Julie Gough

T h e e s s e n T i a l r e s o u r c e f o r T h e a r T c u r r i c u l u m

Julie Gough

resource book

�

T h e e s s e n T i a l r e s o u r c e f o r T h e a r T c u r r i c u l u m

J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k b y c r e A T i v e c o w b o y f i l m s �

contents

Dedication 4

acknowledgements 5

introduction 6

What’s in the resources pack? 9

secTion one – Julie GouGh 10

1. Julie Gough 11

2. selected writings 23

secTion TWo – Biennale of syDney 63

3. locus 64

secTion Three – The films 70

4. We walked on a carpet of stars 71

5. selected discussions: Ware & Tear 74

6. selected works 76

secTion four – rememBer 90

7. in memory of charles Perkins 91

J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k �

This book is dedicated to

the people who walked on a carpet

of stars

J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k �

Acknowledgements

creative cowboy films would like to thank:

national Gallery of australia

Tasmanian museum and art Gallery

national Gallery of Victoria

The art Gallery of south australia

The art Gallery of Western australia

mildura art Gallery

The Biennale of sydney

liverpool Biennial 2002

nsW legislative assembly hansard

aBV42

artlink

australian Painting

Periphery

siglo

michael Denholm

hannah fink

rolf harris

Dr Peter hill

Greg lehmann

Dr charles merewether

amy Barrett-lennard

The hon Dr andrew refshauge

Judith ryan - senior curator indigenous art

Ted snell - Professor of contemporary art

clare Williamson, exhibitions curator state

library of Victoria

Kai Brethouwer, Dutch on Toast

for graphic design

images reproduced courtesy

the artist and Viscopy

every effort has been made to contact

copyright holders and we thank all who have

contributed to this work

Jean-Pierre chabrol and Peter hylands


islands can be very powerful places, a kind of compression of all the happinesses and sadnesses of the world.

and that is Tasmania.

There it is below us, all green, the clouds sometimes interrupting the view with cotton wool white. The plane lands and here we are, on the last leg of our journey to meet Julie Gough.

We load the cameras and other stuff into the hire car and then off to buy the camping gear. shopping done, we are soon heading away from the city and imagining our stay in the wild places of Tasmania.

funny word – ‘wild’, a word which suggest to me the places i like being in the most and for me the wilderness of Tasmania is a civilized and sophisticated place of distinguished biodiversity and great beauty, something precious for us all to keep forever.

We are going to meet Julie at her campsite on the coast in northern Tasmania. Julie is on an expedition to collect the materials for the work, locus, Julie’s forthcoming installation for the Biennale of sydney.

We arrive, unload our gear and set up camp. We camp just at the edge of the beach amongst the coastal tea-tree forest. The trees give us shelter and the fine sand of the beach is within arms length of the entrance to our tent.

We collect some driftwood from the beach, it is time to get the camp fire going. This work complete, the dinner cooked and eaten, we huddle around the campfire, tired from the day’s travel but excited about what lies ahead of us in the morning.

“let’s go for a walk along the beach before we turn in”, i suggested.

as we walked on the beach that first night, the wind blew, it was cold and the starlit sky was crystal clear. at our feet the wet sand, like a mirror, reflected the night sky, and like the thousands of ancestors before us, we walked on a carpet of stars.

Julie says this about what happened here:

People were sent overseas to be studied, children were adopted, some went to sea and were never seen again, other parts of human bodies were sent overseas in bags to the royal college of surgeons, in lime. yes we were scientific curiosities back in the 1800s and today so many of us have mixed heritage though we strongly identify, many of us, with just one. i think it is often questioned of us now, how do we determine our race, when physically we may look european or something else?

in making the film, We walked on a carpet of stars, together with Julie, we would like the viewer to think about the indigenous People of Tasmania and remember the people that walked on the carpet of stars in a time when landscape and nature were intact. To then also consider the decendents of those people, like Julie, who through intermarriage and removal, now have their own stories to tell.

introduction


So what has this to do with art?

Julie completed her Phd in Tasmania. Julie’s exegesis was called Transforming histories: The visual disclosure of contentious pasts and in many ways this part of her academic achievement describes the core of meaning to much of her investigations and resulting artwork. Julie had previously studied at Goldsmiths, part of the university of london and an international learning centre in creative, social and cultural studies and processes.

at Goldsmiths, Julie was in good company, former students at the college include lucien freud, antony Gormley, Damien hirst, margaret howell, Gary hume, steve mcQueen, mary Quant, Vivienne Westwood, Bridget riley, sam Taylor-Wood, Gillian Wearing and Jane and louise Wilson.

i think, what Julie intended by her intervention into the British art scene, was to reclaim some of her past. Julie made her direct intervention, collecting those figures that once collected the people and the objects of aboriginal Tasmania.

Julie says this about her work:

my works utilise found and constructed objects and techniques from diverse sources including the visual arts, the museum, the library, the shop, the garden and my heritage. much of my influence and inspiration comes from the people, stories, places, skills and connections to my maternal Tasmanian aboriginal heritage.

Julie has chosen not to live in someone else’s script, instead investigating the hidden histories of many of those who need to be remembered.

so why are Julie’s activities so important to us? not only in australia and in Britain but to all the indigenous and colonial cultures around the world. Julie’s actions change our knowing and understanding of cultural collisions. The colonial system where the winner took all, and wrote the ‘history’; a history which often has little meaning because it is a story without balance, justice or understanding, has turned the past into ‘unfinished business’. Julie takes this history, this unfinished business, and reinterprets the past, giving us all a clearer vision of both our own past and our own future.

Peter Hylandscreative cowboy films

cuttlefish are marine animals of the order sepiida belonging to the cephalopoda class (which also includes squid, octopuses and nautiluses). Despite their common name, cuttlefish are not fish, but mollusks.

cuttlefish have an internal shell (cuttlebone), large eyes, and eight arms and two tentacles furnished with denticulated suckers, with which they secure their prey.

cuttlefish eat small molluscs, crabs, shrimp, fish and other cuttlefish. Their predators include sharks, fish, and other cuttlefish. They live about 1 to 2 years

caption goes here


caption goes here


what’s in the resource pack?

The contents of the Julie Gough Australian Art resources pack are:

DvD 1

The film We walked on a carpet stars follows Julie Gough as she collects materials in Tasmania and creates her work Locus on Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, for the Biennale of sydney.

DvD �

The films:

1) selected works in which Julie Gough and Peter hylands discuss a selection of Julie’s work; and:

2) selected discussions Julie Gough and Peter hylands discuss art and art practice and the development of ideas. filmed in Victoria, Tasmania and new south Wales.

cD rom

1) The Resource Book includes information about Julie Gough, selected writings about Julie’s art works, information about the films and a transcript of discussions relating to the film selected works featured on DVD 2 of this resources pack; and

2) Project resource notes – ten projects for students.

DVD 2

THE

AUSTRALIAN ART RE SOURCES PACKSERIES

Julie Gough1. Selected works

2. Selected discussions© MMVII creative cowboy Pty Ltd. www.creativecowboyfilms.co

m

DVD 2

THE

AUSTRALIAN ART RE SOURCES PACKSERIES

Julie Gough1. Resource book in PDF format

2. Project resource notes© MMVII creative cowboy Pty Ltd. www.creativecowboyfilms.co

m

J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k b y c r e A T i v e c o w b o y f i l m s 1 0

secTion one – Julie GouGh

J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k b y c r e A T i v e c o w b o y f i l m s 1 1

1 Julie Gough

what Julie says about herself

i am an artist predominantly working in sculpture and installation art. i am also a writer and lecturer in visual arts.

my art and research practice often involves uncovering and re-presenting historical stories as part of an ongoing project that questions and re-evaluates the impact of the past on our present lives. my work is concerned with developing a visual language to express and engage with conflicting and subsumed histories. a key intention is to invite a viewer to a closer understanding of our continuing roles in, and proximity to unresolved national stories- narratives of memory, time, absence, location and representation.

my works utilise found and constructed objects and techniques from diverse sources including the visual arts, the museum, the library, the shop, the garden and my heritage. much of my influence and inspiration comes from the people, stories, places, skills and connections to my maternal Tasmanian aboriginal heritage.

“I particularly enjoy responding to and reconfiguring natural materials”

i create work by re-using natural materials and found, often kitsch, objects. i particularly enjoy responding to and reconfiguring natural materials. These materials including; wood, stone, kelp, bark and shell are turned into narratives that relate to their original environment, connecting my own and my ancestors’ encounters, actions and traces to their places and their materials.

one of my common methodologies is to arrange multiple objects to activate a surface optically, encouraging the viewer to find themselves as part of the work. art works comprising multiple objects are experiments in understanding how viewers can travel around a work and in this process move their position back and forth, flickering between past and present, and hopefully, personal and national memory.

Julie Gough and Peter hylands

J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k b y c r e A T i v e c o w b o y f i l m s 1 �

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most of my works incorporate ideas of movement or stasis, either technically, or in the story that the works convey to the viewer. This suggestion of waiting or of motion is intended to summon the onlooker to enter into the work as a timekeeper. This can be an anxious position for the viewer. The many materials inviting the viewer’s curiosity may initially imply something humorous and then accrue a sinister edge as the viewer reaches a point of understanding of their caged predicament within the work.

my art works are investigations evolving from personal considerations of the place of memory, forgetting, loss, denial and the potency of the past within my own family. increasingly evident is the use of open narrative to decipher self in the process of relating the past. each work has been built from the outcomes of the last and represents a claiming, within a larger consideration of ways to personally invoke and involve nation, viewer and self in acknowledging our entangled histories.

apart from art-making, other experiences have included employment as a curator of indigenous art at the national Gallery of Victoria, lecturer in aboriginal studies at riawunna, university of Tasmania and as an interpretation officer, aboriginal culture, at the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife service. artist residencies include such locations as new york, london, Paris and mauritius.

Julie Gough and andrea hylands

Julie Gough with cuttlefish


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J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k 1 �

J u l i e G o u G h c u r r i c u l u m v i T A e

Born Melbourne, 16 March 1965

Selected studies – Academic

2001 aug. 2001 awarded PhD (fine arts). university of Tasmania, hobart.

exegesis: Transforming histories: The visual disclosure of contentious pasts.

1998 ma fine arts Goldsmith’s college, university of london.

1994 Bachelor of fine arts honours – first class, university of Tasmania, hobart.

1993 Bachelor of Visual arts, curtin university, Western australia.

1986 Bachelor of arts, Prehistory/anthropology and english literature. university of Western australia.

Selected Prizes/Awards

2007 1 Dec 2006 – 1 Dec 2008. Visual arts and craft Board, australia council for the arts, Visual art fellowship, 2007 – 2008: Walking Homeland – An expansion of research and art practice on home and diaspora ($90,000).

