and the Palmer Environmental Sculpture Biennial have provided opportunities for artists to create work in direct response to and within the natural environment. Art works in these events are usually temporary and site-specific installations relying on documentation to extend their dialogue. Ephemeral art has the advantage of avoiding harmful environmental impact, as the works are temporary and physically non-intrusive, being quickly removed once the event is finished and so leaving the site unharmed. These events provide opportunities for artists to communicate with local people to gain an understanding about the sites within which they work. In return the audience can become acquainted in alternative ways with the environment through the new connections the art makes with its surrounds.

Liz Woods is a Queensland artist who exhibits regularly in site-specific environmental art events. Her quirky works often highlight the fact that much of the environment has been cultivated in such a way that the distinction between what is man-made and what is natural has become

143 Ibid 144 At the Scientific Expedition Group’s campsite a dedicated science tent was set up where plants and animals were identified and some animals dissected for their DNA for the South Australia Museum

58 blurred. Living and collaborating with a host farmer for the environmental art project Farming with Mary, Woods addressed a specific environmental threat in her work Utopia made me do it. The red azola weed is an introduced aquatic species whose burgeoning spread is accelerated by the fertilisers applied by farmers, who also depend on the water that is being infested by the weed. By floating loops made out of PVC piping, she created clear pools of water highlighting the striking aesthetics of the red weed.145 Wood’s site-specific environmental art works highlighting the domestication and disturbance of the natural environment resonate with my own exploration into cultural constructions of nature.

Another project placing artists in particular sites was the South Australian Country Arts Trust’s Waterworks Project (1997-99), a state-wide project in regional communities responding to water as a theme. Local issues identified were survival, conservation, ecological balance and sustainability, regeneration, degradation, education and other cultural interpretations with respect to the value and importance of water to regional communities. The aim of the documentation of this community cultural development project was to provoke further questions and debate while generating more ideas in other regional communities across Australia. With relevance to my doctoral research, one of the regional locations chosen by artists involved a consideration of water tanks in the Gawler Ranges as cultural monuments to the pioneering past.146

Artists Jo Crawford and Lisa Philip-Harbutt travelled from Adelaide to the Gawler Ranges to find these remnant tanks. The artists created temporary installations at fifteen tank sites. Some were ephemeral drawings made of water or sand and others were constructed from found objects documented at the sites. The documentation was exhibited in Adelaide and on the Eyre Peninsula which enabled the artists to promote greater awareness of the district’s heritage and also renewed interest in the region’s history and development of water conservation.147 On my field trips to the Gawler Ranges (see Chapter Seven) I saw stone dams and water tanks, all empty but evocative of the spirit of pioneering optimism.

145 Timothy Morrell, "Framing the Colour of Infestation: the work of Liz Woods," Artlink 25, no. 4 (2005), pp. 40-3 146 Catherine Murphy, Waterworks (Adelaide: South Australian Country Arts Trust, 1999), pp. 14-15 147 Ibid, p. 29

As part of the Waterworks Project, Victorian artist Cameron Robbins was involved in a project at the remote South Australian town of Marree. Robbins comments that in his experience, “artists can be very useful interventionists, or supporters of what’s going on, because of the value of creative thinking and their capacity to work and communicate with people. If you’re genuinely sympathetic, you can achieve enormous amounts with the critical, imaginative perspectives you bring from the outside.”148 It is perhaps in this community sense that artists can be agents of social change.

Another regional project gaining more significance as water supply and conservation issues have become increasingly topical is the Murray Darling Palimpsest curated by Arts Mildura. This event has been defined as “an Australian contemporary visual arts event seen as significant for its direct engagement with issues of environmental and social sustainability in the Murray Darling Basin.”149 The theme of the Murray Darling Palimpsest #7 in 2009 was “Displacement” which posed the question “what defines the space of the Murray Darling Basin?” Artists were asked to consider what happens when long-standing notions of how water defines the land start to be challenged by drought and other issues such as “agriculture, horticulture and environmental use, climate change and by the Indigenous dreams that are always present but often submerged”.150

Ian Hamilton, artist and curator of past Mildura Palimpsests, raised the overarching question “Can culture save the river and wetlands?” Hamilton suggests that with the increasing normalisation of our reliance on technology we have been wedged further away from the very natural systems that provide us with inspiration and sustenance. With this increasing separation comes the realisation that there needs to be an urgent shift toward thinking of culture itself as an agent of social change. Hamilton sees art as one form of culture with such potential, but believes it cannot achieve much on its own. With respect to the Murray River, Hamilton proposes that the river can be saved by science but science can only be effective if the economic and political culture is changed. He sees the challenge as being to bring together art and science.151

148 Ibid, p. 53 149 Arts Mildura, "Murray Darling Palimpsest," Mildura Arts Centre, http://www.mwaf.com.au/palimpsest/, viewed 10/12/08 150 Ibid 151 Ian Hamilton, "Can Culture Save the River and the Wetlands," Artlink 24 no. 1 (2004), pp. 42-44

One could also argue that the exclusion of art from dialogues between politics, science and economics is an advantage. Art and new media cultural theorist Stephen Wilson proposes that this very exclusion may be advantageous to art, leaving it free to roam away from bureaucratic entrapments that such disciplines are subjected to and instead allowing it to explore alternative lines of inquiry to expose the cultural implications of human and scientific interventions into nature. He suggests that artists dealing with deconstructivist theories may develop an approach “that examines and exposes the texts, narratives and representations underlying contemporary life.”152 Wilson also sees art as an important cultural nexus in looking at science and technology. “Science, technology, and their associated cultural contexts”, he argues, “are prime candidates for theory-based analysis because they create the mediated sign systems and contexts that shape the contemporary world. They are the tools of power and domination that rely on unexamined narratives of progress, power, representation and nature.”153

An example of art using science is in the work of Australian sound and installation artist Joan Brassil. In Randomly Only – Now and Then (1990), Brassil worked with astrophysicist Dr Brian Robinson to make samples of suspended rock cores “sing” by discharging an electrical current into the core so that their natural vibrations are emitted as sound. Brassil was particularly interested in the transference of ideas using science to create her art. However, unlike science, she saw art as away to “jump barriers”, noting that art is not limited by proof of theorems.154

Two projects that brought art, scientists, environmentalists and economists into cross- disciplinary contact were HEAT: Art and Climate Change, RMIT Gallery, 12 September to 18 October 2008 and The Ecologies Project, Monash University Museum of Art, 17 September to 22 November 2008. A symposium with the theme “Cultures of Sustainability” brought together artists and academics from a range of disciplines to accompany the RMIT exhibition. Both exhibitions included a large number of artists and although most of these works addressed the theme, some of the resultant works appeared to be retrofitted to the curatorial premise. Instead of artists’ statements or biographies, The Ecologies Project catalogue included short essays by

152 Stephen Wilson, Information Art: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (London: MIT Press, 2002), p. 27 153 Ibid 154 Harriet McKern, Somewhere between Light and Reflection (Australia: AFI, 1999), video.

Monash University academics drawn from the faculties of science, arts and economics.155 Perhaps this interdisciplinary dialogue between art, science and the humanities may herald the shift Hamilton and Wilson suggest is needed for art to be seen as an agent of positive social change.

Cinema and Theatre

Australian films and theatre have also provided a rich source of reflection and visual inspiration during my candidature. These include the theatre production The Chosen Vessel, based on Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies which was written in a genre of realism and gothic horror and published in 1902, coeval with the era of pastoralism I am investigating at Yardea Station.156 The simplicity yet power of the props emphasised the drama in a foreboding, dark and threatening way. A simple makeshift slatted wall with light streaming through served as a prop to delineate the domestic interior of a hut conveying a sense of entrapment and isolation from the threatening exterior where menacing male characters stalk in the bushland.

When the Rain Stops Falling by Andrew Bovell was another theatre production with a powerful storyline. It is set between Alice Springs in 2039, London in 1959 and the Coorong in 1988. The play shifts between the different times and places on a set designed by Adelaide-Iranian artist Hossein Valamanesh whose aesthetically restrained furniture and minimal theatre props assist the audience in a meditative reflection as this powerful story unfolds. It is a thought-provoking play, evocative and disturbing in its narrative content. From the future in 2039 the implications of the effects of climate change provide the backdrop as the legacy of hidden family truths reveal themselves through acts in “which the voices of our past echo into our future.”157

Australian films that are compelling in the narrative tensions and suspicion between white settlers and Aboriginal people include The Proposition (2005), The Tracker (2002) and One Night the Moon (2001). Two films that portray a violent and self-destructive side of the white

155 Geraldine Barlow and Kyla McFarlane, ed. The Ecologies Project (Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art, 2008) 156 Chosen Vessel theatre production by Petty Traffickers, at Theatreworks, St Kilda, Melbourne, November 2007. See Alison Croggon, "The Chosen Vessel," Theatre Notes, http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2007/11/review- chosen-vessel.html, viewed 24/3/08 157 I.G. Mykyta, “Review: When the Rain Stops Falling”, Adelaide Bank Festival of the Arts. http://www.artshub.com.au/au/default.asp?vmStr=F58AE967811682081BD7D572ED4FDB7E, viewed 3/6/08

Australian male are Lucky Country (2009) set in 1903 in the South Australian bush, and Wake in Fright (1971) set in outback mining towns of NSW during the late 1960s-early 1970s. Both films depict the duplicitous internal and physical struggle between a vulnerable and humane man as the victim and the violent and bullying forces of the other male protagonists who encounter each other in remote landscapes.

Strangers in the Landscape

As a descendant of white settlers, an inherent problem within my research was to find a way to interrogate white settlers’ relationship with the Australian environment while addressing Aboriginal occupancy. Australian art critic and cultural theorist Susan Best notes that to avoid the Aboriginal question when “landscape is the genre chosen to express identity, emplacement, or national belonging, then to ignore the central conflict over the land and its meanings is to act in bad faith.”158 A decade ago she commented there was an ongoing reluctance by white artists to engage with Aboriginality. Best draws upon the ethics of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in her argument that to represent the other is a form of “appropriative violence” and can only continue to perpetuate the other’s identity in alienating Western terms.159

In trying to reconcile this moral dilemma, Best notes how Australian artist Joan Brassil worked towards resolving this problem by positioning the white settler as a stranger in the landscape. Brassil’s early series of video installations such as Stranger in the Landscape (1983) prefigure my own intentions to make white settlers strange by turning the mirror on white settler consciousness.160 In the video work Stranger Charting (1984), Brassil uses cartographic overlays onto iconic Australian landscapes to show how “a chart, a projection, a map, a grid define space … schemes of cognition, a challenge to the Dreaming … Strangers charting strange shores …” In Kimberly Stranger Gazing (1988) she projected videos of windmills, fencing wire, water tanks and

158 Best, "You Are on Aboriginal Land: Landscape after Land Rights", unpaginated 159 Ibid. Best cites Emmanual Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), p. 124 160 Ibid. Similar to my own inquiry into family photos and archives, Brassil’s inquiry into landscape and memory was inspired by her discovery of letters her great-aunt wrote to her great-grandmother in Hobart in the early 1830s. "Joan Brassil", Australian Art Gallery, http://www.australian-art-gallery.com/index.htm?http://www.Australian- Art-Gallery.com/cgi-bin/v_artist.pl?aid=337, viewed 29/11/09

63 other pastoral incursions onto pieces of warped Perspex arranged to distort the moving images and call to mind the illusion of desire by the “strangers” to see what wasn’t there.161

161 McKern, Somewhere between Light and Reflection, video.

5 Land at the Margins: Yardea Station and the Gawler Ranges

Figure 15 Left to Right: Yardea pastoral leaseholder James Grey Moseley, Yardea station manager Arthur Bailey and an unidentified man.162

The following history of Yardea Station and the Gawler Ranges has been taken mainly from late nineteenth and early twentieth century historical texts, archives and newspaper articles. It begins with a conventional history dominated by the lineage of the white male pioneers and typifies the colonial mind-set of the time where cultivating an “uninhabited” land was in line with the British Empire’s economic, colonial and sovereign needs. However, the impact of this enterprise on the environment and Aboriginal people and its far-reaching consequences is revealed through the archives.

162 Photograph from Kneebone family collection

Pastoral Settlement

The explorer Edward John Eyre (1815-1901), the first European to visit the region, wrote a scathing account of the Gawler Ranges country after traversing the ranges in 1839 and again in 1840-41. His journal entries did not encourage pastoral settlement in what he perceived as a barren and desolate landscape: … the … most remarkable fact connected with this range, was the arid and sterile character of the country in which it was situated, as well as of the range itself, which consisted entirely of rugged barren rocks, without timber or vegetation. There was not a stream or a watercourse of any kind emanating from it; we could find neither spring nor permanent fresh water, and the only supply we procured for ourselves was from the deposits left by very recent rains, and which in a few days more, would have been quite dried up. The soil was in places quite saline, and wherever water had lodged in any quantity (as in lakes of which there were several) it was quite salt.163

It was not until the late 1850s that the South Australian Government showed any interest in the Gawler Ranges and commissioned Stephen Hack to explore the north-west interior of the state. Hack had a pecuniary interest in reporting the finding of good pasture as he was promised double his £300 salary “should you succeed in opening up available country”.164 Unlike Eyre, Hack relied heavily on Aboriginal guides to find rockholes and small creeks that he could not have seen otherwise. Many place names in the Gawler Ranges are Aboriginal names recorded and mapped by Hack, including Yardea which reputedly means “place of rushes”.165 However, when his references to Aboriginal people fell off in his journal, so too did his “discoveries” of water and use of Aboriginal names. Without guides, the tougher search for water made his horses footsore and Hack curtailed the expedition. He wrote: “From what I have gathered from the natives, I feel certain of the existence of a very extensive tract of good well-watered country to the north, but I think there may be considerable difficulty in finding a route to it without the assistance of the blacks in finding the watering places.”166

163 E.J. Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, and overland from Adelaide to King George’s Sound in 1840-1 (London: T. and W. Boone, 1845; facsimile edition, Adelaide: Friends of the State Library of South Australia, 1997), Vol.2, pp. 126-127 164 O.K. Richardson, appointment and instructions to Mr S. Hack, 24 April 1857, in “Explorations of Mr. S. Hack”, SA Parliamentary Papers, 1857-8, Vol 2. No. 156 165 Geoffrey H. Manning, Manning’s Place Names of South Australia (Adelaide: Gilling Printers Pty Ltd, 1990), p. 350 166 Hack, 19 September 1857. “Explorations of Mr. S. Hack”

Close to the time Hack was exploring the western part of the Gawler Ranges, the Commissioner of Police, Major Peter Warburton (1813-1889), was exploring the area nearer Lake Gairdner. Like Eyre, Warburton’s report was discouraging, remarking that the very limited water supply had its source solely from rock holes which evaporated in the heat of summer. Hack’s favourable survey proposing that the country could support at least 225,000 sheep was countered by Warburton’s more pessimistic assessment suggesting that the small amounts of water could support only very small flocks of sheep but that “even this was doubtful, and the experiment far too hazardous for any but a man who had more sheep than he knew what to do with”.167 However, responding to Hack’s optimistic report, the Government went ahead with the experiment of “opening up” the Gawler Ranges to pastoralists. The area’s average 10-inch (250-millimetre) annual rainfall was over time considered “sufficient for all reasonable pastoral purposes, though falling short of agricultural requirements”;168 the soil itself was generally deemed naturally fertile enough for crops but for the want of rain.169 A third of the ranges country, however, was said to be “quite useless” for either growing or grazing.170

It was a hesitant start, with the first lease taken up at Yardea by Dr Browne in 1862 but rescinded after an independent report by a Mr J Bonnin in the dry year of 1863 advised against the development. Yardea was then claimed from the mid-1860s by George Main and John Acraman who took up a leasehold of 800 to 1000 square miles and under various managers established the station.171 An Aboriginal man named Numilty accompanied the first two station hands sent to Yardea when Main and Acraman took up the run in the 1860s. Numilty apparently acted as a guide, with his knowledge helping them find water, but whereas he was able to leave Yardea without difficulty alone and on foot, a mounted worker with poor eyesight known as Edmondson became lost and perished. “Black trackers” drafted in at Paney were able to follow Edmondson’s trail, despite the elapse of several weeks, until wind blew away his tracks. His remains were

167 A.C. Robinson, K.D. Casperson, P.D. Canty and C.A. Macdonald, "A Biological Survey of the Gawler Ranges, South Australia in October 1985" (Adelaide: National Parks and Wildlife Service, 1988), p. 21 168 “Through the Gawler Ranges: A much-neglected country”, The Advertiser, 20 October 1906, p. 8 169 “Through the Gawler Ranges: From Streaky Bay to Port Augusta”, The Adelaide Chronicle, 27 October 1906, p. 40 170 Thomas Partridge, 2874, “Minutes of Evidence of the Vermin-Proof Fencing Commission”, SA Parliamentary Papers, 1893, Vol.2, No.59 171 “The late Mr Main”, The Register, 7 January 1905, p. 7; N.A. Richardson, The Pioneers of the North-West of South Australia 1856 to 1914 (Adelaide: W.K. Thomas & Co/The Register Office, 1925), p. 11; “North and north-west of Port Augusta”, The Observer, 26 January 1924, p. 16

67 eventually found six months later on Koolamerrika Hill, about eight miles north-east of Yardea Station. His body was identified by the clothes and buried close to the head station at Yardea.172

From the late 1870s, under the management of Thomas Partridge, Yardea was enclosed with sheep-proof fencing, which allowed for the entire run to be turned over to the sheep without need of shepherds and therefore for the flock size to increase markedly. By the 1880s up to 80,000 sheep occupied Yardea’s 800 to 1000 square miles of which 300 square miles were never stocked and 200 used only for winter grazing.173 Two decades later these large sheep numbers would be described as “the overstocking ignorance of the old leaseholders”.174 Rabbit plagues and the large numbers of sheep provided easy pickings for dingoes. Thus dingo numbers also rose and the consequent loss of sheep increased year after year, so much so that “the proprietors realized that the country was untenable unless some means were adopted to cope with the dingo trouble.”175 By the early 1890s the original lease holders Main and Acraman abandoned Yardea due to the severe dingo problem and “preposterous rentals” in an economic depression which prohibited the expenditure on a dog proof fence.176

