Foreword
Colliding Islands (exhibition catalogue)
February, 2009
Curator: Louise Rollman
Written: Kevin O'Brien
What is Land?
It promises identity and joy, but also silence and sadness.It anticipates poetry and inspiration, but also ugliness and hopelessness.It reports possession and ownership, but also dispossession and custodianship.It enables meaning and life, but also meanness and death.
For the past decade, property has been traded at an alarming rate. Carved up parcels of land, as defined by the surveyor’s peg, bought and sold at ridiculously inflated prices. Auctions attended by eager punters eyes glazed on the prize. A most vulgar yet popular form of investment. The golden period of economic rationalism. It is not unreasonable to argue that had the same kind of investment been made in our next generation—we may well have avoided the seething youth the Cronulla riots initiated. A generation disenfranchised by greed.
The Oxford Dictionary, the most esteemed reference for the English language, defines landscape as scenery as seen in a broad view. It then defines scenery as the natural features of the landscape especially when picturesque. This is followed by a definition of picturesque as beautiful or striking to look at. The early landscape painters of the 1880s,particularly those of the Heidelberg school, sought the picturesque. They could only see beauty through a European prism—light, mountains and other Europeans. It can be argued that the absence of Aborigines (and therefore their definition of beauty) from this period of work was due to their perceived ugliness. Landscape is a concept derived from censorship.
In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook sailed the Endeavour along the south-eastern coast of Australia. On the 29 April, after firing a volley of shots at approaching Aborigines, Cook landed at the Kurnell Peninsula. Departing shortly after, Cook sailed north, mapping the coastline until finally arriving at Possession Island on the 22 August. On this day, Cookclaimed the entire coastline he had just surveyed as British territory, legitimized by the legality of terra nullius - or empty land. Fires lit by the Aborigines, preceded his route and signaled the imminent danger. The ownership of land damned an entire people.
Country is an Aboriginal Idea. It is an Idea that binds groupings of Aboriginal people to the place of their ancestors, past, current and future. It understands that every moment of the land, sea and sky, its particles, its prospects and its prompts, enables life. It is revealed over time by Camping in it and guides my way into architecture. There is no disenfranchisement, no censorship and no ownership. Country is a belief. It is my belief.
What is yours?