2007 april – July 2007 state library of Victoria creative fellowship: Strait crossings – Nineteenth century Indigenous relocation between Victoria and Van Diemen’s Land and beyond. The production of an annotated bibliography and a wall projection project about cross Bass strait relationships between aboriginal people and sealers/whalers c.1795-1850 ($12,500).

2006 December. Tasmaniana library, state library of Tasmania fellowship: Picturing our past: a narrative response to representations of Indigenous Tasmania. ($2100).

2006 regents court hotel, Potts Point, sydney. one month artist residency may – June.

2001 australia council Greene st new york residency for feb-may 2002.

2001 commonwealth arts and craft award, london. residency on mauritius sept. 2001 – feb. 2002.

2001 arts Tasmania Wilderness residency at “eddystone lighthouse” aug. 2001 & aug. 2002.

1999 arts Tasmania/Qantas artsbridge Grant to install work at liverpool Biennial, uK.

1996 samsTaG international Visual arts scholarship for 1997/8: mVa Goldsmiths college, university of london.

1996 arts Tasmania Development Grant to attend/install work at cologne art fair, Germany.

1996 awarded an installation space as one of 25 “young, emerging artists” by the Jurors of art cologne (as part of the forder Program, 1996).

1995 arts Tasmania Development Grant to attend/install work at PersPecTa 1995, sydney.

1994 attained first class honours. awarded australian Postgraduate award scholarship.

1993 curtin university Graduate sculpture Prize. curtin university Graduate Drawing Prize.

1991, 93 member of Vice-chancellor’s list, curtin university (academically highest 1% across university).

1993 curtin university Graduate sculpture Prize and Graduate Drawing Prize.

Other relevant experience

2005 + member, Peer assessment Board, arts Queensland.

2005 – 06 committee member and co-judge of the X-strata emerging indigenous artist award, Queensland art Gallery, Brisbane.

2005+ committee member, umbrella studio, Townsville.

2005 – 06 committee member, 2006 naiDoc exhibition TaTsicc/Pinnacles Townsville.

2006 Panel member, riverways Public art Project, Thuringowa council.

2005 co-judge of the national interpretation awards.

2004 co-judge of the annual Telstra naTsiaa (national aboriginal and Torres strait islander art awards) awards hosted by the museum and art Gallery of the northern Territory.

2004 co-judge of the national interpretation awards.

2003+ honorary research fellow, riawunna, centre for aboriginal education, university of Tasmania.

2003 Board member of the aboriginal and Torres strait islander arts Board of the australia council. Tasmanian representative while still resident in Tasmania.

1996 committee member of Karadi aboriginal Women’s corporation, Berriedale, Tasmania.

Collections

1. n.G.a. (national Gallery of australia) canberra

2. T.m.a.G. (Tasmanian museum and art Gallery) hobart

3. n.G.V. (national Gallery of Victoria) melbourne

4. The art Gallery of south australia

5. The art Gallery of Western australia, Perth

6. nma (national museum australia), canberra

7. flinders university collection, south australia

8. mildura arts centre, Victoria

9. Powerhouse museum, sydney

10. city of Port Phillip, Victoria

11. Private collections



Solo exhibitions

2005 Intertidal; Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne, Victoria, 10 may – 4 June 2005.

2002 – 04 Chase, Imperial Leather Installation; ian Potter centre: national Gallery of Victoria.

2002 Passages; mahatma Gandhi institute, mauritius.

2001 Heartland; Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne.

Stand; midlands highway installation, Tasmania.

Ice, earth, air, fire, water, ice; midlands highways installation, Tasmania.

Tense Past; PhD examination. Plimsoll Gallery, university of Tasmania, hobart.

1997 Re-collection; Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne.

1996 Dark Secrets/Home Truths; Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne.

Selected group exhibitions

2006 TIDAL – city of Devonport art award, Devonport regional Gallery, 1 Dec 2006 – 28 Jan 2007.

From an island south, asialinK and Devonport regional Gallery touring exhibition to lahore, Kuala lumpur, Bangkok.

In the world: hand, head, heart, Tamworth Textile Biennale, Tamworth regional Gallery, nsW, 9 september – 5 november.

Biennale of Sydney, Pier 2/3, Walsh’s Bay, sydney, 7 June – 27 august.

Senses of Place, Plimsoll Gallery, university of Tasmania, hobart.

Single Currency, Victoria college of the arts, melbourne.

ephemeral art at the invisible lodge, friendly Beaches, freycinet Peninsula, Tasmania.

2005 recent acquisitions: city of Port Phillip, linden – st Kilda centre for contemporary arts, Vic, 19 nov – 18 December 2005.

habitus-habitat, 8 artists respond to Wallaman falls, Great Walks of Queensland art and environment, Perc Tucker regional Gallery, Townsville.

national aboriginal and Torres strait islander art award (naTsiaa), museum and art Gallery of the northern Territory, Darwin.

Cross Currents, linden centre for the arts, st Kilda, Victoria, 28 June – 7 august.

Ware & Tear, chewton, Victorian Goldfields, castlemaine festival, 2 april – 8 may.

Isolation/Solitude, salamanca arts centre, hobart, Tasmania, 31 march – 1 may.

Selected group exhibitions contd

2005 On Island, Devonport regional Gallery, Tasmania, 11 march – 17 april.

2001 – 05 Native Title Business, museum and Gallery services QlD Touring exhibition.

2004 120° of Separation, linden – st Kilda centre for contemporary art.

2004 If only you knew, melbourne Town hall.

2003 Outside Inside: Fragments of Place, Brigham young university museum of art, Provo, utah, usa. 9 october 2003 – 18 april 2004.

2003 Abstractions Drill hall Gallery, anu, canberra. fusions across the arts – centre for cross cultural research anu & anu school of art, 3 oct – 9 nov 2003.

2001 Touching from a distance, foyer, hobart and moores Building, fremantle. nov.2001.

hutchins art Prize, hobart, Tasmania, november 2001

“Captive” and “Witness” in esP Project, Queen Victoria museum and art Gallery, launceston, Tasmania.

What’s Love got to do with it? royal melbourne institute of Technology, melbourne.

Home is where the heart is, country arts sa. Touring exhibition. south aust. 2001.

Driving Black Home, 2000 by Julie Gough and natives on the river ouse, 1838 by John Glover. australian collection focus, art Gallery of new south Wales.

Between Phenomena, The Panorama and Tasmania. Plimsoll Gallery, university of Tasmania.

Response to the Island. IDEAS, MATERIALS, PROCESSES, CONNECTIONS… long Gallery, hobart.

2000 Biennale of contemporary art, festival of Pacific arts noumea.

Heart on your sleeve, Plimsoll Gallery, university of Tasmania, hobart.

Australian Painting Now, access Gallery, curtin university, Wa.

Shifting Axis, Bett Gallery, hobart.

1999 national Gallery of Victoria, russell square.

Mapping our Countries, Djamu Gallery, australian museum, sydney.

TRACE – liverpool Biennial of contemporary art, england.

Whispers, Lies and Text, central coast Gallery, nsW.

naiDoc exhibition, moonah arts centre, Tasmania.

Whispers, Lies and Text, artspace, adelaide festival centre.




1999 contd Whispers, Lies and Text, university Gallery, launceston.

People, Places, Pastimes, Global arts link, ipswich, Queensland.

Butcher cherel, Julie Dowling, Julie Gough, artplace, festival of Perth.

Luna Park and the Art of Mass Delirium, museum of modern art at heide, Victoria.

1998 Sculpture by the Sea, eaglehawk neck Bay, Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania.

Whispers, Lies and Text, casT Gallery, hobart. university Gallery, launceston.

The Kate challis raKa award exhibition, ian Potter museum of art, university of melbourne.

ma (fine arts) exhibition Goldsmiths college, university of london.

Globalising Cultural Studies? – Pacific asia cultural studies conference

exhibition, Goldsmiths college, london.

Telling Tales, ivan Dougherty Gallery, university of sydney and neue Galerie am landes museum Joanneum, Graz, austria.

All this and Heaven too. adelaide Biennial, art Gallery of south australia.

Permanent collection exhibition, Tasmanian museum and art Gallery, hobart.

1997 – 99 Black Humour, ccas (canberra contemporary artspace) – touring to five other venues during 1997/98/99.

Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World, fulbright symposium exhibition, nTmaG, Darwin.

naiDoc exhibition, moonah arts centre, hobart.

Extracts, Boomalli aboriginal artist’s co-operative, sydney.

Unusual Treasures, la Trobe university Gallery at mildura arts centre, Victoria.

1996 cologne art fair, 10-17 nov, 1996, Germany: Forderprogram.

castlemaine festival 1996, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi.

acaf5 (australian contemporary art fair #5) melbourne, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi. also conference speaker “Landscape and Memory”.

Multiples and Memories, schoolhouse Gallery, rosny historic centre, Tasmania.

Through Their Eyes – naiDoc exhibition 1996 st Kilda Town hall, Victoria.

naiDoc exhibition 1996 moonah arts centre, hobart.


1996 contd Something to do with Ears, conservatorium of music, university of Tasmania.

Wijay Na? (Which way now?) exhibition – 24 hr art, Darwin also conference speaker – nTmaG (northern Territory museum and art Gallery.

new music Tasmania installation – “Disturbed Nature” Tasmanian museum and art Gallery, hobart.

Mutiny on the Docks, Tasmanian museum and art Gallery, hobart.

Handbag, festival Theatre foyer, adelaide.

1995 On a Mission, Boomalli Gallery, sydney.

Significant Distractions, couch culture Gallery, hobart.

New Faces – new Directions Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne.

Nuini – We have Survived, Tasmanian aboriginal Group show, university of Tasmania Gallery, launceston.

Perspecta 1995, art Gallery of new south Wales.

1994/5/6 Superfictions, national Touring exhibition.

1994 Art From Trash, moonah arts centre, Tasmania.

Presto, honours Graduate exhibition, Plimsoll Gallery, hobart.

national Graduate exhibition, P.i.c.a. Perth institute of contemporary art, West australia.

12 Days Stuck in a Hole, fine arts Gallery, sandy Bay, Tasmania.

1993 curtin university Bfa Graduate show, Bentley, West australia.

1992 a matter of Degree, Group show, craft council Gallery, Perth.

1991 end of first year show, curtin university, West australia.

Conference papers

2006 People Identity & Place seminar series 2006, Jcu, Townsville, 6 october.

Making sense of place: the interdisciplinary potential of art, historic and contemporary, in reading Indigenous Tasmania.