Drought killed off the rabbits, and Yardea’s manager Thomas Partridge also recalled that “we paid the blacks, in one season, for over 100,000 rabbit scalps, and kept men constantly employed poisoning all over the run”.177 Nonetheless, the damage had been done, with vegetation that fed sheep stripped by the rabbits: Partridge told in the 1890s how “all over Yardea … all the bluebush and saltbush has been killed by the rabbits, and most of the scrub bushes are dead”, even in areas that had “never had a hoof of sheep on it”.178

After Yardea was abandoned due to the high rents, Andrew Tennant leased the run from about 1894, but took possession for only two years and then abandoned it. In that time his stock

172 “North and north-west of Port Augusta”, The Observer, 26 January 1924, p. 16; Richardson, Pioneers of the North- West, pp. 11-2 173 “North and north-west of Port Augusta”, The Observer, 26 January 1924, p. 16; Richardson, Pioneers of the North- West, pp. 12-13; “Mr A.W. Cocks: Bush Experiences Recalled”, The Register, 27 June 1924, p.4; “The late Mr Main”, The Register, 7 January 1905, p. 7; Thomas Partridge, 6216-6218, “Minutes of Evidence of the Pastoral Lands Commission”, 1897, SA Parliamentary Papers, 1898, Vol 3, No 77 174 “Through the Gawler Ranges”, The Adelaide Chronicle, 27 October 1906, p. 40 175 “North and north-west of Port Augusta”, The Observer, 26 January 1924, p. 16 176 Richardson, Pioneers of the North-West, pp. 12-8 177 Partridge, 2841, “Minutes of Evidence of the Vermin-Proof Fencing Commission” 178 Partridge, 2831-2840, Ibid; Partridge, 6321, “Minutes of Evidence of the Pastoral Lands Commission”

68 numbers fell from 12,000 sheep to only 150 head of cattle due to drought, economic depression and vermin. The story was repeated on surrounding runs, with whole areas deserted by pastoralists to become a breeding ground for dingoes.179

The effects of rabbits then dingoes cut the amount of stock Yardea could carry by a third; other stations lost up to three-quarters of their stock or carrying capacity. To counter the dingo threat to their livelihoods, leaseholders poisoned rock holes, initially with arsenic then later with strychnine, and sought government assistance on bounties. But with extensive unoccupied crown lands nearby and with many runs abandoned, large areas were left unoccupied in which dingoes multiplied unmolested.180 In late 1903, at a time of high demand and high prices for sheep, Yardea was taken up by James Grey Moseley with his station manager, my great- grandfather Arthur Bailey, holding a one-quarter stake in the £6000 business. The Yardea lease – which by then included Paney, Yartoo and the old Pondana and Cacuppa stations – was held under the name of J.G. Moseley, but when they acquired the Thurlga lease (which also included Yarinda) around 1907, Moseley’s and Bailey’s names appeared jointly on the lease.181 The number of dingoes was still so substantial in the early 1900s to require construction of the dog fence around Yardea and neighbouring properties before the lessees “got all the dingo out”.182 The dog fence erected early in Bailey’s tenure as Yardea manager soon proved effective, reflected in the comments of a visitor: “That paddocks can thus be made secure, and that sheep can be successfully carried, is once again established on the proportion of old Yardea station, where Mr. J.G. Moseley’s lambing percentage was as good this last season as was ever the case in the days of the old regime.”183

179 E.L. Batchelor, “With the Pastoral Commission”, The Advertiser, 22 April 1898, p. 6; “Minutes of Evidence of the Vermin Proof Fencing Commission”, pp. 79-88 passim. 180 Batchelor, “With the Pastoral Commission”, The Advertiser, 22 April, 1898, p. 6. See also Partridge, 6303, “Minutes of Evidence of the Pastoral Lands Commission”. Hunters were paid a 20-shilling (£1) bounty per dingo scalp (10 shillings for half-breed dingoes) 181 Richardson, Pioneers of the North-West, pp. 14-18; “J.G. Moseley and Arthur Bailey, Partnership Agreement”, December 1903, copy held in Kneebone family papers; William Briggs Sells, 5476-5496, and Partridge, 6209, “Minutes of Evidence of the Pastoral Lands Commission”; maps of pastoral leases 860, 1019, 1225 and 1239, pastoral plan 7, 47/32 (1207-005) and 46/19 (1207-008), Department of Lands records, SA Lands Services Group. Arthur Bailey was also listed as manager of Yardea and leaseholder of Thurlga in the 1909 SA Legislative Council electoral roll, Northern District, subdivision of Flinders, Yardea polling place, State Library SA 182 “North and north-west of Port Augusta”, The Observer, 26 January 1924, p. 16; P.C. Fitzgerald, “Notes on exploration and farming in Gawler Ranges”, unpublished notes and reminiscences, State Library of South Australia 183 “Through the Gawler Ranges: A much-neglected country”, The Advertiser, 20 October 1906, p. 8

Figure 16 Dingo Fence, Gawler Ranges184

In 1916 Moseley sold the Yardea lease to A.J. and P.A. McBride with about 40,000 sheep. The flock size around 1916 was the largest in Moseley’s and Bailey’s time, but they seem to have sold the stock cheaply, perhaps because of the 1914-15 drought in which they lost 10,000 head.185 The sale price of £72,000 or £78,000, up from the £6000 Moseley and Bailey paid for the lease, reflects Yardea’s expanded size and much improved viability because of the dingo fence and better dams and wells built under Bailey’s management.

Figure 17 Left: Yardea Dam wall overflowing, 1905.186 Right: Yardea Dam, empty, 2007187

184 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2007. Taken at Scrubby Peak on Scientific Expedition Group field trip (see Chapter Seven). Scrubby Peak was part of Yardea pastoral lease at the time of J.G. Moseley’s and Arthur Bailey’s tenure 185 Winifred Kneebone, letter, 8 October 1937, in Kneebone family papers 186 Photograph by W.R. Evans, State Library of South Australia, digital collection. Catalogue ref: B54221

Disruption and Dispossession

Changes of land use with the introduction of pastoralism in the mid to late nineteenth century disrupted Aboriginal lives in the Eyre Peninsula and West Coast area. Sheep and cattle displaced native fauna and reduced traditional food supplies, kangaroo shooters vastly reduced availability of game, and the introduction of agriculture closer to the coastal areas in the 1890s meant a more intense land use, reducing native fauna and flora and leading to starvation for many Aboriginal people.188

The identities and numbers of Aboriginal people in the Yardea area in the late nineteenth century remain unclear. Few dedicated ethnographic or archaeological expeditions were taken in the Gawler Ranges area when such research had been encouraged by the concepts of evolution in the late nineteenth century. Philip Jones, senior researcher of Aboriginal material culture at the South Australia Museum, notes there is a lot to be done in terms of “reconstituting” the material culture of the area as there are only a few small collections of Aboriginal objects from the region that were donated or sold to the museum in the 1870s and 1890s.189

An attempt by Norman Tindale to map Aboriginal territories as they existed before the disruption of white settlement has located Yardea at the western corner of Banggarla (Pangkala or Pangulla) country, close to country of both the Wirangu to the west and Nauo to the south, with the Kokatha some distance to the north-west. But as the Aboriginal people suffered large numbers of deaths with the onset of white settlement, the Kokatha and Banggarla are believed to have moved south and south-east through the mid-nineteenth century. The Kokatha have been referred to as the “Gawler Range tribe”, and by the late nineteenth century the Kokatha and Wirangu are believed to have held joint ceremonies in the ranges. It appears, then, that although the Yardea area may once have been Banggarla land, by the mid to late nineteenth century it may have become the country of the Kokatha and Wirangu.190 All three groups appear to have

187 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2007 188 Peggy Brock, Outback Ghettoes: Aborigines, Institutionalisation and Survival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 64-6 189 Personal correspondence from Philip Jones, 13 June 2008 190 Norman B. Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits and Proper Names (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974), 134-136 and map 2; The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, Society and Culture, ed. David Horton

71 lived in parts of the Gawler Ranges in the last two centuries with the exact boundaries between groups possibly moving. However, the pastoral activity and the establishment of European settlements tended to draw these groups out of the ranges and towards coastal settlements such as Streaky Bay, Fowlers Bay and Port Augusta and later towards the mission settlement at Koonibba.

Pastoralism not only reduced the availability of native flora and fauna, but just as importantly, grazing stock put great pressure on available water supplies, so much so that at Yardea over the years, pastoralists spent much effort and expenses on sinking wells and digging dams. James Grey Moseley reminisced about his early pioneering days for a newspaper article with the following recollection going back to about 1864: … in the very early pioneering days in the Gawler Ranges, where my brother and I had taken up country … I put in some long, hard years sinking for water, and I knew what it was to beat a drill for long hours in that red granite country. Many hundredweight kegs of powder and many hundred of pounds of dynamite have I blown away up there. It was there I gained my first knowledge of the blacks and learnt the Pangulla language.191

The introduction of large numbers of grazing animals came at the exclusion of Aboriginal people and the native animals that had relied on the scarce amount of surface water available. This often led to stock theft by Aboriginal people for food or as resistance to dispossession, followed by retaliation by settlers.192 The first police camp in the ranges was at Paney from 1864 to 1872, consisting of a canvas tent in which the troopers slept and a brush hut under which they did their cooking, “and close handy was a stout post in the ground, and to this prisoners were chained.”193 In 1872 the camp moved to Yardea and there a stone police station was built in 1883, costing £700, but police left the ranges two years later.

(Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994), Vols.1 and 2, pp. 92, 555, 1016, 1190; Brock, Outback Ghettoes, pp. 63-6 191 "Tales of the Natives. Incidents of the Early Days. Romance and Legend. A Pathetic Love Story. Chat with Mr Moseley MP," The Advertiser, 13 September 1913, p. 6 192 Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 93,156-173. There were also likely to have been other common rupturing effects of European settlement: introduced diseases; sexual abuse of women; fragmentation of social and ritual events at which marriages were organised, disputes settled and society and culture regenerated 193 Richardson, Pioneers of the North-West, p. 75

Figure 18 Ruin of old gaol behind Yardea police station built in 1883.194

The role of police troopers on these outstations was to deal with conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people. In 1872, with no rains and the runs short of feed, Aboriginal people stole food from shepherds’ huts and fencers’ tents at and near Yardea, taking clothes “to carry their plunder in”.195 One correspondent wrote: Our active and efficient trooper who is stationed at Yardea has had several cases, but because they are only found with the property on them, and are not seen to take it, they get off. They ought to suffer as well as a white man when stolen property is found in their possession and it is high time they were taught the distinctions of the meum and tuum. It is very galling to take a well known thief 200 miles down to see him liberated and then give a fiendish grin at his captor. They are now too cunning to be dealt with by halves.196

It is significant that similar “trouble” in 1882 and 1898 also happened under the duress of drought. Whereas Hack’s Aboriginal guides had easily found water, the impact of drought and pastoralism left Aboriginal people in need. One visitor wrote in 1882: At lunch we heard exciting news. The blacks, driven by the protracted drought and the scarcity of water, had surrounded the Yardea Station, in the Gawler Ranges, sixty miles away, and, after demanding rations and being refused, had attempted violence. Of course, the whites resisted, and the consequence was one nigger “stopped short, never to go again,” another was sent very near to the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns, and then the blacks retreated. Mr Schlank [sic] said he had not seen so many aboriginals together since he came to this part of country as were gathered together at his station – Hilturty [sic] – in the Gawler

194 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2007 195 “Country News”, The Chronicle, 31 August 1872, p. 7 196 Ibid

Ranges. There were about six hundred of them, and they had broken into his store and robbed it of a quantity of tobacco and flour, and had committed other depredations. The severity of the present season is driving blacks, wild dogs, emus, kangaroos, and other denizens of the backwoods from the interior towards the coast, and as all the animals named imbibed thieving propensities with the lacteal fluid of infancy, squatters and others have to keep their eyes open.197

A National Parks and Wildlife report notes that there is little doubt that the troopers at Paney and Yardea police station spent a part of their time rounding up Aboriginal people for transfer to the Fowlers Bay ration depot.198 In 1898, so-called depredations nearer the coast – “hut- breaking and stealing food where ever they get the opportunity” – were caused by the desperation of several hundred Aboriginal people “on the verge of starvation” and driven from inland by severe drought.199 Letters and telegrams to the government’s Protector of Aborigines sent from Fowlers Bay “beg” for more rations for the starving Aboriginal people. One settler wrote to the government’s Protector of Aborigines: All the back waters are dried up so it is impossible for them to go back until the rainy season sets in and owing to the two years of drought all game such as wombats and rabbits have perished so there is nothing but starvation staring them in the face … They say that we settlers killed all their game, Kangroos [sic], Wombats etc and thus if we do not give them more (bread) they will have it … You now have your choice, feed or shoot the native.200

197 “Port Lincoln and Streaky Bay”, Mount Barker Courier, 14 April 1882, p. 3. Later reprinted in H. Partridge, Diary of a visit to Port Lincoln, Streaky Bay, and Gawler Ranges (Mount Barker: Courier General Printing Office, 1899), pp. 4-5. The author presumably meant Anton Schlink, lessee of Hiltaba, aka Hiltaby, a property adjoining Yardea: see Richardson, Pioneers of the North-West, p. 18 198 A.C. Robinson et al, "A Biological Survey of the Gawler Ranges, South Australia in October 1985", p. 17 199 John Rickaby to Protector of Aborigines, 24 January 1898, State Record of SA GRG52/1/1898/42. See also GRG52/1/1898/43 and 45 200 Ibid

Figure 19 “For God’s sake Send Rations Natives Starving Their Case urgent”: telegram to the Protector of Aborigines advising action as Aboriginal people starved in 1898.201

Figure 20 “I think fishing tackle very necessary for aborigines”: telegram to the Protector of Aborigines advising action as Aboriginal people starved in 1898.202

A week later he pleaded by telegram: “For God’s sake send rations. Natives starving. Their case urgent.”203 The government responded by sending 2000 pounds of flour, 280 of sugar, rice, tea, tobacco and, apparently hoping to use the opportunity to change Aboriginal people from their traditional ways, fishing equipment: twelve pounds of netted twine, 200 fish hooks and 24 fishing lines.204 Many of these people, who had headed to Penong and Fowlers Bay, appear then to have

201 Rickaby to Protector of Aborigines, 1 February 1898, SRSA GRG52/1/1898/42. Reproduced with permission from Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation Division, S.A. (see letter Appendix) 202 E.B. Catchlove to Protector of Aborigines, 2 February 1898, SRSA GRG52/1/1898/45. Reproduced with permission from Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation (see Appendix) 203 Rickaby to Protector of Aborigines, 1 February 1898 204 SRSA GRG52/1/1898/45

75 found sanctuary at the Koonibba mission near Streaky Bay. Among them were Wirangu and Kokatha people, whose lands include the Gawler Ranges.205

Figure 21 Edward Russell, Native shepherd, Fowlers Bay, S.A. 1870, pen and ink drawing; 15.1 x 12.4 cm.206

Figure 22 Edward Russell, Government House, Ungutibee, Fowlers Bay, So. Australia, 1873, pen and ink drawing; 14.7 x 23.7 cm.207

205 Brock, Outback Ghettos, pp. 65-7 206 National Library of Australia digital collection. http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an5880439, viewed 20/10/09 207 Ibid

In the National Library of Australia there are about 80 drawings made at Fowlers Bay in the 1869- 80 period by an artist known only as Edward Russell.208 His drawings of figures capture something of the social circumstances that must have existed at the time on ration stations and pastoral runs in the west coast and Gawler Ranges region. The drawings in Figures 21 and 22 depicting an Aboriginal woman serving as a maid and an Aboriginal shepherd give some insights into the changes and continuity of Aboriginal traditions when white settlement and pastoralism arrived at the west coast and into the Gawler Ranges. These images show how various forms of accommodation and social exchange took place between Aboriginal people and the colonists when some Aboriginal people became employees in the colonial enterprise. Although employed largely in subservient and menial duties, working for white people was one way for Aboriginal people to adapt to the social complexities of their changed circumstances. For example, the figure of the Aboriginal shepherd holding his spear and spear-thrower and wearing some European clothing shows how some Aboriginal workers could continue their traditions on the land while working the sheep runs in the face of increasing changes to land use and cultural colonisation.

Figure 23 Workers at Yardea Telegraph Station circa 1901. Back Row: Aboriginal Assistant believed to be Harry Dare, Kenny Black (Line Repairer). Front row: L to R: Dave Stuart (Telegraph), Alf Cole (P&T Station Manager), Herb Kirk (Telegraph).209

208 Ibid 209 Photograph from Cissy Sultan and Kathy Bradley, Cissy's Story (Whyalla, S.A: Cissy Sultan and Kathy Bradley, 2004), p. 4

In her family history Cissy’s Story (2004), Cissy Sultan notes how the encroachment of pastoralism onto tribal lands forced Aboriginal people into a fringe existence or finding work on the stations.210 Sultan’s father Harry Dare was born in the Moonaree sandhills, not far from Yardea sometime in the 1880s and was well known throughout the Gawler Ranges from working on different pastoral properties. As a young man he worked as a the “Battery Boy” at Yardea telegraph station at the turn of the century. A photograph (Figure 23) of the Yardea telegraph workers includes an unidentified young man believed to be Harry Dare. He was the son of a white father known only as Robert Dare and Alice, a Wirangu woman who returned to her people, leaving Harry in the care of a stepfather and other relatives.

