PLANTING DREAMS AUDIO GUIDE Jonathan Jones on Lewin’s ‘The plains, Bathurst’. JONATHAN JONES: So in this work, I guess what I was mainly attracted to was that this, of course, is one of the first images coming out of the Bathurst region, which is, of course, the sort of first inland town which sort of really represents, I guess, how Australia was colonised and the whole sort of pastoral takeover of country. And for me, I guess this is quite a special image, because this is where my family comes from and this is, of course, the part of Australia that sort of experienced the first sort of major wave of warfare and bloodshed and which kicked off a few years after Macquarie came through. In fact, when Macquarie had left and Governor Brisbane had come on board, the proclamation of martial law was declared, which saw every settler and convict armed, and sent into the district, which meant that every Wiradjuri person in that area was either massacred or rounded up and taken off their country to make way for the pastoral kind of industry that is sort of visioned in this image. And Wiradjuri are very proud and all my Elders tell me that they’re very proud that no white woman or child was ever harmed during the war. But, of course, when the proclamation and martial law was declared, Wiradjuri men, women and children were murdered. Horrific kind of slaughters took place. And the key sort of person from our community was called Windradyne and, in fact, he waged a very successful campaign for a long time. And there’s a lot of reports about the campaign that they ran and they sort of targeted specific families who had either been involved in massacres or had killed Wiradjuri people. But after a while they’d realised that this killing of women and children, you know, obviously just was something that they couldn’t work with. So Windradyne, in fact, wrote “Peace” on a small piece of paper, put it in a hat that he wore and he walked from Bathurst all the way down to Parramatta, and met with Governor Brisbane and negotiated peace. So, in fact, you know, peace wasn’t created by the white community. It was, in fact, again sort of established and maintained from the Wiradjuri side, who came together to try and formulate a way forward, because they saw that this war was futile. But I guess what also interests me about this work was that you can see straight away that the area was prime agriculture. And I guess British strangely thought that that was some sort of divine moment, that they were taken to the promised land. But, of course, when I look at this image, I see thousands of years of generations of Wiradjuri people managing their land, creating these grasslands and creating these plains, which, of course, were part of a whole sort of infrastructure to have kangaroos but also to also engage with grain growing. So, more recently, people like Bill Gammage, of course, has been talking about how Aboriginal communities right across Australia were clearing and managing their land and making these enormous grasslands to manage their region. But even more recently again, people like Bruce Pascoe have been looking at how Aboriginal communities were, of course, very heavily engaging with grain growing. And so this area here, to me, speaks of a country that was constantly being used and engaged with. And so I guess it’s a complex image for me, because it’s something that connects me to home but also reminds me of the horrors that happened, but also reminds me of the way that our communities have been managing that landscape. Not far from Bathurst is, of course, one of the very first inland Aboriginal missions, Erambie Mission out near Cowra. So community is very strong there but also families sort of still lived around towns and lived around the region. So there’s families who have still maintained very strong connections, have never left and have continued to maintain the fight, if you like, for that country and maintaining and looking after their cultural sort of right to be there. (ENDS)