Intruder alert! The meaningful layering of later history across Tasmanian place, senses of Place conference, university of Tasmania and national museum of australia, hobart, april 4-6.

2005 Regeneration: Moving places and art making about Tasmanian Aboriginal history, remembering Place/Dismembering home, 9th WiP conference. university of Queensland, 30 september 2005.

Bare to the bone: Absence as memorial in Tasmania, art and commemoration, anu, 31 July 2005.



Conference papers contd

2005 Past Tense/Present Tenable, creative Territories conference, noosa regional Gallery, June 18 2005.

2004 How do Market forces influence contemporary Indigenous Australian artists?, Black insights: indigenous Voices new Directions, Queensland art Gallery, 3-4 July, 2004.

Voices and Sources – Making Art and Tasmanian Aboriginal History, read at the colonialism and its aftermath – an interdisciplinary conference, June 23-25, 2004. university of Tasmania, hobart.

2003 Woretemoeteyerner: Ancestral currents, co-presented with maggie Walter at aiaTsis indigenous researchers forum, 1-3 october 2003, anu.

Still Present Currents, read at fusion across the arts symposium, 10-12 april 2003, australian national university centre for cross cultural research.

2002 Pathways to the past read at indigenous researcher’s forum, curtin university, Wa. 27-29 november 2002.

2002 Art as recovery: connecting with spirit through cultural practice, read at WiPce (World indigenous People’s conference on education), calgary, canada, august 5th 6th 2002.

2001 Portrait by Place – land and language, read at the Portrait and Place conference, university of Tasmania/anu, school of art, hobart, 1st september 2001.

Gaze, guise, ruse of Hybridity, paper read at the university of Tasmania colonialism and its aftermath research cluster forum, 27 July, 2001.

1997 Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World – A Tasmanian perspective, read at: fulbright symposium – indigenous cultures in an interconnected World, nTmaG (northern Territory museum and art Gallery), Darwin, July 24 – 27, 1997.

artist presentation at the opening of Black humour exhibition, ccas (canberra contemporary art space), July 1997.

1996 Landscape and Memory, read at the acaf5 conference (australian contemporary art fair, melbourne) upside down at the bottom of the World, october 5, 1996.

Dark Secrets/Home Truths continued... read at the hobart art Teachers conference, school of art, hobart, october 4, 1996.

Dark Secrets/Home Truths, read at Wijay na? aboriginal and non-aboriginal art and artists conference, nTmaG 15-16 June, 1996.

Publications

2007 We walked on a carpet of starts. creative cowboy films.

Julie Gough – The Australian Art Resources Pack. creative cowboy films.

Publications contd

2006 Gough, J, Trading Places – why make Indigenous Art and where goes culture?, machine, artworkers alliance Queensland, Brisbane, Dec 2006, issue 2:3, issn: 1834-0237, pp. 7-9.

Gough, J, Being collected and keeping it real, Keeping culture: aboriginal Tasmania, (ed) amanda Jane reynolds, national museum of australia, canberra, isBn 1 876944 48X, pp. 9-20.

The ‘Xstrata coal emerging indigenous art award’: Some thoughts from the baseline, Julie Gough, artlines

– Queensland art Gallery contemporary art journal, april 2006.

Being collected and keeping it real, Julie Gough, national museum of australia catalogue essay accompanying Tasmanian aboriginal exhibition 2005-2007: We’re here.

Being there, then and now – aspects of south east Aboriginal art, Julie Gough, landmarks, national Gallery of Victoria, isBn 0 7241 0267 1, pp.125-131.

2005 Space to Move and Grow, Bill Viola, Dadang Christanto, Hany Armanious, Wendy McGrath, art and australia, Julie Gough, Vol 43 no 2 summer 2005.

Recovering, cross-currents exhibition catalogue essay, Julie Gough, linden – st Kilda centre for contemporary art, 2 July – 7 august, 2005.

Aboriginal Art, Langerrareroune (Sarah Island), Oyster Cove, Penemeroic, Toinneburer, Rawee, in ed. alexander, alison, The companion to Tasmanian history, centre for Tasmanian historical studies, university of Tasmania, isBn 186295223X, Julie Gough, four entries p.1, 206, 261-2, 268-9.

2004 Richard Browne, Benjamin Dutterau, Conrad Martens, John Skinner Prout, in ed. lindsay, frances, The Joseph Brown Collection, national Gallery of Victoria, 2004, isBn 0724120523 pbk, Julie Gough, p.40; p.42; pp.46-7; p.50.

Minyma Tjuta: Many women working with fibre and the figures of Kantjupayi Benson in ed. Judith ryan, Colour Power – Aboriginal Art post 1984, national Gallery of Victoria, 2004, isBn 0724120566. pbk, Julie Gough and Thisbe Purich, pp126 -130.

2004 Every which way but lost – the surround sound of skin, sKin exhibition catalogue essay, long Gallery, salamanca arts centre (Touring exhibition) , hobart. 8 July – 8 august, 2004.

2001 Messages received and lately understood, australian and new Zealand Journal of art, Vol.2, number 1, Julie Gough, pp.155–162.

2000 Cultural Relevance and Resurgence: Aboriginal Artists in Tasmania Today, oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture, ed. sylvia Kleinert and margo neale, oxford university Press, anu, 2000, isBn 0195506499, Julie Gough, pp.255-259.



Publications contd

2000 contd Physiological Adaptation to Cold and other true horror stories, oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture, ed. sylvia Kleinert and margo neale, oxford university Press, anu, 2000, isBn 0195506499, Julie Gough, p.97.

2000 Talking Together – Conversations between artworks, catalogue essay for the exhibitionTalking Together. curated by lola Greeno, university Gallery, launceston, september, 2000, Julie Gough, pp.4-8.

History, Representation, Globalisation and Indigenous Cultures: A Tasmanian Perspective, in indigenous cultures in an interconnected World, ed. claire smith and Graeme Ward, allen & unwin, 2000, isBn 186448926X, Julie Gough, pp.89-108.

1997 Cultural Relevance and Resurgence – Aboriginal Artists in Tasmania Today, art and australia, sept.1997, Vol.35 /no.1, Julie Gough, pp.108– 115.

History, Representation, Globalisation and Indigenous Culture – a Tasmanian Perspective, fulbright symposium papers, July 1997, Julie Gough.

Indigenous Australians in the Australian Museum, Periphery 31, may 1997, Julie Gough, pp.10-13.

1996 From the Deep South bearing True North – reflections on the ‘Wijay na? conference and exhibition’, Periphery 28, august 1996, Julie Gough, p.7.

1995 N.J.B. Plomley – My memories of that meeting, Pugganna, Tac (Tasmanian aboriginal centre inc), feb 1995, no.42, Julie Gough.

Exhibition catalogues (represented)

2006 Unsettledness – Julie Gough’s LOCUS, Judith ryan, Biennale of sydney 2006 catalogue, isBn 0 9580 403 1 1, editor/curator charles merewether, 7 June – 27 august, pp.120-1.

In the world: Head, Heart, Hand, the 17th Tamworth regional Textile Biennial 2006, Thwaites, V, isBn-13:978 0 9577871 7 9 & isBn-10: 9577871 7 0, p.7, 19.

An island South, an asialink/Devonport regional Gallery Touring exhibition, stewart, Jane, isBn 0 7430 3660 4, pp. 1-10.

Senses of Place, Plimsoll Gallery, university of Tasmania, 4-26 april 2006.

Single Currency, Victoria college of the arts, melbourne, 3-25 march, 2006.

2005 Cross Currents, linden – st Kilda centre for contemporary art, 28 June – 7 august, catalogue issue 1000, pp.1-2, 4, catalogue essay “recovering” by Julie Gough.

Exhibition catalogues (represented) contd

2005 contd On Island, Devonport regional Gallery, Tasmania, essay on island by Jane stewart pp.10-11, 11 march – 17 april 2005, isBn 0-9750729-3-5.

Isolation/Solitude, salamanca arts centre, hobart, Tasmania, 31 march – 1 may, isBn 0958174539.

2002 Flagship: Australian Art in the National Gallery of Victoria, 1790-2000, 2002, ed. isobel crombie, national Gallery of Victoria, p.78.

Indigenous Australian Art in the National Gallery of Victoria, nGV, 2002. p.20. isBn 07241022124.

2001 Native Title Business, museum and Gallery services QlD Touring exhibition, isBn 0958529167.

Home is where the heart is, country arts south australia Touring exhibition. isBn 09595800-6-9.

What’s Love got to do with it, rmiT Gallery melbourne, august 2001.

Response to the Island catalogue, salamanca arts centre inc. Tasmania, 2001. xisBn 0 646 41342 2.

Between Phenomena: The Panorama and Tasmania catalogue, university of Tasmania, 2001. isBn 0 85901 944 6.

John Glover Natives of the Ouse River Van Diemen’s Land 1838 and Driving Black Home 2000, catalogue, australian collection focus series, art Gallery of new south Wales, 2001.

10 Days on the Island, festival Brochure, 2001, Tasmania. Page 36.

2000 Biennale d’art contemporain de Noumea, catalogue, agence de developpment de la culture Kanak, aDcK, 2000, isBn 2-909-407-86-1, p42, 131.

Heart on your sleeve, catalogue, Plimsoll Gallery, university of Tasmania, hobart.

1999 TRACE – liverpool Biennial catalogue. isBn 0953676102.

Luna Park and the Art of Mass Delirium, catalogue, museum of modern art at heide, p.30 (illust).

Some Notes on Sport, Masculinity, Globalism and Art, in Exploring Culture and Community for the 21st Century, catalogue, Global arts link, ipswich, 1999. isBn 0958634807. p.75 (illust.).

Mapping our Countries, catalogue, Djamu Gallery, australian museum, sydney.

1998 Whispers, Lies and Text, catalogue, casT, hobart (illust).

Sculpture by the Sea, catalogue, nov. 1998 (illust p.16).

Telling Tales, catalogue, ivan Dougherty Gallery and neue Galerie am landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, austria. p.26, 55 (illust.p.26).

‘My Tools Today,’ in All this and Heaven too – adelaide Biennial catalogue, 1998.

J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k � 0


Exhibition catalogues (represented) contd

1998 contd clare Williamson, p.34, 35, 69 (illust. p.35). isBn 0730830586.

1997 Black Humour catalogue, ccas, acT, July 1997, p.21, 22 (illust p.21).

extracts catalogue, Boomalli, sydney, april 1997 (illust.p.3).

1996 cologne art fair catalogue, oct. 1996.