Figure 24 Whipstick Billy and his camel.211

Sultan heard that he was left at “the station” to be cared for – I wonder if this station was Yardea. Whipstick Billy, a Wirangu man who also worked at Yardea (see Chapter Six), was believed to be involved in a dispute to take Harry back to his people.212 This story shows how within a generation of the first European settlement, pastoralism and pastoralists had dramatically affected the lives and lifestyles of Aboriginal people of the west coast, Eyre Peninsula and Gawler Ranges region. Within a generation of contact, Aboriginal people were

210 Ibid, p. 3 211 Ibid, p. 4 212 Ibid, p. 2

78 either moved off their lands or had to live a fringe existence to keep in contact with their country, including taking on various forms of white men’s work.213

In 1896 when the east-west telegraph line was re-routed through the Gawler Ranges, the abandoned Yardea police station was put to use as the only post and telegraph office in the district. In 1898 after the Yardea pastoral property had been deserted due to drought and vermin, the three operators of Yardea telegraph station were described as leading “a rather lonely life … now the runs are practically abandoned all around them”.214 A letter about the life of telegraphist Herb Kirk conveys in some detail the dire circumstances of the times. The Gawler Range country surrounding Yardea prior to 1896 was the centre of vast pastoral interest, but many leaseholders were ruined through drought, and the ravages of dingoes and rabbits. The bunnies even climbed ti-trees in search of food and slipped into small forks where they became firmly wedged and perished by the score. Mice also wrought havoc and only tinned food withstood their attacks – they even ate the lead of rifle bullets down to the brass cases to obtain more of the bees wax which covered the bullets.215

Around this time it was recorded that Aboriginal people had almost entirely vanished from the Gawler Ranges “except at the mail stations”.216 The Aboriginal people seem to have made some use of post and telegrams: in 1899 the Koonibba mission near Streaky Bay received a letter written for an Aboriginal man at Yardea advising that a large number of people were on their way via Yardea to Koonibba, and other Aboriginal people increasingly used letters written by intermediaries to communicate across the region.217

Iris Yumadoo Kochallalya Burgoyne, a Mirning-Kokotha descendant, recounts life before and after dispossession in the Gawler Ranges and Eyre Peninsula area.218 Her book includes a photograph of Aboriginal men working with axes to clear the scrub to make way for the Kooniba mission built in 1901. There is also a photograph of Aboriginal people in European clothing living in fringe camps near the Kooniba mission in about 1910. These profound images show the

213 Ibid, pp. 1-6 214 Batchelor, “With the Pastoral Commission”, The Advertiser, 22 April 1898, p. 6 215 Herb Kirk, "Herb Kirk's Outback Adventures," The Australian Postal Clerk, 1940 (Exact date unknown). Copy held by A. Morris, Yardea Station 216 Batchelor, “With the Pastoral Commission”, The Advertiser, 22 April 1898, p. 6 217 Brock, Outback Ghettos, pp. 66-7 218 Iris Yumadoo Kochallalya Burgoyne, The Mirning: We Are the Whales (Broome, WA: Magabala Books, 2000)

79 changing circumstances of Aboriginal people’s lives as they became marginalised from their lands through the introduction of pastoralism.

Figure 25 Clearing the land to make way for Kooniba mission (date unknown)219

Figure 26 Photograph of Aboriginal fringe camp near Kooniba Mission, c.1910.220

219 Ibid, pp. 32-33 220 Ibid, p. 38

Figure 27 Newborn lamb at a roadside paddock fence. Gawler Ranges, 2008.221

Yardea Station and the Gawler Ranges in 2009

Yardea Station still operates as a pastoral lease running about 10,000 sheep as regulated by the Pastoral Board. Dingoes in the area are few in number, but goats and rabbits remain a problem. The post and telegraph station buildings are used by the current station manager for storage and accommodation.

In 2002 the Gawler Ranges National Park was proclaimed, which includes the former pastoral property of Paney Station which was part of the Yardea leasehold during Arthur Bailey’s time. The park is approximately 1660 square kilometres and spans the transitional zone between the agricultural and pastoral regions of northern Eyre Peninsula. Numerous native fauna species within the park are at the extreme edge of their natural distribution, making this area a crossroads for species to the north, south, east and west. Species of conservation significance that are now rare or vulnerable in the area include the malleefowl, grasswren, greater long- eared bat and the yellow-footed rock wallaby.222 The national park is also a crossroad where “agriculture meets pastoralism, the outback meets settled areas and ancient volcanic rock meets recent dune formation.”223

221 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2008 222 Department of Environment and Heritage, Gawler Ranges National Park Management Plan (Adelaide: Government of South Australia, 2006), p. 15 223 Scientific Expedition Group, Expedition Scrubby Peak, September 2007 (Adelaide: Scientific Expedition Group, 2007), p. 1

When the Gawler Ranges National Park was proclaimed, a deal was also made to allow mineral exploration.224 On 14 May 2008 twenty-four Aboriginal Land Use Agreements were celebrated for the Gawler Ranges by claimants from the Banggarla and Kokotha peoples, pastoralists and the Attorney General’s department. Each ILUA lays out arrangements for access to pastoral leases by Aboriginal people and a regime to protect the rich Aboriginal heritage of the Gawler Ranges.225

Aboriginal heritage in the Gawler Ranges is of paramount importance in the establishment of native title claims to protect sacred sites, particularly with the prospect of mining in the region. Many signs of Aboriginal occupation such as stone artefacts, rock holes, burial sites and middens are important for Aboriginal claimants to identify for native title claims.226 However, Australian historian Rebe Taylor notes how native title law continues to favour Aboriginal communities whose cultures have a continuing relationship with the land. She argues that this disadvantages the majority of Aboriginal communities that have been displaced from their lands by incursions 227 such as pastoralism.

The Minnipa Agricultural Research Centre set up in 1911 is currently working with the South Australia Research Development Institute (SARDI) to conduct research on robust farming resilience that can withstand drought conditions and climate change. SARDI’s Farming Systems science program mission aims “to identify, understand and promote crop and pasture systems which optimise profitability, quality and sustainability within the landscape.”228

The pastoral enterprise in the Gawler Ranges is still very much alive, but as with all farming systems in semi-arid parts of Australia it is facing an uncertain future with ongoing drought and climate change. Marginal lands once considered as barren and desolate are now providing important information for scientific research into drought-resistant plants and native ecologies

224 Scientific Expedition Group in partnership with the Department for Environment and Heritage, "Gawler Ranges National Park: Biosurvey of Scrubby Peak Section. September 16-29, 2007. Program Plan" (Adelaide, 2007). This report notes that under the Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988, the South Australian Government is responsible for the protection and preservation of sites, objects and remains of significance to Aboriginal people 225 "Gawler Ranges Pastoral Ilua," Aboriginal Way, April 2008, p. 2 226 Scientific Expedition Group, "Gawler Ranges National Park: Biosurvey of Scrubby Peak Section. September 16-29, 2007. Program Plan", appendix 1 227 Taylor, Unearthed, pp. 192-3 228 SARDI, “About Farming Systems”, http://www.sardi.sa.gov.au/farming, viewed 19/06/09

82 that may one day provide answers for surviving a hotter and drier future. Perhaps there are grounds for hope to be found through an acknowledgement of past mistakes as lessons for how to survive the future. Now that the land has reached its limits in terms of sustainability, other voices are being heard.

Con Bilney is a descendant of the Kokotha people and is researching ways to revive native ecological systems in marginal farming areas of the west coast and Gawler Ranges. He is looking at ways to help farmers adapt to changing conditions and restore the land’s natural ecology by using a “mixed grazing” method which combines current farming practices (i.e. wheat, sheep and cattle farming) with new and innovative native food production such as the farming of native fruits, endemic shrubs and tree species which can withstand the harsh climate and soil conditions.229 Bilney is using technology such as Geographic Information Systems and consults local farmers to identify remnant ecologies. This approach, which combines science with local and Aboriginal knowledge, demonstrates a more cooperative and holistic way to revive and adapt to a beleaguered landscape.230

Recollecting the past through the interplay of memory and history is significant in relation to uses of the land in which there are fundamental differences between non-Indigenous people who look to the future and Aboriginal people for whom the “aspirations and interpretations of the past are features of everyday life and politics.”231 As outlined in this chapter, different histories have contributed to the heterogeneous nature of what Yardea has become today, including pastoralism, native title and the Gawler Ranges National Park which itself includes a crossroads of species and a hybrid mix of natural, European and Aboriginal history. In the following chapter I discuss how the popular memory of pioneering endeavour and progress dominated until the late twentieth century when it was challenged by revisionist historians and other cultural theorists. With the aid of historical documents and family photographs, I identify and interpret the fallibility of this conventional history through environmental philosophy and cultural studies by exploring memory and myth in Australian history to find ways to creatively unsettle the past and communicate its ongoing presence.

229 Con Bilney, "The Economic Feasibility of Native Food Production in Arid and Semi-Arid Regions of South Australia (Draft)," PhD proposal, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide, 2008 230 Gelder and Jacobs, "Uncanny Australia," pp. 171-2 231 Gill, "Transcending Nostalgia", unpaginated

6 Exhuming the Past - Inland Memories

The photographs and archival records relating to the Bailey family and Yardea Station are not only of personal significance but also provide clues to the myths that have shaped popular memory in Australian culture and history. In particular they have provided a departure point from which to both affirm and challenge the pioneer myth and the nature of white settler culture. My grandmother Winifred was the only child of Arthur Bailey to have sons, which is how I presume these photographs were handed down to my father. It makes me realise how easily links to the past can slip away from generation to generation when relying on the preservation of photographs and objects as bearers of memories.

I am unable to know the Bailey family intimately through the local narratives of white settler history or from snapshot memories based on mute photographs. The narratives of twentieth century history generally reflect ideological stories of progress and achievement. How then do I apprehend the local history of Yardea that lies behind the master narratives of pioneering history?232 What can I glean from the residual material left behind? How do I interpret and represent Yardea’s past and draw from its legacy some significance for the present? This chapter investigates some of the images from the Bailey family collection taken in the early 1900s to give them a dimension in memory, place and time.

Prosthetic memories

According to French memory theorist Pierre Nora, archives can be seen as “prosthetic memories”: “No longer living memory’s more or less intended remainder, the archive has

232 Paula Hamilton discusses how forgetting or “organised amnesia” plays a large part in shaping national memory and the study of memory often reveals a tension between local and nationalist traditions. In Hamilton, "The Knife Edge: Debates about Memory and History", p. 23

84 become the deliberate and calculated secretion of lost memory.”233 Nora uses the term “distance-memory” to contradict how memory is traditionally expected to operate. He argues that it is the “illumination of discontinuity” that creates memory rather than the safe and steady technological and economic progress as historical indicators of a civilised society that “magnify our greatness.”234

This notion of discontinuity became a feature of my research where instead of finding contiguous and interconnected narratives, I uncovered only disparate fragments of historical evidence. Station records from Arthur Bailey’s time as manager of Yardea have not been recovered, so there are few insights into people and daily life on the station. Left with only a sketch of Yardea’s history, my research has taken on a speculative kind of journey in which archival material including articles, photographs, telegrams and reminiscences serve as fragments of information rather than a cohesive and logical narrative. By intuitively responding to these past discontinuities, I am fabricating my own uncertain truths and memories as a way to creatively imagine the tension between the legacy of settler colonialism and the environmental struggles we face in the present.

Cultural geographer Jane Jacobs suggests we need to acknowledge a sense of place which is “built around fractured vectors of connection and histories of disconnection”.235 Perhaps I can apprehend Yardea as a place of broken memories from which to invoke a hesitant dialogue with the past. Jacobs argues that post-colonial critiques are often expressed through grand theory and not explained “through the fundamentally deconstructive space of the local to see how the grand ideas of empire are really unstable and shifting modes of power which reach across time and space”.236 Australian cultural theorist Leonarda Kovacic extends this argument by remarking that post-colonial critiques have monopolised recent perspectives of the past, presenting the “cultural production of the period as having exclusively an imperialistic agenda.”237 She argues there is a lack of post-colonial scholarship that is “responsive to the conditions and context of

233 Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Memoire," p. 14 234 Ibid, p. 16. 235 Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 158 236 Ibid 237 Leonarda Kovacic, "What Photographers Saw: Aboriginal People and Australian Colonial Experience", in eds. Edmonds and Furphy, Rethinking Colonial Histories, p. 99

85 production.”238 By attending to the past through the combined engagement of archival material with field trips, I have searched for ways to reach a more nuanced understanding of the cultural mirage that lies behind the history of white settler culture and its relationship to the land. To interpret these archives, I respond in a way that resonates with the present. In doing so I have needed to find other ways to attend to the creative dimensions of history – in Kovacic’s words, “the texts we create should explain, develop and expand the significance of the image, not narrow it down.”239

Figure 28 Top Row: Mrs & Mr Bailey holding Win (baby), Mrs Stuart holding Edna Bailey, Mr Stuart, Pram Singh. Middle Row: Miss Cole, Miss ? (Mr Bailey’s sister), Miss Stuart and Miss Cole. Front Row: Bert Bailey & Keith Stuart.240

Such an expansion of the image has been involved in my foregrounding of the “Indian in the back ground” in a photograph that first drew me into this investigation. It is a photo of my great- grandparents’ family and friends at Yardea Station who are posing with tennis racquets. Sitting against the backdrop of an arid and scrubby landscape and dressed in predominantly white attire

238 Ibid, p. 90 239 Ibid, p. 99 240 Photograph from Kneebone family collection

86 in the style of the Edwardian era, their “self-assured ease of race and class”241 seems only to exaggerate their cultural dislocation from the natural environment within which they pose. The late Australian environmental philosopher Val Plumwood helps to frame the colonial premise of this photo: “To be defined as ‘nature’ in this context is to be defined as passive, as non-agent and non-subject, as the ‘environment’ or invisible background conditions against which the foreground achievements of reason or culture take place.”242

As the white settlers pose against the backdrop of nature, we can see standing slightly adrift from the group is (as listed on the back of the photograph) an “Indian in the background”. I have since been able to identify this man as Pram Singh or Phram Singhreckie, a Sikh hawker who “became a friend of the Bailey family when Arthur Bailey was managing Yardea for the Moseleys”.243 A photograph of a camel train passing through Yardea and another of my grandmother Winifred and her sister Edna Bailey with a baby camel indicate that Yardea Station was in touch with cameleers.

Figure 29 Camel train passing through Yardea.244

In their book on the history of Australia’s Muslim cameleers, Philip Jones and Anna Kenny note that the Australian historical landscape has placed different emphasis on its past Aboriginal or European associations, leaving Muslim cameleers to “occupy an ambiguous, unresolved role in

241 Henry Reynolds, Dispossession, p. 136 242 Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 4 243 Clem Fitzgerald, "Clem Fitzgerald Memoirs," undated, received in personal correspondence from John Starkey, September 2007 244 Photograph from Kneebone family collection

87 our national story.”245 Afghan cameleers and hawkers were an important part of transport and trade with both white settlers and Aboriginal people. Until recently their role in major expeditions across Australia in the 1800s and in opening up the land to the pastoral industry went unrecognised. The cameleers enabled greater areas of inland to be opened up for sheep grazing and for transport of wool, especially during drought.

As the photos disclose their contents, Yardea becomes a more complex place than that presented in the straight white history lessons of the pioneers. In Foucault’s terms it could be comprehended as a heterotopic place – a contradictory location where the pastoral landscape is a place of superimposed meaning and where cultural transformations occur as one enters its boundaries.246 It is a place where the anxieties and tensions of white settlement circulate through each other: a place of nowhere that struggles to be somewhere, a place that struggles between foundations and unhomely dissonance.

Feral Nature

One old-timer who revisited the Gawler Ranges in 1906 noted the longer-term results of overstocking, vermin plagues and drought near Chilpneda Rock, in the Yardea area of the ranges: One is but on the outskirts of the Gawler Ranges here, but the destroying influence of the rabbit and the overstocking ignorance of the old leaseholders are still eloquent from one end of the country to the other. Most of the edible bushes, including the fine sandalwood, have perished. What the sheep spared or failed to reach the rabbit found means of attacking and demolishing, until to-day there are, at this extremity of the ranges no sheep at all, and, what is more surprising, from one end to the other there are practically no rabbits.247

245 Philip Jones and Anna Kenny, Australia’s Muslim Cameleers. Pioneers of the Inland, 1860s to 1930s (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2007), p. 158 246 Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986), pp. 25-6 247 “Through the Gawler Ranges: From Streaky Bay to Port Augusta”, The Adelaide Chronicle, 27 October 1906, p. 40

Figure 30 Sketch of dingo by Leslie Bebbington in Winifred Bailey’s sketch book, 1913.248

The re-opening of Yardea by Arthur Bailey from 1903 was permissible only by its enclosure within the boundaries of the dog fence – that is, by the attempted separation of European-style pastoralism and its promise of prosperity from the external threat of predators and pests. The dog fence built in 1904 remains as a material symbol of European settler occupation and reinscription of the land. After the abandonment of the Gawler Ranges runs in the late 1890s when “the increase of wild dogs has rendered the occupation of those well-bushed open plains prohibitory”,249 the dingo fence permitted their reclamation and the reopening of the district to sheep. The fence represents the literal application of exclusionary and hierarchical logics of Western environmental thought.

The drawing of the dingo in Figure 30 was made in 1913 by station worker Leslie Bebbington in a small sketch book belonging to my grandmother Winifred Bailey. The solitary dingo standing on rocky outcrop typical of the Gawler Ranges suggests both the presence and absence of dingoes at Yardea in the early years of the twentieth century. Once known to the area for killing sheep, they perhaps became rare enough on the station for this picture to be drawn to show the children what one looked like as the lessees had reportedly “got all the dingo out” before selling Yardea in 1916.250

248 Image from Kneebone family collection 249 “Through the Gawler Ranges: A much-neglected country”, The Advertiser, 20 October 1906, p. 8 250 Fitzgerald, “Notes on exploration and farming in Gawler Ranges”

Figure 31 Bert Bailey (1901-1911) and friend, “riding on the sheep’s back”, Yardea Station early 1900s.251

In contrast Winifred’s brother Bert, born in the year of the nation’s birth (1901), was photographed, literally and allegorically, “riding on the sheep’s back” at Yardea (Figure 31).252 The image of Bert and another boy sitting on sheep seems to promote the emerging national myth of the peaceful and progressive nature of Australian settlement. The micro-history of Yardea can be viewed as a localised example in the mythology of nation-building, particularly given the emergent nation’s dependence on pastoralism for prosperity. Mention of this pioneering history of Yardea has been included in a historical narrative by Norman Richardson, a mailman who worked across the Gawler Ranges area.

