PLANTING DREAMS
AUDIO GUIDE

Jonathan Jones on Richardson’s ‘Garden Palace’

JONATHAN JONES:  So this image is looking at the Garden Palace, which was designed by James Barnet and built in 1879 to house the International Exhibition in Sydney.  So the country that we see here is mainly Gadigal land.  Gadigal are one of the clan of the Eora Nation.   

For a long time this site was known to be a ceremonial ground and, in fact, it was the site where the only ceremony in Sydney was ever documented.  Where the Garden Palace sits and further down to what we know as Government House, was a ceremonial ground where Eora men came together as an initiation ceremony.  And I guess what interests me about that is that it’s the site that, in fact, has continued to be a site of celebration.  It’s continued to be a site of performance, of display and spectacle that, I guess, really seems to repeat itself.

And I think that’s what’s quite interesting as Australia is becoming an older nation in terms of its sort of contemporary Australian history, is that we see the landscape determining things for us.  The land, of course, is telling us the stories and almost these buildings, and the people and things that happen on these spaces are almost enacting a sense of history.  So the Garden Palace was repeating the ceremony.  

And it’s situated and looks at a part of Sydney that everyone is very familiar with but it is almost a world that’s completely unrecognisable to us.  And because the Garden Palace is a building that was lost only three years after that it was built and all these buildings through the gardens are, of course, not there anymore, and we’re left with the extraordinary botanic gardens, which we sort of know and love.  

But this building, in fact, I guess, to me is one of the most important buildings in Sydney, because it was the first cultural centre that Sydney ever really had and, after the International Exhibition, which was only for one year, we were left with this extraordinary building, which Sydney decided to, sort of, I guess, turn into its cultural centre.  

It housed a major orchestra and concert hall, all the government archives, the New South Wales Art Society, the Technological Museum, and the Mineral Museum also moved into the building, along with huge collections of the Australian Museum.  And it was those extraordinary early collections that were lost in the fire of September 22nd on 1882, which saw this entire building destroyed, and also all the objects in it.  There was reports of the Eastern Suburbs Brass Band lost all their instruments.  Australia’s first census was in the building as part of the colonial archives.  That material was lost.  All the Mineral Museum’s collections were lost.

But I guess the collections that I was sort of most interested in and became, I guess, aware of the Garden Palace through, was what they were calling the ethnographic collections, which was the Aboriginal collections that had been, I guess, really amassed on the colonial frontier.  

Most of those collections were mainly men’s material, because the Garden Palace, of course, was very deeply constructed under the idea that terra nullius existed in Australia.  So complex cultural objects, that talked about the complexity of Aboriginal life, were completely pushed aside and it was mainly men’s body parts that were on display, and weapons, which, I guess, were very deliberately constructed around the idea of the noble savage, and the idea of social Darwinism:  that Aboriginal people would eventually die out, that there was no real connection to land and that the sort of British Empire taking over the country was justifiable.  

So, again, this is another image that I look at with - it’s almost that double edged sword, where it represents an enormous loss, but it also was a colonial construction that I sometimes wonder that, you know, losing it, in fact, might have opened up other pathways for Australia to become a kind of a different space.  That if those collections and literally this imperial building, which even the dome was modelled on, you know, the construction of domes that were inherited from ancient Rome to London and filtered down to the colonies, you know, this imperial vision might not be right for Sydney.  It might not be the right building for here and its removal put Sydney on a different path.  

((ENDS))