Dark Secrets, Home Truths catalogue, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne.

acaf5 (australian contemporary art fair #5) catalogue, melbourne, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi. also conference speaker Landscape and Memory.

1995 The Eagle has Landed, Perspecta 1995 catalogue, Peter hill, art Gallery of new south Wales, feb. 1995, p.46.

nuini catalogue, university Gallery, launceston, Tasmania, april 1995.

Reviews

2006 Revelations in the dark, The sydney morning herald, June 24-25, John mcDonald, pp.16-17.

Biennale Fever, artnotes nsW, art monthly australia, courtney Kidd, July 2006, number 191, p. 49.

A world of difference, arts: The australian, Tuesday June 13, sebastian smee, p.14.

2005 Melancholy Debris: Black Humour and Colonial Memory in grids, by Julie Gough, southerly, Vol 65, number 1, university of sydney, marita Bullock, pp. 35-44.

2003 Interview with Frances Lindsay. NGV deputy Director (Australian Art), Gallery, Jan/feb 2003, p.19.

Turning a love of art into a change of heart, agenda – sunday age, february 2, 2003, suzy freeman-Greene, p.2.

2002 Julie Gough’s Leeawuleena, aBV 42 – The annual Journal of the national Gallery of Victoria, Judith ryan, p.66-67.

Drawing Power, herald sun, Tues november 26, 2002, Kate Jones, p.49.

Impressive edifice puts art into focus, sydney morning herald, anthony Dennis, october 30, 2002.

Art Transplant, The age, october 25, 2002.

Precious skill endures, The mercury, hobart, Tania hill, oct 22, 2002, p28,29.

2001 Les installations ludiques de Julie Gough, Weekend scope, mauritius, 6-12 fevrier 2002, p73.

Julie Gough, sunday Vani, 10 fevrier 2002, sarita Boodhoo, p.24.

Reviews contd

2001 contd Les errances initiatiques de Julie Gough, l’express, mauritius, 4 fevrier, 2002, Jeanne Gerval-arouff, p.7.

Julie Gough, Jan Vani, mauritius, 8 february 2002, p12.

Remembering Jesus: the child in Australian Aboriginal art, artlink, vol.21 #2, Brook andrews, pp.20-21. (illust.).

illustrations for the arts Tasmania Grants handbook 2001.

Tense Past – Narratives of Gaps and Silences, artlink, vol.21 #2, Greg lehman, p.88. (illust.).

The big idyll, The sydney morning herald: spectrum may 12-13, 2001, Bruce James, pp.12-13. (illust.).

Wild Art at the World’s End, artlink, Vol.21 #1, Peter Grant, p.16, p.17 (image).

inSITE, museums australia (Victoria) newsletter, april-may 2001, cover image (Detail of: The Whispering sands (ebb Tide), 1998) and brief story p3.

2000 Julie Gough, oxford companion to aboriginal art and culture, ed. sylvia Kleinert and margo neale, oxford university Press, anu, 2000, isBn 0195506499, hannah fink, pp.594-595.

Australia’s Indigenous Arts, australia council, nsW, 2000, isBn 0642472300, p.34 (image/text) p.52.

Julie Gough, by Ted snell in australian Painting now, ed. laura murray cree and nevill Drury, fine art Press, craftsman house, sydney, isBn 905703252X, pp.132–135. (2 col. images).

The Diversity of Practice, artlink, Vol.20, 1, 2000, maurice o’riordan, p.65.

Liverpool Biennial, The Burlington magazine, Jan 2000, Tony Godfrey, pp.53-55.

Global Virus – Latest Symptoms, Broadsheet, summer 99/00, Vol 28, no.4, contemporary art centre of sa, shane Breynard, p.22.

university of Tasmania research report 1999, university of Tasmania, 2000. p.20 (2 col. images).

1999 Trace – Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, art monthly uK, november 1999, 231, Valerie reardon, pp.34-35.

Rich Creativity, methodist recorder, october 14, 1999, Paul flowers, p.13 (illust.).

Whispers, Lies and Text, DB magazine, June 16-29, 1999, David o’Brien.

The liverpool Biennial of contemporary art – Program, art forum international, summer 1999.

Art Notes – Tasmania, art monthly australia, June 1999, sean Kelly, p.43.

Unfolding from the Margins, realTime 30, april/may 1999, andrew nicholls, pp.8-9 (illust.p.9).

Down by the Sea, World sculpture news, Vol 5, 1 Winter 1999, Ken scarlett, pp.33-35 (image p.34).

J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k � 1


Reviews contd

1999 contd artlink, v.19, n.1, march 1999, David hansen, pp.18-21.

Arts, Westside observer, february 19, 1999, andrew nicholls, p. (illust.).

Black Humour, Black + White, 35, feb 1999, Wendy cavenett, pp.28-30 (illust.p29).

1998 Aboriginal Art, howard morphy, Phaidon Press ltd, london, 1998. isBn 0714837520, pp.403-4 (illust.).

Peninsula Awash with Art, The mercury, november 5 1998, amanda sims, p.6 (illust).

Sculpture by the Sea, south east Bulletin, november 4 1998, sandra shrub, p.1, 8 (illust).

Interpretation of the word in their deeds, The saturday mercury, hobart, nov.28, 1998, Joerg andersch, p.38.

‘Bad Memory: Art, Collecting and the Mercurial World of Julie Gough’, siGlo # 10, aut/Win 1998. collection/recollection, hannah fink, pp.3-8. (illust.p.6, 7, 8).

All this and heaven too – ‘adelaide Biennial of australian art, 1998’, art monthly australia, 109, march 1998, Ken Bolton, pp.8-9 (illust.p.9).

The Hell of Primitivism, like – art magazine, 5, summer/autumn 1998, Tom Byra mixie mosby, pp.18-22 (ilust.p.21).

Adelaide Biennial, artlink, v.18n.2, Kevin murray, pp.85-86.

Adelaide Biennial, art + Text, 62, aug – oct 1998, Blair french, pp.95-96.

Tasmania – A Laissez Faire Attitude, Periphery, 34, autumn 1998, Di Klaosen, p.17.

Black Humour, artlink, v.18n.3, stephanie radok, p.80.

Black Humour, Periphery, 34, autumn 1998, avril Quail, p.33.

1997 Julie Gough, Tas aPac (Tasmanian aboriginal Perspectives across the curriculum), Tasmanian aboriginal education unit, hobart, p.4.54 – 4.55 (illust.p54-55).

The Artist as Detective, Periphery, 33, summer 1997, michael Denholm, pp.23-25 (illust. 23- 25).

Revealing the Rot in Romance, The age, fri. aug.15, 1997, myfanwy Warhurst. entertainment Guide, p.17 (illust.).

A Case of Junk Art, The herald/sun, aug. 7, 1997, felicity lewis, p.51 (illust.).

Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World, 1997 fulbright symposium – Pre-circulated papers (coverpage illust.).

Provocative and Timely Humour, The canberra Times, July 18, 1997, sonia Barron, p.12.

Aboriginal Artists See Funny Side, The canberra Times, July 11, 1997, cassie Proudfoot, p.11 (illust.).

Reviews contd

1997 contd Samstag Application visuals, art monthly australia, 97, march 1997, p.9.

Samstag award helps artist in PhD bid, unitas 115, 10 mar. 1997, Peter hill, p.5.

Nothing is Understood. Culture Conferences – a Final Look, Periphery 30, february 1997, Djon mundine, p.21, p.35.

1996 First Voice – A vehicle for Human Rights, siglo – journal for the arts, hobart, #7 summer 96/97, Greg lehman, pp.4 – 8 (illust.p.5 – 8).

Köln Art Fair, Kolnische rundschau, Koln, nov. 12, 1996, Bruno f. schneider.

Köln art fair, Kolner stadt-anzeiger, Koln, nov. 14, 1996, Jurgen Kisters, p.41.

Köln Art Fair, express-Koln, nov. 14, 1996, Gunter Wallroff, p.2.

The Art of Storytelling with everyday objects, The mercury, hobart, nov. 2, 1996, Jane lovibond, p.33. (illust.).

Samstag Winners announced, The australian, fri nov 1, 1996, p.12.

Samstag 1996, The age, fri. nov. 1, 1996, p. B4.

State Grant to Artist, The mercury, hobart, sept. 18, 1996, p.9.

Julie Gough for Cologne, Art Monthly Australia, 93, Sept. 1996, Artnotes: National, Peter Timms, p.34

Wijay Na...?, art monthly australia, 92, august 1996, Dawn murray, p.27.

Cologne Selection, The age, Wed 31 July, 1996, rebecca lancashire, p.B15.

The Next Wave, nightclubs and surrounding islands, art monthly australia, 91, July 1996, Peter hill, p.13.

Where the Salt Water meets the Fresh Water, Periphery, 27, may 1996, fiona foley, pp.20-23.

Quietly Gothic, realtime 12, april/may 1996, edward colless, p.38.

1995 The Art Fair Murders, art monthly australia, Dec 1995, Peter hill, p.32.

exhibition commentary, art and australia, v.33 # 1, spring 1995 p.107.

Julie Gough, c.a.s.T magazine (contemporary art services Tasmania) interview by heather B.swann, aug.1995. pp.20-24.

Julie Gough, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, The age robert nelson, 17 may, 1995. p.23.

‘insight into a culture that is flourishing’, The examiner, may 6th, 1995, Jo mcintyre, p.19.

J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k � �


Reviews contd

1995 contd Art Interbreeds, The Bulletin, feb 21, 1995, Joanna mendelssohn, p.78.

Struggling to find a foothold, The adelaide advertiser, feb 18, 1995, Tim lloyd, p.31.

Perspecta, The Drum Media, feb 14, 1995, amanda rankin, p.56.

Why Perspecta has lost its hybrid perspective, sydney morning herald, feb 11, 1995, John mcDonald, p.13a.

Perspecta Exhibition a Hybrid Exploration, The age, feb 8, 1995, Bruce James.

Contamination as a moral issue, Business review Weekly, feb 6, 1995, John Kavanagh, p.84.

Fearless Five in Visual Art Impact, The mercury, feb 4, 1995, margaretta Pos.p.37.

1994 Diverse Media, The mercury, Dec 17, 1994, p.37.

The making of Australian Perspecta 1995, art monthly australia, nov 1994, Judy annear. pp.12-13.

Visual Artists honoured with Exhibition selection, unitas, oct 21, 1994, Peter hill.

Youthful energy opens eyes to exciting styles, The West australian, may 21, 1994, David Bromfield. The arts p.4.