Richardson’s book, Pioneers of the North-West of South Australia (1925), is a combination of public history and private memories recorded from 1856 to early 1914. Its narrative is constructed through the experience of such men as pastoralists, troopers and mailmen, at a time when diminishing utopian optimism shifted into a growing sense of national identity. The author’s preface note announces:

251 Photograph from Kneebone family collection. Also published in “Scenes at Yardea Telegraph Station in the Far North-West”, The Chronicle, 27 November 1909, p. 30. 252 Allegorical representations of the new nation as a child (compared to an adult Britain) or as a young woman can be seen in the imagery of the period around Federation. See, for example, Josie Castle and Helen Pringle, “Sovereignty and sexual identity in political cartoons”, in Debutante nation: Feminism contests the 1890s, eds. Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993), pp. 136-49

The men who bore the heat and burden of those early times blazed the track for those who successfully occupy the country to-day, and whose names and features in a few years’ time would be forgotten were not some such record as I have tried to make in existence. By means of this small work I hope to keep their memory green.253

The book reads like a who’s-who filled with the admirable deeds of white male pioneers who “reigned” over and “improved” the lands. Up until 1870 Richardson’s information was gained from Government records and some of the original lessees who were still alive. But from 1870 the narrative is principally derived from his own knowledge and experience gained by travelling across the district as the sole mail contractor for forty-two years such that he was “in close contact with all that occurred therein”. He notes that the anecdotes interspersed through the text “are all founded on fact and in many cases are related as they actually occurred”.254

Adelaide historian Robert Foster notes that between 1880 and 1930 pastoral pioneers were named and valorised alongside their photos in publications such as Pioneers of the North-West of South Australia. He argues that the early reminiscences published by pastoralists began the process of Australian history making in the absence of other published histories and that these memoirs were important in offering templates for any future representation of the “roaring days”. Foster notes how these reminiscences “could be seen to represent mainstream conservative attitudes based around the cultural supremacy of the pastoral industry in South Australia”.255

In line with the pioneering myth, Arthur Bailey as defined in the Pioneers of the North-West could be seen to have fulfilled his “higher destiny” at Yardea Station where “under his skilful guidance, and the expenditure of much money in water improvements, it proved a payable proposition.”256 The “pioneer improvements” Arthur Bailey introduced to the land, such as dams and the vermin proof fence, are still crucial to the ongoing operations of Yardea today.

253 Richardson, Pioneers of the North-West, p. 1 254 Ibid 255 Foster et al, Fatal Collisions, p. 99 256 Richardson, Pioneers of the North-West, p. 14

Conserving Loss

Figure 32 Ethel and Samuel White at brush turkey nest in Gawler Ranges, 1912.257

In 1912 an ornithological expedition led by Captain S.A. White crossed the Gawler Ranges and stayed with my great-grandparents at Yardea Station. He reported that Mr and Mrs Bailey, “like most other people we have met out back, are kindness itself, and it was not long before we were quite at home, and that night for the first time after weeks on the ground, all slept in a comfortable bed”.258 This is one of the few personal references I have found that gives clues to the social nature of my great-grandparents. From the newspaper article in which I found this reference, I traced Captain White’s original journal and archives at the SA Museum and uncovered two handwritten letters by Arthur Bailey to Captain White in preparation for this expedition – a small but poignant find for me to see personal correspondence by my great- grandfather in his own handwriting. They are formal but friendly letters describing the weather and travel conditions and offering his hospitality for the expedition.

An excerpt from White’s account of his expedition to the Gawler Ranges shows that the objective was to find specimens of the rare Night Parrot (Geopsittacus occidentalis). It was the discovery

257 South Australia Museum Archives, Captain S.A. White collection, AA 365 258 Capt S.A. White, "The Gawler Ranges: An Ornithological Expedition. Part IV," The Register, 3 June 1913, p. 14

92 and capture of the first Night Parrot that stimulated biological interest in the Gawler Ranges area.259 The Gawler Ranges district is the home to the wonderful night parrot. The first man to do any ornithological work in this country was the late Mr FW Andrews … Mr Andrews worked this country about 1878, and made Nonning his headquarters. He was successful in collecting a good many skins of the night parrot, which must have been more plentiful than it is now …. Our greatest regret, however, was not meeting with the night parrot. There is not the slightest doubt the bird is still to be found, but it has been driven far back by the domestic cat gone wild, and the foxes – two of the greatest enemies to bird life.260

Figure 33 Night Parrots from the Gawler Ranges.261

Despite procuring 300 specimens from this expedition, there was “evidently no contradiction in White’s eyes between his conservationist stance and his collecting.”262 This is reflected in his journal notes in which he describes how he goes out to shoot a rare species of bird: After forming camp we strolled out with the gun, and I was fortunate enough to secure the thick-billed grass wren (Amytornis modestus). This is an extremely shy and rare bird; it is seldom if ever flushed, but passes from one saltbush to another like a mouse.263

259 Robinson et al, "A Biological Survey of the Gawler Ranges, South Australia in October 1985," p. 26 260 Samuel Albert White, The Gawler Ranges. An Ornithological Expedition (Adelaide: W.K. Thomas & Co, 1913), p. 14 261 Collected by F. W. Andrews. South Australia Museum. Photograph by Sue Kneebone 262 Rob Linn, Nature's Pilgrim (Adelaide: South Australian Government Printer, 1989), p. 49 263 White, "The Gawler Ranges: An Ornithological Expedition. Part IV," p. 14

White’s historic expedition and observations have, in effect, helped paint a picture of significant species known to have declined from earlier years of non-Indigenous settlement and establishment of stock grazing in the region.

In Captain White’s and Arthur Bailey’s time, the notions of ecology and environment were rudimentary and did not become popular scientific thinking for another century. However, by the late nineteenth century nature was well understood through the scientific Linnaean nomenclature in which everything was given its place, so White’s ornithology was undertaken accordingly in terms of careful specimen collecting and documentation.264 The contradictory claim of field naturalists as being conservationists while killing to collect specimens seems to cast a self-fulfilling prophecy of ecocidal loss.

The “duty” of preservation was expressed in the following sentiment by the South Australia Museum’s Institute Board in 1859: It is highly desirable, and, indeed, almost a national duty, to preserve for posterity the forms and semblances of the various singular and beautiful animals and birds, reptiles and insects now inhabiting Australia, ere they shall have finally disappeared before the footsteps of the white man.265

As with Aboriginal material culture, the native ecology became pre-ordained for the museum archives to be kept out of sight until bidden, representing a paradox of loss under the aegis of heritage and conservation.

“Dusky Visitors”

Captain White wrote the following newspaper account, headlined “Dusky Visitors”, from his expedition to the Gawler Ranges in 1913 which shows the presence but marginal status given to Aboriginal people in the gaze of white settlers. White’s description illustrates the narrative

264 Linn, Nature's Pilgrim, p. 49; Kay Anderson, "Science and the Savage: The Linnean Society of New South Wales 1874-1900", Cultural Geographies 5, no. 125 (1998), p. 133. The underlying belief of Linnaeus, which is contested by emerging evolutionary theories, was that God had pre-ordered nature and it was the duty of scientific investigation to illustrate and illuminate. Thus natural objects all had their place divinely bestowed on them rather than taking into account complex organisms interdependent through a continuum of ecological systems 265 “Adelaide's Early Specimens”, Origins and Early Years, South Australia Museum, http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/page/default.asp?site=1&id=1198&fragPage=1, viewed 12/12/09

94 reversal being played out by the white settlers, whereby the Aboriginal people were now perceived as “visitors” in their own country. One hot morning, just prior to moving camp, I perceived three spots moving on a ridge about two miles away. With the aid of fieldglasses I discerned three natives who had not yet detected our camp, because they were too deeply engrossed watching a kangaroo out upon the plain. All three were around with rifles, and the kangaroo had little or no chance against them. Even in the old days these men could bring the kangaroo to earth with spears, so what chance had the animals now, when their foes are around with repeating rifles, and are such splendid shots? After killing and cutting up the kangaroo, they espied our camp. A consultation took place between the dusky huntsmen, who little thought that they could be seen at such a distance, let alone every gesture noted. Then picking up their loads, they followed the hillside for some distance, hid their kangaroo meat under a bush, and, taking out a few rags from a sack (they were naked before), pulled them on the best they could, and made straight for the camp.266

Figure 34 Shearers at Yardea Station, early 1900s. Whipstick Billy standing at back.267

According to Adelaide anthropologists working on the Gawler Ranges Native Title report and to whom I showed this photograph (Figure 34), the Aboriginal man standing in the background holding a broom is believed to be Whipstick Billy. He was reputed to be an outcast from his tribe who spent lengths of time working at Yardea until he died in his wurlie on a paddock at Yardea

266 White, "The Gawler Ranges: An Ornithological Expedition. Part IV" 267 Photograph from Kneebone family collection

95 around 1920. The way he is mythologised through written accounts symbolises his movement from bush to a marginal state in which he co-existed with white settlers to survive. We never hear Billy’s own version of events; he is only represented anecdotally through stories of the local settlers whose accounts render him as a friendly character who drifts between properties with his dogs. For long periods of time, he disappears into the bush: “After a while Billy went into the ranges and was not seen for about 10 years.” But he is also spied from time to time: “I was in the railway survey camp at Minnipa and Billy used to see us every day, but never let on he was there”.268 He was seen as someone with an innate understanding of nature, incorporating his knowledge of country that involved such skills as listening to the ground and attracting the curiosity of animals. “He was always a splendid man at tracking, but once he got near the dingo he always took the pants off and hung them in a tree as the swish of the pants would frighten the dingo out of his lair.”269

He was perceived as “nature’s gentleman”, someone co-existing between “civilisation” and the natural world: “When he lay down at dinner time, Billy would not discard the waist coat. How else would a man carry his pipe and tobacco.”270 There is a sense of paternal care and loyalty from those who knew Whipstick Billy. He is a friend of local pastoralists and is regarded as a good worker. The archival stories give a sense of freedom and independence and respect for Whipstick Billy’s mobility and wanderings. He still occupied the natural world in white settlers’ eyes, but demonstrated his own agency to co-adapt and survive while becoming pre-ordained in white society as “the last of the Gawler Ranges Natives”.271 These nebulous narratives of Whipstick Billy portray him as leading a hybrid life, a visitor in his own country as he enters and leaves demarcated pastoral territories, and in the settlers’ eyes coexisting somewhere between nature and culture.

Towards the end of my research I came across a compelling recollection published in The Advertiser in 1913 as told by James Grey Moseley MP, the major owner of the Yardea lease. This

268 Allan Harper, "The Story of Whipstick Billy," The West Coast Sentinel 1975. In collection of Poochera Museum 269 Clem Fitzgerald memoirs, recorded by Molly Eatts, Kimba and Gawler Ranges Historical Society, 1975. In collection of Kimba Museum 270 Ibid 271 Images relating to Whipstick Billy. Series AA 26, Robert Arthur Bedford, South Australia Museum, www.samuseum.australia.sa.com/aa26/AA26-02.htm, viewed 12/06/08

96 article helps to explain how my great-grandfather, Arthur Bailey, came to manage pastoral properties from the late nineteenth century because he was working for his uncle James Moseley whose connections to the Gawler Ranges reached far back to the first pastoral runs in the 1860s.272 Moseley’s reminiscences attest to the colonial mind-set of his times. In particular his views and paternalistic attitude towards the Aboriginal people reveal the legacy and influence of the Enlightenment in terms of its emphasis on rationality and the influence of social Darwinism with its racial assumptions. “I have spent a considerable time among them,” he said of Aboriginal people, “and I never found them much else as simple children of nature, I have had a shot or two at them, but apart from a few occasions I found them peaceable and friendly.”273

His casual mention of shooting at them seems shocking today, and harks back to a time when nineteenth century Australian literature was full of drama and adventure stories of frontier conflict before such tales were played down or expunged from official accounts of Australian history published in the twentieth century. He also talks of befriending Aboriginal people by helping them “in times when thirst and hunger attacked them.”274

One of the most arresting parts of Moseley’s recollection is his version of a dreaming story told to him from an old Banggarla man he befriended called Pimpa.275 It was a dreaming story about two young lovers, a warrior called Ankitena and a young beautiful girl called Uperdillie, who set out to flee from an old Walpiri chief who wanted to make Uperdillie his own. Pimpa tells Moseley how Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens were once fresh water surrounded by forests, but the Walpiri elder conjured to his aid an evil spirit called Porkabindie to make the lakes turn to salt to starve the young lovers of food and water.

Like most of colonial settler society at that time, the reporter and Moseley failed to fully appreciate Aboriginal dreaming stories as reflecting cultural lore and a deep metaphysical understanding of country. Moseley’s recollection seems to confirm how the settler colonists dismissed such stories as a superstitious and fanciful, thereby failing to recognise the land as

272 "Tales of the Natives", The Advertiser, 13 September 1913, p. 6 273 Ibid 274 Ibid 275 Ibid. According to Moseley, Pimpa means “the tall pine tree”. Moseley learnt Pimpa’s “Pangulla” language, also written as Banggarla and Pangkala (see pages 72-73)

97 already being peopled by those who have the capacity to understand and hear the land’s own stories.

This lack of insight into other ways of being can in part be attributed to what Deborah Bird Rose terms the denarrativisation in Western thought which comes from the idea of hyper-separation of mind and matter, where matter is regarded as devoid of subjective interiority.276 Ecologically speaking, Rose argues that the consequences of this way of perceiving the world disabled settler culture’s ability to understand the land and its original custodians as a holistic system. Seeing the land in terms of emptiness, absence and silence, white settlement was instead carried out through violence and dispossession, creating an intractable monologue that disavows and makes impotent the voice of others in its wake. Aboriginal people like Whipstick Billy who managed to co-exist on pastoral lands were now wandering among the broken stories of their own country. They were now perceived by the white settlers as marginal beings, as the “dusky visitors”.

Since its operation as a pastoral run, Yardea Station has been serially re-created through succeeding generations, each one bringing new contestations and impositions on the land. My genealogical connection to this country may appear to be intact in terms of a family tree, but it is disparate and incomplete in terms of details and stories that may inform or connect me to these people and their past. From the photographs and archival memories it becomes evident there is not just one history but many different stories of people passing through. Rather than privileging Yardea as a monologue of pioneering endeavour, it is more likely a heterotopic place, where different experiences and memories pass through and leave their trace.

Although Yardea still operates, its empty homesteads, shepherds’ huts and lonely graves, cairns, empty water tanks, feral goats and denuded vegetation can be considered as testimonies to the past lives of white settlers who wandered in out of place and left behind the entangled remains of their culture. Perhaps the malignant memories of a wounded and dispossessed country have caught up with and exposed settler society’s blindspots. As droughts take hold, temperatures rise and species extinction continues unabated, we are reminded that we occupy a place marked by the rupturing of an ancient ecology and culture, now supplanted by half-truths and myths.

276 Rose, Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation, p. 183

7 Field Trips

This chapter is based on observations made during two field trips taken to the Gawler Ranges region. The first was undertaken as a volunteer on a scientific expedition in the Gawler Ranges National Park, once part of the pastoral lease of Yardea Station. The second trip involved a journey to a series of pioneer museums scattered across the region to try to find information relating to Yardea Station and to gain critical insights into how pioneer life has been remembered. These field trips helped to expand my research by adding a layer of lived experience to the theoretical abstractions and silent archives.

As familial links have now been lost, fieldwork was important to enrich my research by experiencing this marginal outpost. Visits to Yardea Station and the Gawler Ranges were vital to enable me to see at first-hand how the nature of pioneer myth has inscribed itself onto this remote colonial landscape.

Field Trip 1 – Scientific Expedition Group

My first opportunity to visit the Gawler Ranges came about by volunteering to take part in a biodiversity study on former pastoral land once managed by my great-grandfather which has now been established as a national park. This first visit allowed me to learning something about the ecology and landscape once managed by my great-grandfather. I was also anticipating an opportunity to visit the Yardea homestead, only thirty kilometres north of the expedition site. This expedition, organised by the Scientific Expedition Group (SEG)277 in September 2007,

277 The Scientific Expedition Group Inc. was established in 1984 and is a volunteer, nonprofit organisation that organises and runs scientific field work. This particular expedition was a study for the Department of Environment and Heritage to carry out a biodiversity survey of the area adjacent to Scrubby Peak within the Gawler Ranges National Park. The aim of the expedition was to gather information on the flora and fauna and to

100 granted all those who volunteered the opportunity to learn hands-on for this scientific biosurvey taken at Scrubby Peak. Established in 2002, the Gawler Ranges National Park encompasses what was known as Paney Station along with the smaller Pine Lodge and a portion of Scrubby Peak Station. During Arthur Bailey’s time these were part of the Yardea leasehold and therefore under his care as station manager from 1903 to 1916.

My preliminary impressions of the Gawler Ranges were of an austere and ancient landscape where the soil and vegetation resolved themselves into a variegated palette of soft hues across undulating hills and flat plains. Alongside the relentless dust and wind I also experienced climatic variations idiosyncratic to this region, where clouds hover over the ranges and tease the land below with its suspended curtain of virga rain.278 With time I became accustomed to looking beyond the perceived homogeneity of the landscape and began to see where one ecotone gently succeeded another with undulating ranges of remnant mallee forests giving way to sparse and sombre plains of bluebush and saltbush scrubs.

During the two-week study we were divided into groups to collect mammals, spiders, ants, bats or plants. Plucked from their ecological habitats, samples were taken back to the science tent where these small lives were terminated and labeled for the museum. Even those listed as vulnerable were put down for the sake of science, their livers extracted and frozen for DNA testing.

document human occupation within selected areas. See http://www.communitywebs.org/ScientificExpeditionGroup/pages/Aims.htm 278 Rain that evaporates before reaching the ground is called virga and often hangs in wisps above desert and semi- arid lands

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Figure 35 Lethabarbed and dissected Bicycle Lizard, SEG tent, Gawler Ranges, 2007.279

This scientific expedition allowed me to critically reflect on Western culture’s anthropocentric relationship with nature and the detached scientific methodology employed in order to collect, classify and dissect species taken from the natural environment. It also allowed me to witness the ongoing externalisation of nature through the “sado-dispassionate” methodology of science. Sado-dispassionate is a psychoanalytic term coined by Lacanian theorist Teresa Brennan to characterise emotional neutrality in certain contexts, most obviously in scientific experimentation. It is a term adopted by Val Plumwood to convey a deep moral failing of science in today’s rationalist society.280 This term resonated with the discomfort I felt in observing the captured animals being “lethabarbed” (killed by a chemical injection) and dissected in the science tent. It also reminded me of the dissonance I experienced as a science student when it was compulsory to perform dissections, which involved killing the animal beforehand, and in some cases vivisections. To cope with inner conflict there was a form of irreverent mockery or dark humour at play in the laboratory.

