PLANTING DREAMS
AUDIO GUIDE

Jonathan Jones on his Kaldor Public Arts commission.

JONATHAN JONES:  So the project barrangal dyara (skin and bones), which is in the local Gadigal language, is a commission from Kaldor Public Arts.  And it’s the first time Kaldor Public Arts has worked with an Australian artist.  And Kaldor Public Arts mainly presents major sort of installations within public sites.  

And when I was asked to submit an idea to Kaldor, the project I wanted to look at was thinking about the Garden Palace, and thinking about forgotten histories, thinking about how we remember stories, how Aboriginal communities often seem not to forget histories, how a lot of Aboriginal people have remembered the Garden Palace, because we experienced enormous loss when it was burnt down in 1882, but other Australians have managed to forget the Garden Palace.  Perhaps it doesn’t hold the same significance.  

So, I guess I was interested in how Aboriginal histories and ideas have, I guess, interwoven within contemporary Australian ideas.  And I guess, for a long time, Aboriginal people have always remembered that Australia has a much longer view of history and has a much more complex history than most Australians appreciate but now our historical kind of narrative is also threading through, and meaning that we get to remind Australians of colonial history as well, that seems to be cropping up.  

So, I look at this building and it looks like an imperial edifice and in some ways I can see that it wasn’t fitting into the landscape, and that it perhaps was imposed and had a very sort of imperial vision.  

But the loss of that building also signals the loss of the cultural collections from this region. So for people of the southeast region - Aboriginal people of the southeast region - we experience an enormous amount of loss, because all those early collections, all the early cultural collections that we had, were housed in this building.  

I think that that notion of constructing the Aboriginal history through objects and constructing it as a very biased view, was concurrent from the point of collection to the display.  A lot of those weapons were obviously picked up after frontier violence and, of course, even that very first encounter with Captain Cook and, you know, in Botany Bay was, in fact, you know, stolen material.  You know, the very first objects ever to go into the world from Australia were stolen.  So, I mean, that sets up the collecting practices in Australia very early on and sets the kind of curatorial agenda for how you engage with Aboriginal material and I think that’s something that has continued through history.  

But the loss of those objects is terrifying, because those communities that they were taken from were left in such turmoil that most of those communities weren’t able to continue those practices.  So most communities weren’t able to continue making shields or continue making those boomerangs.  They ceased that cultural production.  

So the loss of that material is an extraordinarily deep scar that will never go away and, in fact, you know, the project, barrangal dyara, is about trying to heal that scar and about trying to come to terms with that enormous loss.  

And a lot of that loss, I guess, has really been dealt with through the project via language.  So a number of communities from right across the south east are contributing through soundscape recordings of their language.  So language words that remember those objects, people reading lists of lost objects, people describing their objects in language, people getting their young children and Elders to read those lists of objects as well, so those voices will record and kind of create a sense of memory on the site, on that very specific site in the Garden Palace, to try and remember that loss.  

((ENDS))