Select employment

2005 – 06 Lecturer, Visual arts, James cook university, Townsville, Queensland, australia.

2003 – 04 Curator, indigenous art, national Gallery of Victoria.

2002 – 03 Lecturer, riawunna, centre for aboriginal studies, university of Tasmania.

2001 – 02 Voluntary sculpture lecturer at mGi (mahatma Gandhi institute), moka, mauritius for five months courtesy of a commonwealth arts and crafts award.

2000 – 01 Interpretation Officer, aboriginal culture, Parks and Wildlife service, hobart, Tasmania.

Pre-2000 Associate-Lecturer in Visual culture – mixed-media studies Diploma, school of art, university of Tasmania, hobart, 1997. Plimsoll Art Gallery Attendant, school of art, university of Tasmania. University Receptionist, school of art, university of Tasmania, Database compiler Tasmanian museum and art Gallery, hobart.

J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k b y c r e A T i v e c o w b o y f i l m s � �

� selected writing

Julie Gough discusses some of her exhibitions

Cross Currents (Group Show) �00�

linden-st Kilda centre for contemporary arts

craft for floating home is a series of rafts that i have recently made whilst in (self-imposed) exiled in Townsville, away from my ancestral homeland, specifically from the far north east of Tasmania, Tebrikunna. The place in far north eastern australia in which i find myself now living is coastal; perhaps the extent of its familiarity.

making art is central to my being; as central as the need to carry a physical understanding of an immediate way home from wherever i am in the world. The security of keeping alive the flame of my potential means of return to Tasmania is a meditative preoccupation for me.

making these rafts actual out of the dimension of dream has been a cathartic experience of renewal. These rafts, in the repetitive craft of beach collecting, tying and knotting, take my weight and help me move beyond the everyday.

Thinking through why we make things and how they operate in the real and imagined worlds our origins provide us, give me an elemental pleasure of connectedness. on these rafts i sense movement from where i have been, both in art practice and in a broader cultural sense, toward a quiet space for further formations or transmissions about culture, place, time to emerge.

These rafts are voyageable translations of what absence and isolation are and how they enable the traveler to experience anew.

Language art is our central unifying language. it enables paths to be charted afresh, puzzles about our interconnected pasts to be reconsidered and recovered in our time. We come from places and peoples called Waradjerie, yorta yorta, Trawlwoolway, Tasmanian aboriginal, cape Barren islander, swan hill, Wagga Wagga, the murray river, yarrawonga, Barmah, echuca, st Kilda, cape Barren island, Tebrikunna, Weymouth, launceston yet there are overlaps and synchronicities in how we feel, think and work our ideas into form. There is a sense of familiarity in the company of these women; sisters and aunties.

Fluidity There are salt and fresh waters in our hair, on our skin, tracing trans-generational memories. our ancestors met on waterways, rivers and straits, islands and isthmus. courses were charted with people in and outside of our respective countries and cultures. since then perhaps, we have become more fluid in our understanding of identity, and the ways and places it surfaces to direct us. our womens’ indisputable mobility over countless generations enables us to be here to dart and dive across, into and out of the situations of our present. This movement is inherent in our work, the objects and their installation speak of travel, trade, memory, time, recollection, transmission, readiness, adaptability and renewal of skills.

Trade We carry in us the means to travel and carry culture. The means to transmit beyond ourselves is inbuilt, a female capacity inherent and palpably calling to occur. The pulse that is the need to move our hands, our fingers, to bond and bind what we find, feel and think into art is the way we live. our driven paths compel us to collect and form into art narratives of our cultural memories. This is intensely part of us. making


is about using things well; using time, skills, place in respectful ways to enable good outcomes. The time spent finding, preparing and building transforms into conversations, sharing of skills, understandings of place, planning for futures. our art work provides intimate windows into cultural changes through time and how ideas develop according to circumstances.

Tidal shorelines are places where our women have met each other, men, collected materials, foods, news, set out on journeys both one way and return. our blood carries lineages of these sometimes shared stories. cross currents expresses this ebb and flow, how we pace ourselves, where we are at in tending to our distinct cultural and personal knowledge. There is renewal and recovery in this opportunity to make for ourselves and each other; to take time to be together in the frenetic present to support our often otherwise individual journeys.

Home Sweet Home, Liverpool Biennial, �00�

liverpool

Home Sweet Home is an installation i made as a response to my visit to liverpool in may 1999. invited by guest curator Tony Bond to make a work for the inaugural liverpool Biennial international exhibition Trace. i was very excited by my opportunity to make site and story specific work at the Bluecoat arts centre. arriving in liverpool i noticed references to the great wealth upon which the city was founded; the movement of people and materials – slavery, migration and trade.

Wandering around, i stood searching the cityscape from the top of the liverpool anglican cathedral and saw the cemetery below. i walked down through the stone tunneled entrance into the underworld like quarried burial ground of selected inhabitants of the city. stone after stone was inscribed with the name of ship captains and their ships, and of dearly beloved and departed young children, eulogized in terms of permanent angelic sleep. in the midst of the repeated notions of love and family i was stopped hard in my tracks by the sight of six stones in a row. Damp and nettle fringed, they unemotionally listed one hundred and twenty two dead children from four liverpool orphanages; the Bluecoat hospital, the liverpool infant orphan asylum, the liverpool female orphan asylum and the liverpool Boys’ orphan asylum.

i have been engrossed in researching the enforced transportation of people to australia – convicts and children. however, i now found myself drawn, somewhat unexpectedly, to the children who stayed behind in the Bluecoat hospital orphanage

– now the Bluecoat arts centre, where i was to exhibit. liverpool’s archives hold diverse references to the Bluecoat hospital, as well as the ragged schools and the Kirkdale house of correction that existed then – brief, tantalizing glimpses into short lives of hard work. late in the nineteenth century children in the ragged school sorted senna and pigs bristles, whilst children in the Bluecoat hospital made pins. earlier than that, orphan boys in the Bluecoat hospital had been expected to set sail on the slave ships, some of which were run by members of the Bluecoat’s board and by benefactors of the hospital. Girls were trained to be domestic servants, if they defied this expectation they were not provided with street clothes to leave the premises.

i felt that the six stones in the cemetery were the answer, the reason for my extended walks in and around the city. i imagined them immediately as soft pillows or mattresses – as a comfort that these children never had in reality. i returned to my headstones shortly after with a huge bundle of cotton fabric and graphite, to rub and transfer the Bluecoat children’s names on to the fabric, and hence back to Bluecoat itself – and the names of other children at a similar orphanage site elsewhere. i did this over six wet and windy days – accompanied by unexpected but vital meetings with cemetery locals and visitors.

Home Sweet Home 2002



i visited Port sunlight and saw the influence of the lever company on the region. i decided that soap should also be an element within the work. The unacknowledged trading of palm oil – a major cargo on slave ships – meant a direct connection with Bluecoat (yet again), and palm oil’s transformation for household cleaning was a strangely repulsive and compelling piece of information. i applied a scented soap mix, utilising lever’s lux soap and lavender oil, to the base of a plaster pillar in the installation. This represents both the lack of mother and home comforts in these children’s lives, and visually expresses the metaphorical bar of soap upon which the building’s foundation and framework was based.

returning to Tasmania in late may 1999, i constructed small beds for the pillows / mattresses i had made that were the size of the actual tombstones. i believed that the letters of the children’s names must be filled in with pins. They became pin cushions, with only the pin-heads visible as an act of recognition and remembrance of the short lives of these children. The dots were a form of punctuation – full stops. my mother, three obsessively compulsive women and i worked continuously over two months to complete the intensive pin-work required. This seemed appropriately similar to the endlessly repetitive work which the children’s tiny hands had endured as pin- makers and, as such, perhaps a fitting acknowledgement.

it was fantastic to be funded (by the liverpool Biennial, arts Tasmania, the australia council and the university of Tasmania) for materials and two visits – allowing the work to be made as a true response to me seeing and experiencing liverpool. seventy kilograms of pins later – and with enough stuffing for ninety regular pillows – the children were brought back in from the cold to the home that wasn’t so sweet for them. my return visit to install the work and participate in the event with other artists was a great reward for creating it. Visitors to my installation began speaking the names of the children aloud as they read the pillows, further invoking the children’s presence in their return to the very site where they had dwelt over 100 tears ago. This unexpected filling the gap of time, with the sound of voices reading children’s names, unsettled me – the sounds of naming became a generous act beyond my intent, relative as it was to the former silence of the children’s cold headstones.

it was unnerving sharing the same Bluecoat room as the artist maria magdalena campos-Pons. This is because her work eerily mirrored my own. she had created ‘slave boards’ – timbers replicating the space allocated to each slave in the hold of a slave ship – into which she carved mappings of the slave’s quarters for several different ships. These were exhibited lined up vertically along the walls. multiple unnamed people were represented, on coffin-like lids. across the other side of the room were my six beds displaying the multiple names of dead children, borrowed from tombstones and laid horizontally. We had both displaced horizontal to vertical, or vice versa, changing the placement of people in not entirely different ways. i feel that our works were uncannily complimentary, changing the space with something potent from liverpool’s variant pasts.

everyone at the Biennial office, and the wondrous Bluecoat team, were kind and patient with me – with unpacking, installing, photographing and with storing bags of coal and weird bristles and various other sample i assembled. These folk made the entire, immense event memorable – they ensured that it worked. i wish i could have met other artists in more depth, more times for more talk – whatever. But i am a bit shy. i managed, though, to catch good glimpses into our various work practices and life outlooks, which enhanced my project and the processes of being part of this event. fondly remembered.