In the science tent set up on the expedition camp site, I was curious about the way scientists displayed outward affection for the animals that had been trapped and plucked from their habitats to be prepared for dissection and identification. To express this inner frisson and

279 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2007 280 Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, p. 22

102 dissonance between emotion and empiricism, I anthropomorphised the animals collected by the scientists by staging them on colonial-style dolls’ furniture to highlight how these animals had entered an environment “thoroughly invested with human cultural values.”281

Figure 36 Dissected Greater Long-eared Bat propped in a doll’s house colonial-style rocking chair.282

Science and technology academic Eileen Crist argues that as science is heir to the Cartesian hiatus between humans and animals, representations of animal life, whether intentionally or not, are always addressing the contentious topic of animal consciousness.283 The demonstrative feelings of care and affection I witnessed by the scientists for their live specimens reflects a recognition of animals as sentient beings, yet the killing and dissection normalised by the traditions of Western scientific methods have, according to environmental philosopher Peter Hay, “rendered nature inert and insensible in order to morally justify the dissecting table.”284

One of the projects undertaken on this expedition was to look at European history in the area. The ruin of Pine Lodge was located for a survey in which I helped measure and map the

281 Goodall, "The Nemesis of Natural History," p.114 282 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2007 283 Eileen Crist, Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), p. 1 284 Hay, Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought, p. 75. Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) is regarded as the father of modern scientific methods

103 foundations. This survey work documented the material remains of the foundations and other signs of European occupation such as garden beds, rusty car parts and water tanks. This sole focus on European material history precluded the voice of Aboriginal people who would also have worked and lived on pastoral properties in these regions. Heritage studies academic Rodney Harrison argues that most rural historical archaeology “constitutes a profound omission of the entanglement of Aboriginal and settler Australians’ lives, lived in and through the landscape.”285

Despite this apparent omission of Aboriginal heritage, it is important to note that native title for the Gawler Ranges is currently under negotiation and any access to Government archives that may identify Aboriginal people is restricted to legal privilege and therefore not available for public use. As such I was not granted permission to access Government records that may identify Aboriginal people working or living at Yardea Station from the past. Anthropologists working for the Gawler Ranges Native Title project were under legal obligation not to disclose the identities of Aboriginal people who lived or worked at Yardea, and any secret/sacred knowledge of country continues to be held by the descendants of the original Aboriginal owners of this country. Encountering this process as part of my research has helped me appreciate the sensitive and delicate issue of Aboriginal land rights and cultural heritage.

In my field trips to the region I encountered an uneasiness when it came to mining and land rights issues, such as that reflected in comments from one local farmer that white landholders could own only the top six inches of soil. An Australian researcher on land and environmental issues, Nicholas Gill, notes how recent debates over future land use management and conflicts over native title on pastoral leasehold land have raised many aspects of contemporary frontier ideologies in Australia.286 It seems the issue of mining and native title in the Gawler Ranges is bringing to the surface past wounds and unsettling the surety of white pioneering privilege over the land. This disquiet arose with the advent of the Mabo case, which Richard Davis argues “destabilised the demand of oppositional categories of self and other, settler and Indigenous,

285 Rodney Harrison, "Historical Archaeology in the Land of the Black Stump," in Beyond the Black Stump, ed. Alan Mayne (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2008), p. 91 286 Gill, "Transcending Nostalgia ", unpaginated

104 colonised and coloniser that informs the presumptions of established frontiers.”287 Cultural studies academics Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs also note that the contemporary issue of land rights is a force where “a certain kind of unsettlement arises which is given expression by non- Aborigines and Aborigines alike.”288 The contestation of native title over pastoral land is prising open once again the unsettled nature of white settlement.

A Visit to Yardea Station

During this field trip I was able to visit Yardea Station at the invitation of the current station manager, Sandy Morris, to gain a sense of the land where my forebears lived and worked. I was surprised to see he had copies of the same photographs that had been passed down from my great-grandparents and was able to identify the localities where these photos may have been taken. Through this exchange I was able to visit the remote homestead and landscape where my forebears lived and worked a century before.

Figure 37 Yardea homestead with Bailey Family.289

The original house pictured above still exists, although it has been extended and is now used as accommodation for itinerant workers. The original building remains for the telegraph station which was originally built as the police station and has behind it the remains of the single-cell

287 Richard Davis, "Transforming the Frontier in Contemporary Australia", in Rose and Davis, Dislocating the Frontier, unpaginated 288 Gelder and Jacobs, "Uncanny Australia", p. 172 289 Photograph from Kneebone family collection

105 gaol. The post office building is also intact and used for accommodation and storage. Old stone sheds for tractors and farming equipment fringe the entrance to the homestead. I could imagine it would have been like a very small village with the families of the telegraph operators, post office employees and itinerant workers sharing this place with the Bailey family. Although no longer evident, the tennis court and the establishment of the small Gawler Ranges Tennis Club may have been a way to demarcate social divisions between the small group of white-collar workers and itinerant workers and others such as Aboriginal and Afghan people.290

Figure 38 Remnant equipment from post office and telegraph office at Yardea Station.291

Figure 39 Image of ice plant growing behind Yardea Station shearing sheds.292

On the surrounding pastoral paddocks the disturbance and displacement of native bush by pastoral stock and past attempts to grow grain have given way to fields of noxious weeds such as

290 Figure 28 on page 88 shows a post in the background holding up a wire fence surrounding the tennis court 291 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2007 292 Ibid

106 horehound which thrives in poor soil. It is believed this weed was used by shearers for curing head colds and for brewing beer.293 In my explorations I was particularly fascinated by the beauty of crystalline ice plants spreading out across the ground behind the old shearers’ quarters. This introduced succulent weed is covered in glistening jewel-like bladder cells that have the ability to accumulate salt. On death this salt leaches back into the soil to suppress the growth of other less tolerant species.294 I see the sinister beauty of this weed growing in a disturbed and denuded site as an indicator of cultural maladaptation embroidered onto a delicate and misunderstood ecology.

Pacific oyster shells discarded by itinerant shearers were also found behind the shearing shed, indicative of a link between this remote semi-arid property and the coastal regions of Eyre Peninsula. The current Yardea station manager also showed me what he believed to be a native oyster shell found on the property, perhaps once used as a tool or for exchange by Aboriginal people.

Wudinna Agricultural Show

Commencing in Australia in the 1880s, agricultural shows came to validate and honour the achievements of white settler pioneers as cultivators and “improvers” of the land. Cultural geographer Kay Anderson notes how underlying this display of domesticated nature is the enlightened conviction of Western civilisation that being human “transcends the merely natural.”295

During the SEG expedition I took the opportunity to go to the annual Wudinna Agricultural Show. Wudinna is a small farming town on the Eyre Highway located near Goyder’s line demarcating the wheat belt to the south and the pastoral lands to the north. Here I saw the proud displays of

293 “rumor was that shearers used to propagate it from shed to shed for use as a cure for head cold”, cited in Aussie Home Brewer online forum, http://www.aussiehomebrewer.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=26731, viewed 14/2/10. A record from Sir Joseph Bank’s diary states that horehound was sent to NSW on board the ship Porpoise on 11 October 1798. Horehound appears to have been introduced for use as a garden herb and for beer brewing. Cited in J. Weiss, N. Ainsworth and I. Faithfull, Best Practice Management Guide for Environmental weeds, (Adelaide: Weeds CRC, 2000), http://www.weedscrc.org.au/documents/horehound.pdf, viewed 14/2/10. 294 “Water for a Healthy Country”, CSIRO, http://www.anbg.gov.au/cpbr/WfHC/Mesembryanthemum/index.html, viewed 4/1/09 295 Kay Anderson, "White Natures: Sydney's Royal Agricultural Show in Post-Humanist Perspective," Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28, no. 4 (2003), p. 422

107 sheep, wool, wheat, birds, shearing machines and tractors. According to Anderson, agricultural shows can be perceived as spectacular enactments of the “triumphal narrative of human ingenuity over the nonhuman world.”296 The sheep shearing competitions continue to be demonstrations of male endurance and strength important in upholding the pioneer character of popular Australian history. The Country Women’s Association Hall was the venue for a variety of competitions including best fruit and vegetables and flower display. Agricultural shows could be perceived as competitive spectacles in terms of the search for perfect nature while the untidiness of “wild” nature is left out, subsumed by this monoculture of perfection.

Tucked away on the show grounds was a tiny school house, now the office for the local history society, displaying objects such as old maps, bottles and telegraph equipment that bear material witness to the pioneering past. This small tribute to the pioneering culture seemed to seal the local identity of this community and, along with the recent advent of the Australian Farmer statue, is an affirmation of its pioneering heritage heading into the future. The field trip to the Gawler Ranges gave me insights into how the agencies of white pioneering culture are still a deep and integral part of local industry and identity. Wheat and wool continue to be farmed as they have for generations, but while the pioneer myth may sustain a sense of nostalgia and identity, it is prone to change with time as any other myth.

It has been argued that white settlers’ narrative focus on the experience of a malignant and harsh landscape was a way for the colonial mind to bury the uncomfortable experiences of direct conflict between white settlers and Aboriginal people, in favour of a more acceptable focus of conflict between the settlers and the land itself.297 The process of overcoming emptiness, absence and loss involved a heroic, possibly tragic attempt to make the landscape theirs through the transformative process of cultivating and domesticating an unsettled terra nullius.

296 Ibid, p. 423 297 Attwood and Foster, Frontier Conflict, p. 192

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Field trip 2 – Pioneer Villages A second field trip taken in July 2008 involved a journey by road to visit a string of pioneer museums in the Eyre Peninsula and surrounding regions on the way to and from Yardea Station. These small institutions and pioneer villages, established from the late 1970s to early 1980s with their quaint collections of relocated buildings and material clutter from the past, helped me gain a sense of how pioneer nostalgia and myth-making have materially manifested. Claustrophobic “pug and pine” cottages are relocated or reconstructed as “authentic” reminders of how pioneers lived.

Australian historian Chris Healy notes how the material collections included in these museums started with the formation of groups such as Old Identities Associations and Pioneer Societies from 1860 to 1880 not only to focus on reminiscences but to collect objects of particular local importance.298 He also notes how most of these small bush museums do not proffer interpretive signs or comprehensive inventories because they were not subject to the same regulatory rules of state museums.299 Inanimate objects such as domestic irons, clothes and farm machinery sit side by side on overcrowded shelves and in rooms and sheds. With the absence of detailed information, the visitor is left with a confusing collection of eclectic objects and images from different times and places. Michel Foucault describes museums as “heterotopias of time” which enclose in one place objects from all times and styles: “They exist in time but also exist outside of time because they are built and preserved to be physically insusceptible to time’s ravages.”300 As social and political change takes place outside these walls, the museum provides refuge to these anachronistic objects as bearers of duplicitous memories.

Heritage studies academic Lisa Young remarks on how “authenticity” becomes a tricky concept in pioneer museums, where buildings have often been relocated to create artificial juxtapositions and interiors with a sense of “old-world” charm. She describes how these museum villages grow out of a process of dismantling and relocation in order to present a stage for the past. Within

298 Chris Healy, "Histories and Collecting: Museums, Objects and Memories," in Memory and History in Twentieth- Century Australia, p. 45 299 Ibid, pp. 45-6 300 Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," p. 26

109 such relocated cottages, shops and sheds the individual items maybe genuine, however “the en masse displays generate an incorrect picture of rural life.”301 Young makes the point that in recreating the minute details of small town life, larger issues such as drought, depression, plagues and isolation are ignored, “the tragedies and imperfections of life affect no real families”.302

Figure 40 1873 steam pump from Yardea Station, Koppio Smithy museum.303

Figure 41 Samples of barbed wire bush grown for fences, Koppio Smithy Museum.304

301 Young, "Villages That Never Were", p. 329 302 Ibid, pp. 328-30 303 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2008 304 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2008. Koppio Smithy Museum is famous for its collection of barbed wire. I was particularly fascinated by a display of Australian barbed wire bush grown to form fencing hedges (Figure 41).

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At such museums that display objects without provenance or historical context, I witnessed how information can be embellished and distorted to create half-truths. For example, an old boiler from Yardea Station is now displayed out of context in a shed among other bits of disused farm machinery at Koppio Smithy Museum. When asked what its function was, the museum attendant explained at length about how it was used to drive shearing machinery. However, in an unpublished history on the Gawler Ranges, I found it was a steam pump once based at “S well” where it was used for pumping water.305 This example confirmed for me the tenuousness of memory and how distorted “facts” can create disjointed gaps in knowledge between the past and present.

Figure 42 Catching a Calf after breaking away when yarding Cattle at Paney Station. Pencil drawing titled from the “Life in the Gawler Ranges” by Leslie W Bebbington, 1909, Streaky Bay National Trust Museum.306

305 John Starkey, The Southwest Gawler Ranges: A Personal View (Victoria: Yekrats Publishing, 2004), unpaginated 306 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2008

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Figure 43 Pencil drawing signed Leslie Bebbington, 1910, Paney, Gawler Ranges.307

I found only a few images and artefacts linked to Yardea scattered across the museums. Among the repository of artefacts at Streaky Bay National Trust Museum I recognised sketches hanging on the wall depicting life in the Gawler Ranges by Leslie Bebbington, who had drawn the image of the dingo for Winifred Bailey discussed in Chapter Six. The images above refer to Paney Station in 1909 and 1910, which was part of the Yardea lease at the time it was managed by Arthur Bailey. These sketches give the impression of the adventuresome life of a station hand – a tale of rogue bulls and lanky stockmen in the outback.

I also found a photographic portrait of James Grey Moseley, MP, Arthur Bailey’s uncle by marriage and the main leaseholder of Yardea Station, in an old school room in Koppio Smithy Museum. It hangs opposite a wall bearing an elaborate display of Aboriginal artefacts. It makes a profound juxtaposition given Moseley’s early reminiscences of his encounters with the Aboriginal people of the Gawler Ranges (Chapter Six). The Aboriginal artefacts found in the Koppio Smithy Museum are displayed in an elaborate Pitt-Rivers style, a nineteenth century system of display used for ethnological artefacts based on grouping like objects according to their functional use and aesthetic qualities rather than locating them in their ethnographic context according to criteria such as cultural group or place of origin.308 A common thread between these museums is that Aboriginal history and culture is presented as being only at the start of the pioneering

307 Ibid 308 Annie Coombs, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 118-21

112 narrative, an acknowledgement that Aboriginal people were here before white settlement, but beyond this time further references and stories remain slim.

Figure 44 Aboriginal artefacts in school room, Koppio Smithy Museum.309

Figure 45 James Grey Moseley, lease owner of Yardea Station and uncle to Arthur Bailey. In school classroom hanging on wall opposite Aboriginal artefacts, Koppio Smithy Museum.310

These pioneer museums are now a few decades old and are in themselves becoming anachronistic sites. How will these small bush museums and their precious cargo of objects signifying “whiteness” fit into an era of shifting social and environmental awareness? Once revered and respected, they no longer enjoy uncritical confidence and admiration. We are

309Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2008 310 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2008

113 positioned at a point of change, increasingly aware of the importance of understanding “history” as a series of self-reflexive narratives.311

However, there is no denying the folkloric charm of these museums as one attempts to decode these loose remnants of material culture from the past. They often include a display of miscellaneous Aboriginal artefacts which are given no provenance and no clues in terms of identifying their origins. Chris Healy suggests that for Aboriginal people, these remnant artefacts provide the opportunity and potential to subvert white history’s status quo by “remaking connections, meaning and memory between objects, culture and history.”312

The celebration of local pioneering history while eliding ongoing Aboriginal presence still seemed to be a pervasive and ominous ingredient in some country towns. I just had to scratch the surface to experience a sense of how Aboriginal people are still consigned to the shadowy margins. In one place I was casually informed at the motel that my car would be safe parked on the street because there were no black people there “... they are all at Ceduna.” Such perplexing encounters highlighted to me the socially produced complexities that have established themselves and the inordinate distancing that European colonisation has created between black and white cultures.

Figure 46 NAIDOC march, Ceduna, 2008.

311 Young, "Villages That Never Were ", p. 335 312 Healy, "Histories and Collecting: Museums, Objects and Memories," p. 44

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Figure 47 NAIDOC march float, Ceduna, 2008.313

The next day I happened to visit the Ceduna Art Centre where I was informed that the annual National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) march was about to depart through town. Homemade floats of car trailers and utes passed by with about one hundred local Aboriginal people taking part. Apart from the participants in the parade and the few people watching the start, the streets were empty of spectators, a somewhat eerie and desolate atmosphere for a celebration of cultural affirmation and identity.

After the march I went to the Old Schoolhouse National Trust Museum a couple of blocks away, where a wide range of pioneer artefacts are displayed in rooms and relocated buildings. With a mixture of horror and curiosity I found I had wandered into the “Maralinga Room”. Its collection of objects highlights 1950s politically inculcated fear and the absurdity of outback atomic testing. Given the general secrecy of government about such matters I did not expect to see such a display of malignant artefacts. Without interpretive signs I was unsure whether to take it as an anachronistic display of progress or as an admission of monumental human folly. Perhaps the objects are loaded enough to speak for themselves in conveying the horrors of this historically repressed memory. The museum neglects to note the stories of removal of many Aboriginal people from their lands for the atomic tests and how they could not return for decades, and how other Aboriginal people were left exposed to the tests because Government officials left them in

313 Photographs by Sue Kneebone, 2008

115 the area.314 After watching the NAIDOC march I wondered if local Aboriginal people ever dared to visit this museum, containing as it does grim reminders of official indifference and ignorance.