Further writing about home sweet home, Liverpool Biennial, 2002

When the former Bluecoat hospital was suggested as a site for a work i began walking around liverpool noticing references to the great wealth upon which this city was founded; the movement of people and materials – slavery, migration and trade. i initially became engrossed in researching the transportation of people to australia – convicts and the forced migration of children. however, i found myself drawn, somewhat unexpectedly, to the children in the Bluecoat hospital (orphanage) who stayed behind. The liverpool archives holds diverse references to the Bluecoat hospital, and also to the ragged schools and the Kirkdale house of correction last century in this city. Brief tantalising glimpses into a short life of hard work. children in the ragged school in soho street, liverpool “sorted senna and pig bristles” whilst children in the Bluecoat late last century “made pins”...The orphan boys in the Bluecoat hospital were expected to set sail on the slave ships and Traders which were run by several of the Bluecoat Board and Benefactors early last century. Girls were trained to be domestic servants, if they defied this expectation they weren’t provided street clothes to leave the premises.

in wandering the city, i stood searching the cityscape from the top of the liverpool anglican cathedral and saw the cemetery below. i walked down through the stone-tunnelled entrance into the underworld-like quarry burial-ground of selected inhabitants of the city last century. stone after stone inscribed with the names of ship captain’s and their ships, of dearly beloved and departed young children eulogised in terms of permanent angelic sleep. in the midst of repetitive notions of love and family i was stopped hard in my tracks by the sight of six stones in a row, damp and nettle fringed they unemotionally named-as-lists one hundred and twenty-two dead children from four liverpool orphanages: The Bluecoat hospital, The liverpool infant orphan asylum, The liverpool female orphan asylum, The liverpool Boy’s orphan asylum.

i felt that these stones were the answer, the reason for my extended walks in and around the city. i imagined them immediately as soft pillows, as mattresses, as a comfort that they never had in reality. i returned to the headstones shortly after with a huge bundle of cotton fabric and a large graphite rock from the liverpool museum to rub and transfer the Bluecoat children to their former site, and the other children to a similar orphanage site to which they had also experienced. This activity occurred over six wet and windy days- with accompanying unexpected vital meetings with cemetery locals and visitors. at this point i decided that soap should also be an element within the work. i had been to Port sunlight and seen the influence of lever on the region, and the unacknowledged origin of palm oil as a major item within the cargo of slave ships, and this connection with Bluecoat (yet again). lavender scented soap mix utilising lever luX and lavender oil was applied to the base of the pillar in this installation. This represents both the lack of mother and home comforts in these children’s lives, and visually expresses the metaphorical bar of soap upon which this building’s foundation and framework was based.

upon my return to hobart, Tasmania in late may i constructed small “beds” for these pillow/mattresses; the size of the actual tombstones. my mother, myself and three obsessively compulsive women worked continuously over two months to complete the intensive pin-work required. i believed that these names must be filled-in with pins – pin cushions within only the pin-heads visible as an act of recognition and remembrance of these children’s short lives; the dots as a form of punctuation – as full-stops. making this work seemed to be an appropriately similar activity to the endlessly repetitive work which the children’s tiny hands endured as pin-makers, and as such perhaps a fitting acknowledgment.

i initially wondered, as one local liverpool man, ian, questioned” if people will search for and recognise their own surnames?” But things were even closer to home than that – visitor’s to the room began speaking the names of the children aloud as they read the pillows, invoking their presence and return to the very site where their names had been the everyday over 100 years ago. They filled the gap of time with voice. seventy kilograms of pins later, and with enough stuffing for 90 regular pillows – the work was en site, the children were brought back in from the cold to the home that wasn’t so sweet for them…


Heartland, �001

Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne solo exhibition

Winter 2001 i created a series of artworks about movement through time and space.

They were slightly nostalgic works, tinged with some sadness about the impossibility of a return to my culture as it once was before europeans arrived in Tasmania. at the same time they were exploratory in medium and showed an embrace of the materials that remain mine culturally to work with and through which to express myself.

The resulting pieces were expressions of much physical joy of the return to my maternal homeland and the satisfaction of being able to find and work with local materials in a fluid way that resulted in an entire exhibition of interconnected stories. These works converted the gallery space into a kind of doorway into other worlds.

The art provided a viewer the means to see and negotiate what i experienced in north east Tasmania, which was, more than one space and more than one time occurring simultaneously. i felt the past, present, future converge in shimmering congruency in that country. The art works were my versions of portals to times past, practices past and those ways of living that the time of the residency enabled me some understanding of.

These works were all made onsite during a Wilderness residency at eddystone lighthouse in north east Tasmania.i lived alone in the lighthouse cottage and created the works over some months. The materials were collected at lake st clair in central Tasmania; on the midlands highway during road widening works; and from coastal areas of the north east corner of Tasmania.

one name by which the north east of Tasmania is traditionally is Tebrikunna. Tebrikunna is my traditional homeland on my mother’s side of the family. The original name of my people are the Trawlwoolway people. We survived, ironically, due to our women, some two hundred years ago, being kidnapped by sealers and whalers from the uK, usa and new Zealand. These women were kept moving across the Bass strait islands to mainland australia, further afield to King George’s sound and even across to mauritius. This mobility kept some of our people out of the reach of the Van Diemen’s land and colonial government’s net, a net that most Tasmanian aboriginal people experienced by the 1830s when captured, removed from mainland Tasmania and taken to flinders island where most succumbed to respiratory illnesses.

Heartland 2001courtesy Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi


Time Capsules (bitter pills), �001

rocks, cuttlefish bone private collection

This work came about in a natural almost effortless way that felt like a gift. i was sitting on the beach near eddystone lighthouse and picked up a piece of cuttlefish bone and had an urge to carve it. i found my pocket knife and returned to the beach and there on the spot began making small pills in capsule form. There was no reason for making these forms, they just starting being made in a rapid succession until i had a large handful. it occurred to me what i was making at that point was anything that could take me further into being of that place. The title came immediately also at that point, Time capsules (bitter pills), because i had been musing and making other works about transporting myself back in time to the same place hundreds of years ago. i immediately called them bitter pills, because i don’t think that i would have survived long or enjoyed what i found.

Time Capsules (bitter pills) 2001

Cuttlefish, north east Tasmania


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J u l i e G o u G h : T h e A u s T r A l i A n A r T r e s o u r c e s p A c k b y c r e A T i v e c o w b o y f i l m s � 0

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Chase, �001

Tea-tree, steel, cotton, jute. approx. 300 x 240 x 300 cm collection of the national Gallery of Victoria

Chase is about terror, flight, this is the unspoken space and place called australia. Terror nullius. nothing is there but everything feared. This is what we inhabit in the night, the pause, the gap between then and tomorrow. This work is a story of the unfinished business between black and white australia. i wanted to make something simple in materiality to cast the one dimensional nature of addressed, institutional history out from the protection of the gallery walls. i wished to allow something that is quietly, intangibly, ever-present in this ‘nation’ to take form. This work is an attempt to convey the pervasive knowledge of a wrongly commenced national story that cannot be rewritten – one that is beyond spoken or written language, but exists as gripping, knowing, feeling.

in presenting a work as a commentary between the 1901 federation painting e.Phillips-fox The Landing of Captain Cook and the 1994 work Imperial Leather i felt there was only the space between them, that silent space we all interminably inhabit in which to work. i don’t believe that australia has left behind the two aforementioned stories but is still enmeshed in their dialogues of invasion, control and silencings. Chase is a visual reminder of what we want to forget but haven’t faced it in order to lay it to rest: our collective, overlapping pasts and complicities.

ongoing because we don’t perhaps have the language to deal with it.

in this installation i reference several visual elements from both the 1901 and 1994 works from which i have created this new work: These elements include:

- The colour red in the flag of cook’s landing and the coat of those in command taking aim to shoot at the aborigines, and the red fabric toweling of Imperial Leather.

- multiple objects as in the wax heads aligned across the surface of the British blood red flag, and the hands of the europeans in the painting, also the weaponry of the guns and spears.

suspension in the forms of the hanging wax heads and also in the idea of suspension implying waiting and unfinished trauma.

- The notion of the Vertical which is contained within the aligned rows of wax heads in Imperial Leather and in the various positions of the rifles and spears, the oars and masts of the boats and the figures and flag-stick in the fox work.

from these visual triggers i decided to create my version of the psychological space this country inhabits. This took form as a tense, tight tea-tree forest. The kind of forest that is dark and damp, leech ridden and easy to be lost within. This is a suspended space, eerie, floating in no-time between the 1901 and 1994 works. This work is intended to be a kind of emanation, aura or psychic force between them. my visualization of a place that has not been negotiated successfully and so remains our haunted house, our outdoors and indoors, our everywhere. The forest hangs, string suspending each stick with a noose knot. multiple sticks as the multiple heads in Imperial Leather and the multiple spears and rifles in fox’s painting. The view from either side of Chase transforms and modifies the visibility, the perception, the reading of both Imperial Leather or The Landing of Captain Cook. i make the space, the world between them uncannily visible. The story is that within the forest is the trace of a pursuit. Torn scraps of cotton flagging and red toweling held within its grasp bear testament to a struggle within this space, a flight of passage took place and took parts, pieces of both works into this otherworldly configuration. Traces of captain cook’s party and of the Imperial Leather British flag which holds the suspended heads of aboriginal Boy ornaments flicker within the tea-tree, the forest has borne witness to the start of where we are today. The fabrics are held firm through time, we are still

Chase 2001courtesy national Gallery of Victoria

Previous 3 pages:Cuttlefish bone, north east Tasmania


enmeshed in the grasp of this narrative. Whilst cook is clearly sleep-walking across fox’s canvas, his hand outstretched his face avoiding the aborigines awaiting the landing party, i suggest that the reality is that a pursuit came next, the chronology of reading from left to right shows that the aborigines cannot be evaded, they are the last thing awaiting to be encountered and yet this cannot happen within the frame which fox allowed cook in his work. That story- the result of cook’s landing, the result of european arrivals determined to find a terra nullius is carefully avoided by fox and offered by Chase – this is not ‘chased’ but an ongoing tension and presence in this country.

Stand, �000

Tea-tree, lamp, wood, rope 8 x 8 x 8 ft

Tea-tree room constructed on and installed on a hill adjacent to the midlands high-way on lovely Banks farm during the inaugural 10 Days on the island festival, Tas-mania 2001. This tea-tree room had a lamp perpetually lit for the entire 10 days and 10 nights of the festival in vigil/memory of the original aboriginal inhabitants.

Driving Black Home, �000

sixteen postcards in 100 boxed sets

16 postcards of Black, nigger, native places around Tasmanian encountered during a 1200km drive around Tasmania in 2000, 16 (10 x 15cm) postcards commercially printed from my personal photographs x 100 set.

There are fifty-six places names after Black people in Tasmania, they include: Black mary’s hill, Black George’s marsh, Blackman’s lookout, Black Tommy’s hill, Blackfellows crossing and Black Phil’s Point.

There are seventy nine ‘Black’ places in Tasmania, they include: Black Beach, Black creek, Black Gully, Black marsh, Black Pinnacle, Black reef, Black sugarloaf and Black swamp.

There is one abo creek in Tasmania. There are three places named ‘nigger’ in Tasmania: nigger head, niggerhead rock and niggers flat. There are sixteen places named for ‘natives’ in Tasmania, they include: native hut creek, native lass lagoon, native Track Tier and native Plains.

These are one hundred and fifty four places. But really they become one big place, the entire island, Tasmania. This is a journey of mapping and jotting the intersections which make up this place’s story and history.

i see this big ongoing journey as an act of remembering. it is also my way of considering and disclosing the irony that although our original indigenous place names were all but erased from their original sites; europeans then consistently went about reinscribing our ancestors’ presence on the land. i propose that these ‘settlers’ recognised the rights of occupancy of aboriginal Tasmanians’ – evidenced by their renaming of ‘natural’ features across the entire island in the image of Black, native, nigger and abo...

The conception of this artwork directly relates to my previous employment within Parks and Wildlife, Tasmania as an indigenous interpretation officer. in this position i have had the opportunity to see more places and meet more people than ever before. i have also been reading much more than between the pages of history or science or old school books- which were the texts that formerly inspired much of my art practice.

Stand 2000

Postcards from Driving Black Home 2000


This postcard/photographic series has emerged from reading the land and those interventions with the land that have stood outside largely unquestioned- signs. signs in more ways than one, these are markers to ways of seeing and labelling place in the past that have unavoidably intersected with my present.

These signs have demanded that i take note and collect them in this way. much of my work is about collecting, compiling and reconfiguring objects of culture. i need to gather, shuffle and prod objects about. my process is to find the point of unease- where familiarity counters a general discomfort and leaves the work hovering between uncertain worlds. in my practice, i assemble a certain number of objects, a particular grouping, an almost normal delivery – but not quite – so that the apprehension and comprehension of my work isn’t always immediate but requires a pace of reading that is, in itself, linked to my own growing awareness whilst i created the work.

There are resonances of other things driving this series- my own early dislocation from Tasmania. i was born and ‘grew up’ in st Kilda – in another state entirely....in ‘returning’ to the land and this island in this way, i see things afresh, askew and seemingly unquestioned. These are signs which seem to be something else and which i want to address. late in 1998, i made my own ‘people signs’ – i collected sixteen ‘colonials’ whilst i was living in london. Britons who had collected Tasmanian aboriginal people and objects of culture in some way.

i pyrographically inscribed life size images of these people into plywood and placed these figures in a simulated seascape. They were assembled indoors in london with the sounds, colours and super eight footage of the ocean. a film loop revealed me throwing bottles with messages into the english sea – notes which asked that objects of culture be returned to their original nations and peoples... Just days before this exhibition opened i was asked if i wanted to participate in a site-specific outdoor exhibition in Tasmania. This was fate, for that was where the work needed to be to complete its own journey. i posted these wooden ‘portraits’ to Tasmania, and followed them home. Titled The Whispering Sands (Ebb Tide) and placed on stakes in the Tidal flats at eaglehawk neck, Tasman Peninsula, they were revealed and concealed by the actions of the tides. sometimes completely hidden and other times exposed down to the sands, their metal post structures defined these as “people signs”. These figures became memory personified as their relentless presence/absence reflected the ongoing, covert effects their actions have had on our culture. in this series Driving Black Home, i haven’t had to do anything but be there- and record the real...and recognise that truth is stranger than fiction…

Ebb Tide (The whispering sands), 1��

pyrography on marine plywood, steel variable dimensions collection the artist

This installation comprises sixteen life-size portraits pyrographically (hand-burnt) onto 5mm plywood. These are British individuals who historically and subsequently impacted on Tasmanian aboriginal people. These figures were placed in the tidal flats at eaglehawk neck, southern Tasmania during november 1998 in the Sculpture by the Sea exhibition.

These people were collectors; they accumulated material culture, stories, human remains, anthropological/medical information and even aboriginal children in the names of science, education, history, anthropology and the increase of their own personal status and power. i decided (as an exercise and partially an exorcism) to collect these people themselves (as images) and reduce them to a nameless conglomerate mass just as they had enacted on aboriginal Tasmanians last century. Placed in the tidal flats for two weeks late in 1998, these figures submerged and re-emerged with the action of the tides, the tide enacting the position of memory.

Postcard from Driving Black Home 2000

Ebb Tide 1998

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Placed as though they were wading into shore, they operated as a form of mnemonic trigger. Their emergence from the water suggested that their presence and deeds rests still within our own memories. This work was a response to awakening ideas about our co-residency with the past, and to questions arising about our avoidance and consignment of the past to a peripheral dimension called ‘history’.

Dark Secrets / Home Truths, 1��

hobart

history, it seems, can only control its past and its ongoing future as a discipline by discovering ( ie inventing) linkages between events, maintaining that there is a beginning, middle and end of such stages or eras, and inferring that the viewpoint taken is somewhere universal, uncomplicated and correct. The idea that aboriginal people have their own history was only recently taken-on-board in this country when it was decided that australia could take on an international aura of historical significance by ripping aboriginal history out of its context and mathematically adding it to 200 years of european settlement.

although history has always blurred the truth by omittance, the underhand manipulation of fact by failing to document equitably during the past, in hindsight, is perhaps partly exonerable due to constraints linked to education, distance, time, and means of communication.

in the re-creation of Western history within fictional film, ‘authentic’ documentary and written portrayals, non-western participation has been portrayed as inconsequential, of “natives” caught in an intangible landscape – not urban, enacting some kind of ritual with plant or animal matter – not planning, deliberating, or appearing coherently “involved” in an ongoing “existence”.

my interest lies in combating, or at least questioning the single – viewpoint or perspective of history maintained by fixing indigenous peoples in a landscape, as unmoving, unchanging, undeveloping, non-participating, singular and two-dimensional.

my work centres on recontextualising historical stories and the cultural meanings of objects by retelling documented events from an alternate and differing perspective than that of the western historical record. my intent is to challenge the recorded past by subversively reworking it from my personal view-point of the “invisible aboriginal”. Through using “familiar” – and therefore safe /non-threatening visual materials such as domestic, schoolroom, medical, holiday / souvenir icons, i hope to invoke an air of recognition, of a momentarily returned nostalgia interwoven with my unexpected and possibly disturbing version of the times or events in question and on view.

as i work with rediscovered episodes in the newspapers or archives, i at present realise that they become an artform of an almost replicant singular format to that of their previous written life, in a sense they cannot lay to rest nor naturally adjoin with neighbouring stories. This action of reuse of a narrative, as with incorporation of used materials in my practice is somehow linked to the perhaps dissatisfying notion within my work and myself that there can be no closure of the past, it is amongst and within us, there are no absolutes, and the sense of discovery which impels me does not lead to the satisfaction of being able to locate the “real” the “truth” the “facts” – only yet another approximation of them – my own.

integral to my work is the knowledge that the stories i wish to unravel are usually only documented in the language, the tongue, and therefore the inferences, opinions and bias of the non-aboriginal onlooker. my reasons for using the english language within my work are several, and include taking issue with the position of this language as the main means of representation of people’s stories within australia (regardless of cultural inappropriateness).

Pedagogical innersoul pressure 1995

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my suggestion is not that any other written language can fill this void, rather, that the use of alternative visual/vocal language forms may assist in offering other interpretations of stories without the inherent historical/cultural boundaries of the english language, and that if utilised within these possibilities the english language will appear the interloper rather than the omniscient inventor.

i wish to draw attention to the confines of this language in the recent past serving only categorisational, locational, and other descriptory means when applied to aboriginal peoples. language as a means of control and placement, to render safe, to understand, to name and thus to “know”. i believe a reuse, at this point, of language-fracture is a means of drawing attention to, not only the ongoing misrepresentation of indigenous people, but the basic misunderstanding this stems from.

another reason for my working from this english language framework, in teasing the visual from tempered words, is to acknowledge that this is the position where i began some years ago in not consciously recognising my own aboriginality, and thus experiencing stories with any aboriginal content from the distortions of school – texts, missionaries diaries, anthropological / scientific studies, musical, book, newspaper or TV documentary perspectives.

for the same reason, my research and work is based on situations impacting on my family or is that of open public record. for example, i don’t wish to trespass on Traditional Tasmanian aboriginal culture – of which much is consciously unknown. Thus, if i don’t feel connected to all aspects, or if there is no elder or guide for the area by whom i am welcomed to discuss implications and possible meanings, i don’t follow it through; often therefore my work is about recent and urban – related events and attitudes.

any linkages suggested between the events i depict are as tenuous as those proposed historically, however in reworking the past from the viewpoint of the “other”, i believe my work is physically proposing cultural continuity and growth within rearticulations and realignments as viable alternatives. Thus the sense of an ongoing search within my work, of being in flux, disruptive and lacking finality, whilst being an anxious history, is a useful one.

equally central to my work process is the maintenance of a sense of humour within myself and most pieces. often bordering on the macabre, certainly twisted, my usage of humour is linked to the inclusion of familiar objects in the reworking of stories, and is my means of further displacing borders, such as where – funny – meets awful, or of releasing tensions within a remembering that allows for fears and positions of uncertainty, involvement or even complicity to resurface.

The usage of aboriginal kitsch in my work, of colours of the 1950s in paint or fabric, or toys, shoes/clothing, puppets, washing machines, kitchen utensils, souvenirs, and 1970s trashy novels all may act to distance an audience to a safety – zone of the pseudo – past, yet my intent is to lure – out the recognition – factor, inescapable within memory – span in order to psychologically connect the viewer with the story.

often, by utilising the “collection” with its components of reproduction, multiplicity, recognisability, nostalgia, ownership, i intend to connect the household with the museum, the scientific exploration of minute difference with the continuity – factor of basic behaviour through time. The collection is a metaphor for control, containment, order, logic, and fear of the unknown.

The boundaries of the collection are the locked cabinet door, or the lack of an information – card. a collection, the western history sets its task to name or indentify without acknowledging that there were already names and interactions existent, for example here (australia) prior to european arrival. a collection is as much about elimination of materials as inclusion, a collection tells much about its maker as itself, therefore, it is as contrived as any documented history with one author.

Folklore 1995


according to susan stewart (stewart, susan on longing – narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection, John hopkins uP, Baltimore, 1984), a souvenir is about remembering, whilst a collection is about forgetting. By starting afresh due to the “difference of purpose” accorded a deliberate grouping, a collection recontextualises itself through reverberational internal dialogues which are set – up due to time and space anomalies between its components.

as a collector myself, i seek out objects and data which sit on the periphery, pieces that have been discarded by many, snippets of time that suggest an alternative story and have been an anathema to mainstream perspectives. in utilising the fragmentary and almost lost, i am hoping to suggest the magnitude, complexity and the sheer number of stories that do presently or may shortly lie beyond our earthly realm, inferred and implied by those surviving.

at hobart university library the Bliss classification system of books lies segregated. They are the daemons of historians, of scientists; the blatant evidence of suppositions gone terribly wrong, of beliefs blatantly biased, of practice so appalling as to be ludicrous or thankfully sometimes even humorous over time.