Figure 48 Equipment in Maralinga Room, Old Schoolhouse National Trust Museum, Ceduna.315

314 For more information on the scale and impact of this atomic testing and the role of “native patrol” officer Walter B. MacDougall, see “Atom Bombs before Aborigines: Maralinga” in Christobel Mattingley and Ken Hampton eds, Survival in Our Own Land: ‘Aboriginal’ experiences in ‘South Australia’ since 1836 (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1988), pp. 88-9. It was not only Aboriginal people who were affected; during the atomic tests many Australian and British army personnel “were deliberately exposed to the blasts just to see what effect radiation had on troops.” Cited in Maralinga – Our Own Shame, http://www.sea-us.org.au/thunder/britsbombingus.html, viewed 10/12/09

315 Photo by Sue Kneebone, 2008

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Figure 49 Sign at Ceduna explaining the myth of Gulliver’s Travels.316

Another incidental find on the foreshore at Ceduna was an interpretive sign explaining how the myth of Gulliver’s Travels (1735) may relate St Peter and St Francis Islands within sight of the coast at Ceduna. English author Johnathon Swift plotted his fictional lands cartographically within the vicinity of Terra Australis and, according to this sign, the islands of Lilliput coincide with the coordinates of these islands. Stories by British and French mariners fuelled tales of imaginary beasts and giants. Centuries of antipodean speculations infiltrated European perceptions of Australia and popular stories such as Gulliver’s Travels are roughly contemporary with the times of arrival of white settlers. Now I found myself standing on a site once perceived by European imagination as the absolute edge of empire and a place of imaginings of monsters and giants. Such fantasies helped foster ideas of the unexplored margins, places that were “conceived as remote and menacing”, a place on the periphery, a place of fantasy and sensational possibilities.317 Fears about the unknown appear to have accompanied the mindset of new white settlers, who reported that nature here was perverse. Imperialism and the Enlightenment may have been in full swing, but the anterior world of superstition was always ready to surface.

Heading back from Ceduna along the Eyre Highway I found a bush museum in the small town of Poochera. Here among a hoard of domestic objects donated by locals, I found a newspaper article on Whipstick Billy, and tucked away up on the wall among other paraphernalia was a

316 Ibid 317 Shino Konishi, "'Inhabited by a Race of Formidable Giants': French Explorers, Aborigines, and the Endurance of the Fantastic in the Great South Land, 1803," Australian Humanities Review, no. 44 (2008), p. 16

117 photo of King Poojeri, an Aboriginal elder wearing a breast plate indentifying him as the local Aboriginal monarch. Poojeri, who worked as a shearer in the region in his younger years and died in 1916, may have been one of the early witnesses to the first white settlement in the area. The town of Poochera was named after Poojeri and was derived from the word Putyednura meaning “towards the mist”. I wondered if Poojeri might have also worked at Yardea about fifty kilometres away.

Figure 50 Photograph of King Poojeri and boomerang (no provenance), Poochera Community Museum.318

318 Photograph by Sue Kneebone, 2008

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Figure 51 Travelling Hawker visiting Yardea, early 1900s.319

At the Kimba Museum I came across a photo of Pram Singh which helped me to contextualise his “place” on the land. Singh is seen with a wooden cart laden with haberdashery that he is selling to the women at Yardea and is identified as a “Travelling Hawker”, again anonymous but now the centre of narrative attention allowing for a more accommodating reading of his role in this photo. Perhaps the exchange between Pram Singh and the women could be seen as a meeting of mutual material and social needs of those usually excluded by gender and race from the pioneering myths of masculine endeavour. This photograph illustrates the presence and place of people whose memories and stories were inconsequential or patronised in pioneering reminiscences and recollections. In his memoirs of the region Clem Fitzgerald recalls the hawkers: “The ones with the vans had quite a collection of goods and clothing, and before they opened up the van, they would say something like this – ‘You want to see my things – Bengal Razor, Rogery Pocket knife, Shirt a man, Trousers woman’.” Small findings such as these helped me to help look inside the grand narratives of populist Australian pioneer history.

319 Photograph courtesy of Kimba and Gawler Ranges Historical Society

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On my return trip to Adelaide, I dropped into the Homestead Park Pioneer Museum built in the suburbs of Port Augusta. I walked through a gate expecting to find someone in attendance but it seemed empty. I felt self-conscious entering this repository of white pioneering memories located in a suburban area of mixed Aboriginal and European residents. The museum, neglected and apparently deserted, seemed to exist in a liminal state, waiting for history to be rewritten in a more reflective way. The surety of the pioneering past now seemed merely as an anachronistic display.

On Reflection

The more museums I visited across the west coast of South Australia, the more I became perplexed as to how to knit a cohesive story together from these discordant objects and narratives. These museums and their unprovenanced objects become part of a generic pioneer nostalgia observing the past. By searching through the mass of objects and images at Koppio, Streaky Bay, Poochera and Kimba Museums I found a few more fragments of information relating to people and objects from Yardea.

The more information I gathered, the more I became aware that a shifting network of pastoralists, Aboriginal people, mailmen, white settler families, teachers, police, telegraph and postal workers, field naturalists, hawkers, cameleers, dam sinkers, stockmen, hunters, shearers, cooks, swagmen and other itinerant workers have entered and left these marginal lands over time. More recently tourists, anthropologists, historians, feral control officers, ecologists, geologists, mining companies and native title claimants have all left traces on the Gawler Ranges landscape to differing degrees.

As I tried to unearth more complex stories and memories about the colonial landscape I found myself part of the inner babble of white amnesia. I now look to these mnemonic objects as reference points within spatial networks of lost stories rather than bearers of new historical “facts” and insights. As I reflected back on this fragmented and jumbled “history”, the process of bricolage enabled me to imagine other narrative connections between objects, images and words.

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8 Creative outcomes

This chapter broadly documents art works generated over the period of my candidature from 2007 to 2010. It follows the chronology of studio research and exhibition projects associated with the research investigation from commencement in 2007 to the proposed exhibition, Naturally Disturbed, to be held at South Australia School of Art Gallery in April 2010. It records the thinking behind some of the works and considers spatial installation of works for final exhibition.

Critiques held at the South Australian School of Art’s Liverpool Street Gallery during my candidacy have provided an important platform for feedback and critical reflection on studio research. These small prototype exhibitions for research students and staff helped to gauge shifts in thinking and development of the studio research, which itself reflects an imaginative response to the theoretical concerns addressed in this exegesis.

Naturally Disturbed recalls the mythical sense of fear, isolation and melancholy that the remote Australian environment has instilled into European consciousness. Parlour room photographs, furniture, bones, guns and animal pelts call on us to revisit the dreams of past colonial enterprise of conquering and opening up the land for pastoral use. Rather than idyllic scenes of pastoral landscapes, the sense of interiority in these works serves to question how the ramifications of the colonial mind manifest today in scientific endeavours such as plant genomics which continue to push nature towards an unknown future. Through the studio research, discordant remains of the past are combined with images and objects from the present to create an uncertain dialogue between memory and history.

This engagement with Australian pastoral history could be considered a moral, political and poetical response to place and landscape. These art works make explicit the subjective nature of the creative process through the aesthetic agency of materials and images in response to history,

122 place and landscape. By working with the equivocal tensions between memory and history, I have investigated the anterior chambers of white settler history to reveal its nebulous relationship with nature and place. The following quote by cultural theorist Lisa Slater underpins the thinking behind my art works. By letting in some of the elements which are strange and unhomely, one might begin to build connections which aid the reimagining of the self and the social, which in turn enables one to not only live in postcolonial Australia but participate in creating it. A strange place: unsettled by other desires, histories, knowledge and memories …320

Relying on the material traces of archives I am resurrecting and interrogating myths. Retrieved archival material such as letters, photographs, newspaper articles, telegrams and reminiscences provide tenuous links to memories and events from another time. I have sought ways to bring these fragments together through the interpolative processes of bricolage and photomontage to destabilise and disrupt normative references to the colonial past. These works lie between history and myth having been recast from the material traces of the past. They operate as metaphors that evoke the anterior world of Yardea as a place where white settlers wandered in out of place. White settler culture is made strange through the studio processes of photomontage and assemblage that allow for the loose accumulation of gathered materials and photos to be redirected into other unexpected forms or images.321

Aboriginal Cultures Collection, South Australia Museum

Through collaboration with the South Australian Museum, the exhibition will include selected Aboriginal cultural artefacts dating from the period of early settler contact in the Gawler Ranges pastoral area. I anticipate that the inclusion of Aboriginal material culture alongside my own visual artworks will allow for a critical engagement reflecting the complexities and shifts in thinking about the environment and Aboriginal culture and history since the time of British colonisation. An important aspect of my PhD project is the recognition of Aboriginal people from

320 Lisa Slater, "No Place Like Home: Staying Well in a Too Sovereign Country", Media-Culture, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2007), http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/13-slater.php, viewed 10/7/2009, paragraph 20 (unpaginated) 321 Based on Richard Dyer’s theories of race that “white people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words, whiteness needs to be made strange.” Richard Dyer, "The Matter of Whiteness," in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, ed. Les Back and John Solomos (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 241

123 the Gawler Ranges whose heritage and culture has been affected by the social and environmental legacies of white settlement.

In developing this part of the exhibition, it was important with respect to ethics and the integrity of this project to consult with representatives of the Gawler Ranges Aboriginal community to seek consent in displaying their artefacts. This was undertaken at a meeting with the Kokotha Mula Nations Land Council committee on 6 December 2009 at Port Augusta. The committee agreed to the exhibition on condition that community representatives could view the selected museum objects to make sure that none were culturally sensitive. To ensure this, a second meeting took place on 5 January 2010 with a senior curator at the South Australia Museum. Ideally, Kokotha involvement in the inclusion of museum artefacts in the exhibition context helps build bridges and open up dialogue between the past and present and between Aboriginal and non-Indigenous cultures. As discussed in Chapter Two, collaborating with the museum to include cultural artefacts as bearers of memories provides an important opportunity to draw on local histories to better understand national debates and themes.322

Figure 52 Left to right: Shield from Yardea, Gawler Ranges; two small throwing clubs (double-pointed), collected at Koonibba by Pastor Hoff, late 1920s; a small bundle of cut mallee roots, as used for water (with leaves of the tree for identification), collected near Fowlers Bay, 1928.323

For the final examination exhibition at South Australia School of Art Gallery the spatial arrangement of art works and the juxtaposition of Aboriginal cultural objects from the era of early Gawler Ranges pastoralism is intended as a series of tableaux that interconnect and resonate with each other. I envisage that as the viewer encounters the works stories will start to circulate within stories, prompting critical speculation and other points of view.

322 Sculthorpe, "Exhibiting Indigenous Histories in Australian Museums", pp. 73-8 323 Photographs by Philip Jones

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Studio Research 2007 to 2009

The following works from my studio practice are provocative expressions of the notion of pioneer settlers being out of place in another’s land – the experience of settlement and unsettlement as a combination of the heimlich and unheimlich circulating through each other. My visual response to the colonial and pastoral history of the Gawler Ranges is through incomplete memories and impressions from the past that have been brought together in intuitive ways that give rise to art works that resonate with the Gothic mode predicated on the darkness and anxiety specific to the Australian experience.

The Gothic genre as a popular form of fiction was persistent during the time of British settlement in Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Australian studies academic Gerry Turcotte proposes that the Gothic mode is ideal to convey a sense of spiritual malaise specific to the Australian colonial experience because of its associations with fear, uncertainty, isolation and the unknown. He gives examples unique to the Australian Gothic experience such as the anxieties experienced at isolated stations, being at the mercy of nature, frontier conflict and becoming lost in the bush.324 Turcotte explains how the Gothic mode as a hybrid form works by fragmentation, borrowings and conflations. In doing so it lends itself to surreal and uncanny fabrications where the unfamiliar is imposed on the familiar. 325

In her book Fantastic Metamorphosis, Other Worlds, Marina Warner postulates that the Gothic sensibility was a literary tool for “turning on its head the governing notion of Otherness”. 326 She intimates that tales of metamorphosis often occur at points of inter-change or cross cultural zones. Warner explains how such transformations allow the rules of natural order to be broken, and invite us to enter an imaginative realm where reverie may help us to think otherwise.327 This fits in with the Australian colonial experience where cross cultural encounters in an unfamiliar place lends itself to the Gothic sensibility as a popular form of expression.

324 G. Turcotte. "Australian Gothic" Faculty of Arts - Papers (University of Wollongong, 1998), http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/11, viewed 19/06/2010, unpaginated 325 G. Turcotte, "Vampiric Decolonization: Fanon, 'Terrorism' and Mudrooroo’s Vampire Trilogy" Faculty of Arts - Papers (University of Wollongong , 2005), http://works.bepress.com/gturcotte/4, viewed 25/06/2010, unpaginated 326 Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 24 327 Ibid, p. 18

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The found images and materials I have gathered either have a direct connection to, or are inspired by my research into the Gawler Ranges. Through the manipulation of photographs, found materials and archives, my art works seek to stir and unsettle the viewer in ways that resonate with the anxiety and uncertainties of colonial settlers. Family ancestors are transformed into hybrid characters to implicate them in this colonial past when the settlers forcibly ‘naturalised’ their environment by transposing the familiar into unfamiliar space that “emerged out of a condition of deracination and uncertainty”.328 Turcotte explains that it is “this very quality which Freud identified as the condition of the uncanny, where the home becomes unhomely—where the heimlich becomes unheimlich—and yet remains sufficiently familiar to disorient and disempower.”329

328 Turcotte, "Vampiric Decolonization", unpaginated 329 Ibid

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Figure 53 A theatre of flying insects, 2007, giclee print330

Photographs from my family collection of Edna and Winifred Bailey (my paternal grandmother) as children have been drawn upon as metaphors for vulnerability and innocence. Post-colonial theorist Bill Ashcroft writes about the way the trope of the child in post-colonial literature serves to magnify the ambivalence between wilderness and civilisation. Referring to David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon, Ashcroft describes how the child stands in as an uncreated place, an interconnection between being and place, half wild and half civilised, somewhere between culture and nature.331

In Figure 53, A theatre of flying insects (2007) is a pestilential pantomime of insect-like fairies infiltrating and disrupting the theatrical setting of the studio photograph with its painted backdrop of an Arcadian landscape.332 The fairytale imagery is used to draw the viewer in to consider more insidious subtexts such as disturbed ecologies from colonial incursions.

These images of young girls hark back to a time when the fairytales of bucolic dreams and utopian futures were starting to be displaced by the realities of an unforgiving landscape and economic demands of an indifferent industrial world.

330 All photos in Chapter Eight taken by Sue Kneebone unless otherwise indicated 331 Bill Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Future (New York: Continuum, 2001), p. 55 332 Original photograph from Kneebone family collection. The photograph is undated, but the approximate age of the girls indicates it may be been taken around the time their older brother Bert died aged 9 in 1911.

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Figure 54 A delicate menace, 2007, giclee print

A delicate menace (2007) is a whimsical reverie evoking the darker side of white settler society’s ambivalent relationship with nature. The anthropogenic notion of nature as something humans can influence was central to the rationale behind nineteenth century acclimatisation societies, which can now be seen as an uncontrolled experiment in ecology. The South Australian Acclimatisation Society was established in 1862 and released 45 starlings not only as a way of introducing familiar species from the homeland of empire, but as a form of biocontrol to eat mosquitoes and other insect pests.333 In A delicate menace the girls have been transfigured with the scanned head of a starling. Included in this image is a scanned sheaf of barley grown in a plant genomics research laboratory that is searching for genetic markers for drought-tolerant grains. Australian ecologist Tim Low argues that the research work of scientists at institutions such as the CSIRO could be regarded as the ongoing work of acclimatisation societies that were responsible for introducing many types of animals and plants into Australia.334

333 Tim Low, Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia's Exotic Invaders (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 37, 275 334 Ibid, p. 275

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This work also contains images of locusts plucked from my car radiator after a road trip through northern South Australia. This alludes to the swarms of locusts that benefit from devouring white settlers’ crops. The round format of the image is intended to evoke the microscopic lens of science.

Figure 55 The coexistence of comfort and threat, 2008, giclee print

In The coexistence of comfort and threat (2008), the girls’ clothes are transmogrified with barley plants grown in a plant genomics laboratory, alluding to a futuristic world unknown in their time. Today artificial selection has gone beyond backyard breeding into the laboratory where, through reproductive and gene biotechnology, transgenic food and animals are now being realised in the interests of sustainability and ecological conservation. Hanging on the wall behind the girls are images from biotechnology research.335

335 The background images in The coexistence of comfort and threat are microscope slide images prepared by Dr. Gwen Mayo of the Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics, University of Adelaide.

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Figure 56 A cautionary tale of overconfidence, 2007, giclee print

In A cautionary tale of overconfidence (2007), pastoral owners from the early 1900s display their manly confidence as they pose with folded arms and crossed legs. These are gentlemen who have attempted to master nature in a semi-arid zone that experiences extreme heat and precarious rainfall. These men have been hybridised with the heads of bats and a rabbit found over a century later during the Scrubby Peak biosurvey in 2007 as discussed in Chapter Seven. While the rabbit is regarded as an introduced environmental pest, the mircobats endemic to the area have become endangered due to the ecological imbalances caused by pastoralism.

The interpolative process of bricolage and photomontage allows for the creation of intersections that span the gaps of time and enfold the present within the past. The anterior roots of colonial fear and unknown futures are unfurled in the folds of curtains and clothes in the form of technical and scientific artefacts unknown at the time of the photographs.

The following works were assembled from found objects gathered from the Gawler Ranges. Animal bones and remains were collected and reassembled into objects as reminders of how past problems still manifest in the present. Feral goats remain a problem and hunters count their bounty with ears strung up on a piece of wire back at their campsite. A found goat’s leg

130 and bones were cobbled together into the shape of the gun. Iron red volcanic stones typical of the Gawler Ranges and covered in delicate coatings of green lichen are found scattered across the pastoral paddocks. These were placed in shoes from Pakistan, once British India, from where many of the cameleers migrated. A feral goat’s skull sewn into muslin cloth with embroidered motifs has an other-worldly feel.

Figure 57 Bounty, 2008, goat ears, wheat seeds, jewel box

Figure 58 (right) Goat Gun, 2008, bones, cloth

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Figure 59 Left: Stepping stones, 2008, Gawler Ranges stones and shoes Right: Untitled, 2008, goat skull, muslin, embroidered cloth

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Figure 60 Skin Deep, 2008, woollen blankets dyed in eucalypt bark, Palmer Sculpture Biennial, 2008.

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Figure 61 Skin Deep, 2008, installation in Liverpool St Gallery, 2008.

Skin Deep (2008) is a series of animal-shaped pelts made from blankets dyed in eucalypt bark. The woollen blankets recall the stealth-like replacement of traditional fur clothing (such as possum skins, which were waterproof, warm and durable) with blanket rations.336 This work draws on Aboriginal-European relations from the colonial past with its civilising experiments and the subsequent legacy of ongoing colonial afflictions that have been inscribed onto the landscape. This work was initially made for the Palmer Sculpture Biennial in March 2008 (see Figure 60). The denuded landscape of Palmer, once a pastoral property but now owned and managed by Adelaide sculptor Greg Johns, provided an opportunity to exhibit temporary site- specific works. Skin Deep was later reconfigured to hang in the Liverpool Street Gallery (Figure 61).

336 See, for example, Michael Smithson, “A Misunderstood Gift: The Annual Issue of Blankets to Aborigines in New South Wales, 1826-48”, in The Push: A Journal of Early Australian Social History, No. 30, 1992, pp. 73-108. In early colonial South Australia, blankets were distributed each year to Aboriginal parents whose children attended school

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Figure 62 Angelfire, 2008, bones, cloth, ceramics (detail)

Figure 63 Angelfire, (detail)

Angelfire (2008) is an installation of guns cobbled together from animal bones found in Gawler Ranges pastoral regions. It has been alleged that during the “wild colonial days” between the 1850s and 1880s nearly every Australian rural homestead harboured several revolvers and long arms.337 Guns played an important part in opening up the landscape for pastoral use while also erasing native ecologies. In his book Fatal Collisions, Foster describes how early settlers’ memoirs of violent encounters with Aboriginal people is written in the genre of romance and adventure. These early biographical memoirs and reminiscences by pioneers helped to frame Australia’s fledgling history.338

337 Edgar Penzig, In Defence of Lives and Property: The Weapons Used in Australia in Wild Colonial Days (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1981), p.9 338 Foster et al, Fatal Collisions, p.99

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In his landmark book The Other Side of the Frontier, historian Henry Reynolds describes early Aboriginal interpretations of guns and gunfire which included the term winji-bandi, meaning emu leg or shank, and other more graphic names such as “holemaker”.339 Andrea Gaynor comments on how guns were also used unrestrictedly from the outset by Europeans in Australia to hunt native animals for food and sport and for skins for export. Native predators such as eagles and dingoes were also killed to protect livestock. She notes that as a result of unrestricted hunting, many species of fauna declined dramatically. However, in an ironic twist, Games Acts laws were introduced to protect some birds and mammals to make sure there were enough to go around for recreational hunting, and even rabbits were given protection.340

The telegraph

From the 1870s the arrival of the telegraph replaced the mail as a rapid means of connecting remote regions to the metropolis. Hearing Loss revives the arcane language of morse code translated from nineteenth century telegrams sent on the east-west line alongside remote South Australian pastoral areas. Australian historian Ingereth McFarlane notes the telegraph line was an agent of modernity that altered the spatial history of Australia by allowing instantaneous connection to the rest of the world. However, McFarlane also points out it had unintended outcomes by creating another form of “contact zone” as it cut through the country and lives of local Aboriginal people.341

South Australian historian Philip Jones writes that: “As custodians of that single strand of wire binding the colonial capitals to London, the metropolis of empire, the telegraph station managers were largely unaware that it bisected a seething complex of Aboriginal lines of mythology and communication”, as they were “bound to office space in the limitless space of desert and bush”.342

339 Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, p. 99 340 Andrea Gaynor, "Colonists and the Land: An Environmental History of Nineteenth Century Australia," in Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past since 1788, ed. David Ritter and Deborah Gare (Melbourne: Thomson, 2008), p. 51 341 Cited in Harrison, "Historical Archaeology in the Land of the Black Stump", p. 95 342 Jones, Ochre and Rust, p. 127

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In 1898 a west coast settler pleaded by telegram: “For God’s sake send rations. Natives starving. Their case urgent.”343 This telegram was sent along the east-west line from Fowlers Bay to Adelaide via Yardea telegraph station. The old native pine telegraph pole from Yardea in this installation was likely to have been part of this urgent transmission.

Jane Belfrage responds to the trope of “The Great Australian Silence” by describing how the colonisers transformed “the land into an ecological disaster-zone, they replaced the subjectivities of the land’s ancient soundscape with silences and voices and meanings of their own, which were then committed to powerful paper texts.”344

Figure 64 Left: Hearing Loss, 2009, timber wardrobe, ceramic insulator and copper wire with recorded soundscape. Right: Hearing Loss (detail). For Adaptation, satellite exhibition for Murray Darling Palimpsest at Palmer, March 2009.

Hearing Loss was first installed at Palmer for Adaptation, a satellite show as part of the 2009 Murray Darling Palimpsest. The sound of Morse code transcribed from the nineteenth century telegrams was transmitted between the native Casuarina tree and the narrow coffin-like wardrobe. As listeners walked from the wardrobe to the tree, the electronic sound became replaced by the ghostly sound of the wind through the leaves and branches of the tree – a dialogue between nature and reason.

343 J.B. Rickaby to Protector of Aborigines, 1 February 1898, SRSA GRG52/1/1898/42. Reproduced with permission from Department of Aboriginal Affairs 344 Jane Belfrage, "The Great Australian Silence: Inside Acoustic Space," Australian Sound Design Project (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1994), www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/AusSilence.html, viewed 23/09/08

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Figure 65 Hearing Loss, 2009, 1870s native pine telegraph pole from Yardea, timber wardrobe and copper wire with soundscape, Liverpool Street Gallery

Figure 66 Hearing Loss (detail)

Hearing Loss was later exhibited with an authentic 1870s native pine telegraph pole from Yardea, in Liverpool Street Gallery. The thin copper wire is so delicate it could snap, breaking the communication link, exposing the vulnerability of those in the outback. The sound of Morse code is effective in its repetition, cutting through space with gaps and pauses in sound as it is conducted along the copper wire oscillating between the pole and cupboard. The wardrobe suggests domestic space in dialogue with the exterior natural world. It also draws on the story of Mrs Cole, who passed away at Yardea, too sick to travel the distance to Port Augusta for medical

138 help. Her husband, a telegraph operator at Yardea, was left to bury his wife at Yardea and reportedly made a makeshift coffin out of office furniture.345

This context of death is repeated through the dead tree trunk of a native cypress pine, once used as telegraph pole and now found discarded in the landscape with the telegraph line becoming redundant technology. This resurrected tree, like a funerary relic, bears down on us from the past to evoke associations with death and change through the passing of time.346 Callitris trees, or native cypress pines, are an important part of the culture of Aboriginal people for the manufacture of spears, spear throwers, ceremonial objects. Resin is used to make glue while the cones, bark, leaves and ash are components in various medicines.347 According to Moseley, “Pimpa”, the name of the old Banggarla man he referred to in Chapter Five, is an Aboriginal word meaning tall pine tree. The name Pimpa may therefore indicate the significance of cultural connections of Aboriginal people to Callitris trees. Thus while the Callitris provided an important and sustainable resource for Aboriginal peoples, these trees also proved to be a valuable building material for the new settlers. In the Gawler Ranges National Park the remains of Pine Lodge and a family photograph from Yardea showing a hut made of vertical pine slabs indicate the pastoralists use of native cypress pines. From what I observed on my field trip to the Gawler Ranges, cypress pine trees appeared few in number and I wonder how many were cut down by white settlers for building houses, fences and the telegraph line.

Water

As was noted in Chapter Five, Yardea is believed to be an Aboriginal word for “place of rushes” and its location was most likely an important source of water for Aboriginal groups that moved through this country. Where the explorer Stephen Hack’s references to Aboriginal people ceased in his journal, so too did his “discoveries” of water and use of Aboriginal names. At one point

345 Kirk, "Herb Kirk's Outback Adventures" 346 For information refer to: What is the Symbolism of the Cypress Tree? http://www.ehow.com/about_6560164_symbolism-cypress-tree_.html#ixzz0rNDETH1h, viewed 19/06/2010 347 “Australian forest profiles: Callitris”, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.http://www.daff.gov.au/brs/publications/series/forest-profiles/australian_forest_profiles_callitris, viewed 19/06/2010

139 without Aboriginal guides, he named one rivulet Pagan’s Creek after a packhorse that happened on it.348

Figure 67 Small rock holes near Mt Ive Station, Gawler Ranges, 2008.

Introduced stock and changed land use practices had a severe impact on Aboriginal people’s traditional lifestyle which led to confrontation. The Gawler Ranges’ scarce surface water, in particular, could easily be depleted by stock – Hack had found one spring at Mount Ive “scarcely sufficient for our horses”,349 and the intensification of stock-carrying in the 1870s and 1880s would have left little water for use by Aboriginal people or the native fauna on which they had traditionally relied for food.350 In 1872, with no rains and the runs short of feed, Aboriginal people stole food from shepherds’ huts and fencers’ tents at and near Yardea, taking clothes to “carry their plunder in”.351 It is significant that trouble with the area’s Aboriginal people in 1882 and 1898 also happened under the duress of drought.

348 Hack, 19 September 1857. “Explorations of Mr. S. Hack”, SA Parliamentary Papers 1857-58, Vol.2, No.156 349 Hack, 10 October 1857 350 On stock consuming scarce water elsewhere, see Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 156-157 351 “Country News”, The Chronicle, 31 August 1872, p. 7

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Figure 68 I never reached water, 2009, horse tail, sponges, horse shoes, sticks (detail), Liverpool St Gallery, 2009

I never reached water (2009) developed out of my consideration of early explorer-surveyors’ attempts to cross the Gawler Ranges in quest of finding and opening up pastoral country when extreme heat and scarcity of water often landed them in difficulties, such as in the case of the young Englishman named Edmondson mentioned in Chapter Five who became lost after the rock hole at Yardea dried up and whose remains were found six months later.352

Geoffrey Blainey writes on the ingenuity required to find water by Aboriginal people – a skill subsequently adopted by white explorers: “After a short shower had fallen on dry land, travellers sometimes used a sponge to collect water from the neat shallow holes created in the soft earth by the impact of horses’ hooves. The same sponges could be used to collect the morning dew. With patience a small sponge, used again and again, might eventually fill a quart pot.”353 On a more ominous note, those that ignored the “native guide” were at risk. Thus on the one hand, explorers often depended on Aboriginal knowledge to find water to survive and open up the land for their own expansionist gains, yet on the other many explorers manifested a deeply epistemologically engendered ignorance of Aboriginal people who were perceived, as with nature, to be something exterior and inferior to white culture. As early settlement followed the explorer-surveyors’ experiences, James Grey Moseley reminisced on saving a group of Aboriginal people from thirst in the Gawler Ranges by procuring water for them. He described their survival technique of drinking water from mallee roots:

352 Richardson, Pioneers of the North-West, p.12 353 Geoffrey Blainey, Black Kettle and Full Moon: Daily Life in a Vanished Australia (Melbourne: Penguin 2003), p. 38

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While we were camped at Wilcherry … a startling incident occurred. Just in the gloaming six or seven poor wretched blacks appeared at the door of our tent their tongues sticking to the roofs of their mouths, and in the last stage of exhaustion for want of water. A lot of about 20 had essayed to travel through from Streaky Bay. The weather turned out fearfully hot – twas near Christmas and the rock holes they had depended on for water proved dry. For three days they had camped during the great heat and travelled at night through the dense scrub, subsisting during the whole time on mallee water, obtained from the roots of dark green mallee, easily distinguished by the natives. The roots may be eight, and even ten or twelve yards long, just under the ground, and contain a small supply of sickly tasting water. They are broken in short lengths and drained into large shells brought from the coast or tin pots, but they had few of the latter in those days. The small supply of water is sufficient to keep body and soul together until a large rock-hole is reached. My brother and I spent a day and night carrying water along the back track, and saved the lives of the whole lot of women and children. The worst case was a very old man, Pimpa, and his was a close call. When we found him the flies and crows had marked him for their own, but water poured between his lips soon restored him.354

Moseley saw himself as a heroic and enlightened humanitarian by procuring water from his newly sunk dams to save these Aboriginal people’s lives. However, he failed to reflect on the bigger picture of the double impact that pastoralism and drought had had on the small amount of surface water, often found in rock holes on which the Aboriginal people relied. But as he recalls, his benevolent actions probably saved these people’s lives under the circumstances of loss and change to their land.

The series Saintly Sinners is a group of photomontages based on images of pioneers who were part of the early endeavour to open up the Gawler Ranges to pastoral runs. These venerable men are now seen through the lenses of environmental and cultural history as protagonists who brought with them a legacy of vermin, weeds and the dispossession of Aboriginal people. Robert Foster notes how early reminiscences of pioneer men “could be seen to represent mainstream conservative attitudes based around the cultural supremacy of the pastoral industry in South Australia”.355 Saintly Sinners seeks to reveal how masculine endeavours behind the pioneer myth serve to cover up a deeper sense of fragility and impotence.

354 “Tales of the Natives. Incidents of the Early Days. Romance and Legend. A Pathetic Love Story. Chat with Mr Moseley MP." The Advertiser, 13 September 1913, p. 6

355 Foster et al, Fatal Collisions, p. 99

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Figure 69 Saintly Sinners, 2009, giclee prints

By giving them a mythical aura of animistic parity with the non-human world, these pioneers of the north-west have been transformed into “ecoprophets” who are also victims of their own actions and belief systems. Kate Rigby explains that “the prophet is both implicated in and wounded by the wrongdoing that is shown to be driving his or her world headlong into catastrophe.”356 These Anglo-Australian men were bound to their Judeo-Christian belief systems as God’s custodians of the natural world. However, they experienced the Australian bush as a place of hostility, harshness and lost innocence – a place from which to look for redemption through land, labour and settlement. There is in the prophetic voice ... an “ethical self-exposure” in which subjectivity lays bare its vulnerability, and opens itself consciously to others.357

356 Kate Rigby, "Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness," Humanities Review, no. 47 (2009), p. 178 357 Ibid

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Figure 70 (left) The Past Remains, 2009, timber cabinet, bones, paper Figure 71 (right) The Past Remains, 2009 (detail)

The Past Remains is made with copies of explorers’ maps from the Gawler Ranges area collaged onto animal bones collected from pastoral lands. This 1859 map of the area marks imminent change, the “moment” before colonial settlement commenced. Traced by “JK” at the Surveyor General’s Office, this map shows the west coast of South Australia and includes Yardea in the Gawler Ranges. It shows the routes of Warburton, Stuart and Babbage and includes many Aboriginal place names and notes on natural features, including water sources.358 Animal bones and lonely graves of various individuals can be found scattered across the Gawler Ranges – enduring reminders of the passage of people and animals inhabiting a changing landscape. Throughout Western art history bones have symbolised death, destruction and mortality, yet they are the most enduring of corporeal remains after death, a material link to loss, absence and irredeemable change. They are physical reminders of what has gone before and is lost forever – they link the past with the present.

358 "Part of South Australia Shewing the Recent Discoveries" (Adelaide: Surveyor General's Office, 1859). Printed with permission from Mortlock Library, SA

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Figure 72 For better or for worse, 2009, giclee print

For better or for worse (2009) explores the contradictory nature of pioneer culture. This wedding portrait of my great-grandparents from the late 1890s becomes a foreboding tale of impending ecological catastrophe. Before them lies the Night Parrot (see pages 95-6) a vulnerable ground dweller now believed to be extinct as a result of habitat destruction brought about through feral animals such as cats and foxes. This particular Night Parrot was shot and procured from the Gawler Ranges in 1871 by an ornithologist, F. W. Andrews, who had long-standing connections to the South Australia Museum.359 Andrews was also one of the first Europeans to collect Aboriginal artefacts for the museum from the Gawler Ranges region from the 1870s.

359 J. Burton Cleland, "The History of Ornithology in South Australia," The Emu 36 (1937), p. 298

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Figure 73 Inland reverie, 2009, mixed media.

Figure 74 Inland reverie (detail). Left: tennis racquet with copper wire and decoupaged with map. Right: Night Parrot rendered in kangaroo grass, dacite stones from Yardea and footstool.

Inland reverie (2009) is a combination of artefacts responding to leisure activities such as tennis and picnics depicted in the Yardea family photos. The photographs and objects combine to create stories within stories. These activities were most likely to have been important social occasions to break up the routine of their remote and isolated lives. In the late nineteenth and

146 early twentieth century, cricket matches and horseracing events were notable annual fixtures in the Yardea calendar, drawing participants and spectators from across the district and beyond.360 Bush life was described by one governess in 1868 as “a strange mixture of roughing and refinement.”361 The suspended starched white muslin hammock-dress reflects this strange and incongruous mix of bush life where “pioneer ladies” picnicked, played tennis or went horse riding in the restrictive confinements of Victorian dress. Familiar leisure activities such as these helped give an air of comfort to the aspiring gentry in this remote and difficult bush life. A tennis racquet with broken copper wire strings and decoupaged with an early explorer’s map of the Gawler Ranges region alludes to a place of remoteness, relying on the telegraph and mail for outside contact. Unlike the Aboriginal people whose place they occupied, European settlers’ early lack of knowledge on how to survive in a harsh environment made it difficult for the newcomers to wander far from their homesteads without proper preparations.

In Figure 74 the footstool cradles dacite stones from the Gawler Ranges and a Night Parrot rendered in native kangaroo grass, based on the specimens shot and collected by ornithologist F.A. Andrews from the region (see Figure 33 in Chapter Six). Small marsupials such as the stick nest rat and birds including the Night Parrot have become endangered or extinct due to the impact on their habitats by pastoralism and the habits of pioneer settlers. Numerous native animals and birds were not only shot to be collected for the museum, but also shot by pioneers to eat. A pioneer woman writing in 1841 described how native animals such as bush rats and birds were common in the early pioneers’ diet: “There is an animal here they call the Kangaroo rat … they are very nice and eat much the same as rabbit ... We eat black magpies, cockatoos and paroquets ... always a change from the salt meat.”362

360 “The Yardea Races”, The Chronicle, 4 January 1890, p. 13; “Mr. A.W. Cocks: Bush Experiences Recalled”, The Register, 27 June 1924, p. 4; “Cricket Tour to Yardea Station”, The Register, 19 August 1927, p. 7; “Cricket at Yardea: Interesting Annual Fixture”, The Observer, 11 August 1928, p. 5 361 Louisa Agnes Geoghegan, letter, 17 May 1868, quoted in Lucy Frost, No Place for a Nervous Lady: Voices from the Australian Bush (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1984), p. 193 362 Penelope Selby, letter, 5 July 1841, Station on the Yarra, quoted in Ibid, p.159. The burrowing bettong or kangaroo rat had one of the widest distributions of any species of marsupial. They were one of the first Australian marsupials to become extinct, their habitat coinciding with land rapidly taken up for cultivation. See Sandra Wood, “Does it Matta”, Yorke Peninsula Country Times, 14 March 2007 http://www.ypct.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=256&Itemid=69 , viewed 19/1/2010

147

The dingo was regarded as a pest to the pastoralist, and with a bounty for their scalps, many were killed. A delicate pencil drawing of a single dingo found in my grandmother’s sketchbook was reanimated into a simple video projection that depicted the dog raising and lowering its head in a continuous loop. The actual projection was cropped to the circular frame made around the original drawing to evoke the full moon and howling dog with its Gothic associations. I see this enlarged circular projection of the original drawing from 1913 as a portal to an anterior world that instills in us an uncanny nightmare or waking dream that invites us back into the past.

Figure 75 In background, projection loop of dingo drawing found in Winifred Bailey’s booklet, SASA Gallery, 2010

Foster notes how the original stories of male white settlers were transformed and glorified in later biographical accounts.363 Popular accounts of the time merge in a fluid zone between history, memory and myth-making, he argues. Unnatural causes refers to stories from the frontier past, including accounts given as evidence at court trials and personal reminiscences that over time became well-known local myths and legends. Foster et al recount how in conversation with Aboriginal people in Ceduna and elsewhere along the coast the traumas and tales from the past are still felt in the present: “People have described how they will not visit Elliston, and one mentioned that he found stopping for petrol difficult.”364

363 Foster et al, Fatal Collisions, pp. 99-100 364 Ibid, p. 71

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Figure 76 Unnatural causes, 2009, mixed media installation

Figure 77 Unnatural causes (detail)

This work is a response to the impressions I gained after reading numerous anecdotes from the very early days of white settlement in the Eyre Peninsula and Gawler Ranges regions. In particular, it draws on a story common in the Eyre Peninsula in which the head of an early settler murdered by Aboriginal people is discovered in a camp oven pot. This story dates back to an incident in 1848 in the west coast area and is part of a cluster of local legends that have been told in regard to the putative Waterloo Bay massacre of Aboriginal people near Elliston. Foster, who has traced in detail the transformation of this story into local myth, has cast considerable doubt on the veracity of the element of the head in the pot and how this incident is tenuously linked to a chain of events that led to the legendary story of the Elliston massacre.365 Nonetheless, Yardea leaseholder James Grey Moseley was one who repeated this grim frontier story in 1913:

365 For stories based on fatal conflicts in the area, see Reynolds, Aborigines and Settlers, pp. 7-9; Foster et al, Fatal Collisions, pp. 44-73; Richardson, Pioneers of the North-West, p. 78

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Some people will remember the horrible fate of one of the old pioneers. He and his sons had their sheep out in the back country. The sons shepherded the sheep while the father did the hut keeping. The two sons returned one eventide with the sheep and could get no word of their father, who usually came to the yard to meet them. After searching and cooeeing around they went to the hut, and on lifting the lid from the camp oven they found in it the head of their father. It is said many a black paid the penalty at the hands of one of the sons, who for years sought vengeance.366

According to one disputed account, John Chipp Hamp, the original lessee of Cacuppa run (later incorporated into Yardea station around Arthur Bailey’s time), had used this run in conjunction with one on the West Coast and around 1863 he “was murdered by the blacks and they were rounded up and driven over the cliff at Elliston called ‘Waterloo Bay’.”367 A different brutality was shown to the body of an Aboriginal man allegedly murdered at Yardea: disinterred, his head was severed and sent to Port Augusta as evidence for a trial – an act unthinkable for a European victim.368

This work is also influenced by an earlier story of a murder trial at which Charles Stubbs gave graphic evidence about the murder of his wife Elizabeth Stubbs in her bedroom near Port Lincoln in 1842. In this violent affray his wife was stabbed with shears hanging at the end of her bed.369 Foster tells of a similar story in the chain of events leading to the alleged Waterloo Bay massacre. Annie Easton was speared in front of her baby son in her bed in May 1848. Foster speculates this may have been part of a payback murder precipitated by the poisoning of Aboriginal people who had eaten arsenic-laced flour.370 Soon after Easton’s widowed husband left the land and their son Alfred was raised by the pastoralist Andrew Tennant, a leaseholder of Yardea from 1894 to 1896.371

The ram’s skull from the photomontage For better or for worse and found in the camp oven in the installation Unnatural causes responds to a conflation of these shady stories handed down

366 “Tales of the Natives. Incidents of the Early Days. Romance and Legend. A Pathetic Love Story. Chat with Mr Moseley MP." The Advertiser, 13 September 1913, p. 6 367 Fitzgerald, “Notes on exploration and farming in Gawler Ranges” 368 Richardson, Pioneers of the North-West, pp 77-78 369 Reynolds, Aborigines and Settlers, pp. 7-9 370 Foster et al, Fatal Collisions, pp. 47-8 371 Ibid, p.56

150 through the generations. The hovering figure with emu feather cravat, horse tail, dinner shirt, coat tails, clay pipe and shearing blades inhabits a gothic world. It emerges from the different stories and myths passed down in various incarnations and now part of both non-Indigenous and Indigenous legend and lore.

This exhibition both brings together and pulls apart fragments of history, memory and myth to reveal and reflect on the anthropocentric constructs of nature and culture, settler-self and other by imagining speculative scenarios that, in Ross Gibson’s words, “conjure new models for knowing our place in this grievously altered old environment where we are all fated now to survive or perish.”372

372 Gibson, "Remembering a Future for an Australian Landscape," p. 63

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9 Conclusion

Naturally Disturbed draws upon the archives of white settler history to create contemporary visual art works that metaphorically slip between the culture/nature divide. I see the practical outcomes as forming a strange kind of multi-naturalism that can reflect back to us the attitudes and belief systems of the Australian pioneering era with its utopian hopes beset by unforeseen environmental consequences. What was once seen as an era of modernity and progress is now being rethought in terms of the damaging legacy of colonialism in generating systemic negative changes to the climate and landscape. By invoking the past to unsettle the present, new understandings through art may have the capacity to probe and provoke new ideas about the way we remember and historicise this pioneering past and consider its enduring legacy. This project invites us to look back into the colonial mindscape, a place from which malignant memories and tensions hover in the present. Through this research investigation I am suggesting that newer forms of imagination and expression are needed to interrogate the Western anthropogenic mindset.

The interpolative process of bricolage and photomontage has allowed me to explore the fluid zones between memory, myth, history and landscape, both present and past. The artistic outcomes reflect my response to an abstracted past largely framed by populist historical narratives. Understanding such myths and impressions from a personal perspective of the past has helped me confront and negotiate inherited values and belief systems that are foundational to our current struggles with the natural environment. Through this investigation I am hoping to communicate something about the way the past continues to shape our thinking about nature as we struggle to deal with drastic changes.

Across more than two hundred years of colonisation, Aboriginal people have seen their country fractured and desiccated by European occupation so that it can never be truly retrieved or returned to its pre-European state. By working with memory and history one can go back to the anterior chambers of white settler consciousness to unsettle and expose its ambivalent

152 relationship with nature and the rigid divide between self and other. Perhaps one task of environmental art is to unsettle the surety of colonial power and its mastery over nature by shifting the vision of Western culture into a paradigm of interconnectivity.

I view this creative research project not only as a recollection of the past to make sense of the present, but as a developmental process of rewriting the self by shuttling back and forth between prospective and retrospective time. It is an interpretive act made manifest through a practice aimed at an “enlarged understanding” of the self.373 In this investigation, fieldwork and archival research became part of an ontological interrogation of place and time with which I became unsettlingly implicated, leaving me feeling ambivalent, discordant, confused and confronted. In my studio practice I sought to bring to the surface unsettling aspects of white settler culture. In response, I suggest that a parodic imagination informed by ethical considerations may be an effective way to aesthetically reflect upon the often uncomfortable relation between past and present.

In 2007 I noted in my original PhD research proposal Ross Garnaut’s dire predictions of Australia being more susceptible to climate change than any other continent.374 In late 2009, towards the end of this research project, it is noteworthy that Adelaide and other parts of south-eastern Australia experienced record-breaking heat waves and catastrophic fire warnings. The unthinkable is happening. To avoid repeating mistakes of the past, I have sought to invoke the colonial mindset by drawing attention to the pioneering protagonists and their earnest endeavours in transforming the land. Kate Rigby suggests that ours is an “anthropocene era”, one in which the “privileged sphere of mind, spirit or reason ... denies of ethical considerability to anyone or anything that is excluded of their sovereign selves.”375

Naturally Disturbed explores the complex interchange between the past and present, history and memory, nature and culture, non-Indigenous and Indigenous people. Re-imagining Yardea’s history through visual art has not only helped to raise, expand and reshape my own critical awareness of this marginal landscape, but may have the broader capacity to communicate other

373 Mark Freeman, Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 29 374 Colvin, "Labor commissions climate change study", PM, ABC Radio, 30 April 2007 375 Rigby, "Writing in the Anthropocene: Idle Chatter or Ecoprophetic Witness," p. 175. Anthropocene era is a way to consider the ecocidal era within which we are all now implicated.

153 imaginative perspectives and critical viewpoints for the viewer. Through my studio practice I am both interrogating and re-asserting the past in order to reveal this pastoral landscape as a complex heterotopic and contested place.

By expressing the poetical and ethical (poethical) through creative visual art practice, this project seeks to stir an imagination desirous of social change, an imagination more holistic and ecocentric as the need increases to shift from hegemonic nationalisms to understanding the local struggles in an adversely affected environment. New ways of imagining ourselves may not only help to avoid the mistakes of the past, but also bring attention to the forgotten or silenced other – “to bring down the walls of human-self enclosure that render us insouciant towards other- than-human suffering.”376

376 Ibid, p. 184

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Theses and Exegesis

Kneebone, Susan. “The Exotic as a Construct of the Colonial Mind and its Contemporary Relevance”. Masters exegesis, Victorian College of the Arts, 2000.

Websites 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects, Art Gallery of NSW, 2 October 2009 to 14 February 2010, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/current/kaldor_projects/projects/ “About Farming Systems”, SARDI, http://www.sardi.sa.gov.au/farming “Adelaide's Early Specimens”, Origins and Early Years, South Australia Museum, http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/page/default.asp?site=1&id=1198&fragPage=1 “Australian forest profiles: Callitris”, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, http://www.daff.gov.au/brs/publications/series/forest- profiles/australian_forest_profiles_callitris “Best Practice Management Guide for Environmental weeds: Horehound”, http://www.weedscrc.org.au/documents/horehound.pdf

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Kelada, Odette. "Nici Cumpston Attesting." Flash, no. 2 (2009), http://www.ccp.org.au/flash/ “Maralinga – Our Own Shame”, http://www.sea-us.org.au/thunder/britsbombingus.html Morton, Tom. "In the Tracks of Goyder". Hindsight, ABC Radio National, 20 May 2007, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/stories/2007/1903977.htm Mykyta, I.G., Review: When the Rain Stops Falling, Adelaide Bank Festival of the Arts. http://www.artshub.com.au/au/default.asp?vmStr=F58AE967811682081BD7D572ED4FD B7E Organ, Michael. "Landscape Art of the Illawarra Region of New South Wales, Australia 1770- 1990. A Catalogue of Works." www.michaelorgan.org.au/illart1.htm Orr, Jill. Bleeding Trees, 1979, http://www.jillorr.com.au/bltrees.html Scientific Expedition Group, http://www.communitywebs.org/ScientificExpeditionGroup/pages/Aims.htm “Water for a Healthy Country”, CSIRO, http://www.anbg.gov.au/cpbr/WfHC/Mesembryanthemum/index.html Weiss, J., Ainsworth, N., and Faithfull, I. Best Practice Management Guide for Environmental weeds (Adelaide: Weeds CRC, 2000), http://www.weedscrc.org.au/documents/horehound.pdf “What is the Symbolism of the Cypress Tree?” http://www.ehow.com/about_6560164_symbolism- cypress-tree_.html#ixzz0rNDETH1h Whipstick Billy, Series AA 26, Robert Arthur Bedford, South Australia Museum, www.samuseum.australia.sa.com/aa26/AA26-02.htm Wood, Sandra. “Does it Matta”, Yorke Peninsula Country Times, 14 March 2007 http://www.ypct.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=256&Itemid=69 Wudinna Hotel/Motel website, www.wudinnahotelmotel.com.au/local.html “Wudinna to get 'big farmer' statue”, ABC News, ABC Radio, 17 April 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/17/2545607.htm

Newspapers, Magazines and Pamphlets Batchelor, E. L. “With the Pastoral Commission”. The Advertiser, 22 April 1898. “Country News”. The Chronicle, 31 August 1872. “Cricket Tour to Yardea Station”. The Register, 19 August 1927. “Cricket at Yardea: Interesting Annual Fixture”. The Observer, 11 August 1928. "Gawler Ranges Pastoral Ilua". Aboriginal Way, April, 2008. Harper, Allan. "The Story of Whipstick Billy". The West Coast Sentinel, 1975 (exact date unknown). Kirk, Herb. "Herb Kirk's Outback Adventures". The Australian Postal Clerk, 1940. “Mr A.W. Cocks: Bush Experiences Recalled”. The Register, 27 June 1924. “North and north-west of Port Augusta”, The Observer, 26 January 1924. Plomley, Jo. "Mr Patterns: Study Guide". Sydney: Film Australia, 2004. “Port Lincoln and Streaky Bay”. Mount Barker Courier, 14 April 1882. “Scenes at Yardea Telegraph Station in the Far North-West”. The Chronicle, 27 November 1909. "Tales of the Natives. Incidents of the Early Days. Romance and Legend. A Pathetic Love Story. Chat with Mr Moseley MP". The Advertiser, 13 September 1913. “The late Mr Main”. The Register, 7 January 1905. “The Yardea Races”. The Chronicle, 4 January 1890. “Through the Gawler Ranges: A much-neglected country”. The Advertiser, 20 October 1906. “Through the Gawler Ranges: From Streaky Bay to Port Augusta”. The Adelaide Chronicle, 27 October 1906. White, Captain S.A. "The Gawler Ranges: An Ornithological Expedition. Part IV", The Register, Adelaide, 3 June 1913.

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Video McKern, Harriet. Somewhere between Light and Reflection. Australia: AFI, 1999.

Unpublished, Government Records and Maps SA Legislative Council electoral roll 1909, Northern District, subdivision of Flinders, Yardea polling place, State Library of South Australia. Aborigines Office, correspondence files, 1898, files 42, 43 and 45. State Records of South Australia. Maps of pastoral leases 860, 1019, 1225 and 1239, pastoral plan 7, 47/32 (1207-005) and 46/19 (1207- 008), Department of Lands records. SA Lands Services Group. “Map of a portion of South Australia north west of Adelaide. Explored by a party under Stephen Hack Esq 1857”. Signed by W.G. Harris, surveyor to expedition. Mortlock Library, S.A. "Part of South Australia Shewing the Recent Discoveries." Adelaide: Surveyor General's Office, 1859. Mortlock Library, S.A.

Parliamentary Papers “Explorations of Mr. S. Hack”, SA Parliamentary Papers 1857-58, Vol.2, No.156 “Minutes of Evidence of the Vermin-Proof Fencing Commission”, SA Parliamentary Papers, 1893, Vol.2, No.59 “Minutes of Evidence of the Pastoral Lands Commission”, 1897, SA Parliamentary Papers, 1898, Vol 3, No 77.

Kneebone Family Papers J.G. Moseley and Arthur Bailey, Partnership Agreement, December 1903. Winifred Kneebone, letter, 8 October 1937 Winifred Kneebone, sketch and autograph book, c. 1913.

Other Unpublished Material Bilney, Con. "The Economic Feasibility of Native Food Production in Arid and Semi-Arid Regions of South Australia (Draft)." PhD proposal, Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide, 2008. Fitzgerald, Clem. "Clem Fitzgerald Memoirs." Recorded by Molly Eatts, Kimba and Gawler Ranges Historical Society, Kimba Musuem, 1975. ——— "Clem Fitzgerald Memoirs", courtesy of John Starkey, September 2007. Fitzgerald, P.C."Notes on Exploration and farming in Gawler Ranges", State Library of South Australia.

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List of Appendices

Letters of Approval Department of Premier and Cabinet, Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation Division South Australia Museum Aboriginal Advisory Board Kokotha Management Committee University of South Australia Ethics Approval State Library of South Australia

Maps Map of a portion of South Australia north west of Adelaide. Explored by a party under Stephen Hack Esq 1857. Signed by W.G. Harris, surveyor to Expedition. Mortlock Library, S.A. (detail). Surveyor General Office. "Part of South Australia Shewing the Recent Discoveries." Adelaide: Surveyor General's Office, 1859. Mortlock Library, S.A. (detail).

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