These books are the history we are made of, yet they are on the verge of being discarded – to allow the system to be absolved, because they are now “outdated”. These books “gave–over” the data for the Medical Series i constructed during 1994 – they spoke of tests on aboriginal people from the 1930’s, such as the czechoslovakian research team in the late 1950’s who in testing for ”Physiological adaptation to cold” in the central Desert “placed” aboriginal people in refrigerated meat-vans overnight.

other volumes constructed difference and an accompanying inferred inferiority around comparative studies of people’s ear-wax, teeth, body odour, eyeball weights, hair, fingerprints, skull-dimensions, brain-weights, and finally the Porteous intelligence test – based on pencil/paper and an imported time/space logic – all unintelligible to the aboriginal people of the Kimberley region in the 1950’s, and contrived to be so.

Whilst i also reconfigure through art non-indigenous accounts that have impacted on me during childhood – such as films like The Sound of Music, Psycho, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, places including “luna Park” in melbourne (next to which i spent my early years), or the original Kung Fu TV series, my compulsion is to retrieve and rework depictions of aboriginal people by those who professed to “know” about us.

one persona i believe i have borrowed from popular culture in shaping my investigative means of uncovering information is that of the detective figure in fiction and in 1970s TV drama – such as Darren mcGavin, who is Kolchak in the Night Stalker. usually working alone, in the borderline zone of the night and the alleys, this figure solved a puzzle by living within it, never completing his task because the following week the next scenario awaited his particular way of perceiving the clues, of seeing details that eluded others. seemingly disconnected, the crimes were really so integral to the people and those times that they actually represented them, the same way i believe that the fragmentary scraps within documented-meets-memory-history hold the behavioral clues necessary to reassess the displaced past.

in scouring texts for information i become an investigator, this-detective-of-sorts; searching for the underbelly of meaning, my aim is to dislodge the evidence no-one thought to remove, or even knew was there. as slavoj Zizek said “The detective’s domain is the domain of meaning, not facts – thus the scene of the crime is structural like a language… (and) … the detective is not only capable of grasping the significance of insignificant details, but in the apprehending of absence itself as significant”. (Zizek, slavoj, looking awry: an introduction to Jacques lacan through culture, miT, mass, 1992).

Boxing Boys 1995


absence is rife in the historical record – the version of the colonised or the documented is historically not recorded and non existent through regular channels of research. similarly, i no longer see the historical record as factual, rather it is a ledger leaking attitudes which often reveal more than scrawled names and dates – these are the details which bring meaning to my work, by discovering and adding to taxonomic referencing and groupings, then enlisting myself as a fallible and visible narrator i hope to open-up history to fresh contention.

The detective is partially a suitable description for my process-persona because it suggests the danger of discovery, the lack of absolutes, the clues that lead to nowhere

– the red-herrings, the knowledge that any solutions will lead to more “crimes” to solve. Physically, also i work “undercover”, collecting information by unintentionally eavesdropping as the “invisible aboriginal” catching attitudes from those unaware, and developing storylines from the reality of my peripheral position; which is within the subtexts of everyday life, acknowledging the self i shouldn’t be aware of – if Government assimilation policies had worked.

my intention is to combine the mythical with the factual, the familiar object with the alien viewpoint, science with household, to evoke a reaction of the unexpected, of disturbance, a continuation of the non-settled blurring of the truths/fictions of identity, authenticity and historical facts. There will always be more questions than answers.

Partially, i envisage my art-practice as a type of comparative study, examining the means by which history is recorded, maintained and changed by its interaction with time and what we all bring to it. Thus, in my work, the final factor necessary for a renegotiation of history to occur is to invite a viewer, an audience to bring their own cultural baggage to a story. i believe by this means the past becomes the present at that junction when a viewer may enter into a recognition of part or all of what i have made, to momentarily fix themselves and the work into a point in time.

Snow White 1995

Black Beauty 1995


Medical Series, 1��

a series of ten folded tin or galvanised iron cases.

These are ‘case studies’ depicting western scientific and medical means of supposedly determining racial difference which is then aligned with inferiority. These cases were my accumulations of scientific understandings of ‘identity’ at a time when i was directly learning about the position and representation of my extended indigenous family (and thus myself), by people both aboriginal and non-aboriginal in Tasmania.

i created a series of pieces about the body. There was a freedom in allowing different portions of the body to speak of the ways in which they had been tested and probed. This became a series about processes of collection. The often familiar objects within the cases instigated a dialogue between the viewer and the work prior to the texts being read. These works each had texts from scientific books and journals silk-screened onto Perspex which covered and enclosed the objects. This way of assembling objects was pivotal to the future development of works incorporating or eliminating the written word. i began to see the carrying-potential which configurations of objects could hold. This work was central to my honours submission and subsequently was exhibited in Perspecta 1995 at the art Gallery of new south Wales.

Medical Series 1994. collection: Tasmanian museum and art Gallery

Tooth Avulsion 1994collection: Tasmanian museum and art


Medical Series, 1�� contd

Intelligence Testing – The Porteus Maze Test, 1994tin, plastic, sawdust, paint, sawdust, chrome, acrylic 170.0 x 39.5 x 29.5 cm

Based on the 1930ss anthropological test-on-paper given to indigenous peoples (in this case the arrernte region of central australia) to determine iQ by the speed one traversed a maze on paper by pencil. This was the first time these subjects (aboriginal people) had held pencil or paper....

Physiological Adaptation to Cold, 1994 tin, polystyrene, plastic, stainless steel, mercury, acrylic 27.0 x 19.0 x 15.0 cm

a visual reconfiguration of the research of a 1950s czechoslovakian research team who ‘placed’ central desert aboriginal people in refrigerated-meat-vans overnight to determine their Physiological adaptation to cold.

Skull Dimensions, 1994 galvanised iron, soil, gravel, plastic, bone, chrome, acrylic 114.0 x 57.0 x 47.0 cm

Hair Differentiation, 1994 tin, synthetic and human hair, wax, stainless steel, chrome, acrylic 103.0 x 49.5 x 35.5 cm

Eyeball Weights, 1994 tin, plastic, found objects, acrylic 30.0 x 26.0 x 22.0 cm

Tooth Avulsion, 1994 tin, synthetic and plaster teeth, mixed media, chrome, acrylic 103.0 x 49.5 x 28.0 cm

Physical characteristics – Body Odour, 1994 tin, oil, soap, wax, toweling, acrylic 40.0 x 30.0 x 8.0 cm

Physiological Adaptation to Cold 1994collection: Tasmanian museum and art Gallery

Skull Dimensions 1994collection: Tasmanian museum and art Gallery

Eyeball Weights 1994collection: Tasmanian museum and art Gallery

Physical characteristics – Body Odour 1994collection:

Tasmanian museum and art Gallery


Medical Series, 1�� contd

Earwax Consistency, 1994 Tin, wax, plastic, acrylic, mixed media 5.5 x 29.5 x 40.0 cm cabinet 89.0 x 51.0 x 40.0 cm

Fingerprint Patterning, 1994 tin, wax, paper, acrylic, mixed media

Brain Capacity, 1994 tin, wax, plastic, acrylic, mixed media

series acquired by the Tasmanian museum and art Gallery, 1995

Fingerprint Patterning 1994collection: Tasmanian museum and art Gallery

Brain Capacity 1994collection: Tasmanian museum and art Gallery

Intelligence Testing – The Porteus Maze Test 1994collection: Tasmanian museum and art Gallery

Hair Differentiation 1994 Collection: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery


Imperial Leather, 1��

cotton, wax, composition board 149 x 204 x 15 cm collection of the national Gallery of Victoria

Imperial Leather addresses notions of: imperialism, cleanliness/cleansing, whitening, placement, loss of self, identity, policies of rendering indistinct.

The title is suggestive of the soap-brand name and associative connotations of familiarity due to the current availability of the product (one premise of the piece includes its immediacy) and the title also conveys notions of ‘imperial’ invasion alongside ‘leather’ which suggests whipping, punishment and control. The ‘heads’ are wax, cast from an original aluminium ‘positive’ of the kitsch plaster ‘aboriginal boy’ ‘head’ commonly suspended in australian lounge room walls in the 1950s.

The layout of mathematical regularity in the piece speaks of order, control and containment over aboriginal people as represented on the panel. Power is held by those whose flag is the control mechanism. The cross-motif also resembles a target, whilst the hanging and pinning aspect relates to the exploration and labelling of the ‘new’ worlds and their flora and fauna.

The sense of order and obsessiveness through repetition in this work represents western fear of the other and the unknown which the British carried with their flag to australia. This fear was channelled into state and federal control mechanisms through displacement of indigenous peoples into state or church-operated “homes” without families, when many of the British newcomers had arrived without their own families. removal and re-organisation was part of an ongoing goal imposed on indigenous australians – which was for aboriginal people to lose their original identities, to be whitewashed, and thus subsequently embrace imperial/colonial identity or the “flag”.

Imperial Leather 1994

Imperial Leather 1994courtesy the national Gallery of Victoria


what other people say about Julie’s work

Genetic Pool 1996


what other people say about Julie’s work

Cross Currents (Group Show) �00�

extract from exhibition catalogue. linden-st Kilda centre for contemporary artsamy Barrett-lennard, Director, linden

linden is extremely proud to be presenting Cross Currents, an exhibition of fresh new work by five indigenous female artists from Victoria and Tasmania who all use found materials in very personal and culturally evocative ways.

This exhibition marks ten years of linden presenting, with the assistance of the city of Port Phillip, an annual exhibition aimed at showcasing the best· of contemporary indigenous australian art and promoting it to as broad an audience as possible.

as the only contemporary art space in a major urban australian city to have a dedicated annual program of aboriginal art, linden is able to play a unique and vital role in the development and promotion of contemporary indigenous art in this country.

it’s exhibitions and associated programs, which have always been part of naiDoc (national aboriginal and lslander Day observance committee) week, have often lead to major acquisitions, commissions, overseas residencies or other significant opportunities for the artists involved. in this way linden has not only assisted with the development of indigenous art but has also contributed to a broader appreciation and understanding of indigenous culture, both past and present.

it is the past and present that the artists in Cross Currents have so imaginatively and tenderly examined. lorraine connelly-northey, lola Greeno, Julie Gough, Treahna hamm and Denise robinson, although from different areas of Victoria and Tasmania, and with different life experiences all share the compulsion to produce pieces that refer to their histories and ancestors and which are made from found objects. These materials, natural and man made, are sourced from the sea, beside the river, on the side of the road and even at the tip. although respectful of the elders who have handed down techniques such as weaving or shell beading, these artists are eager to

“bend the rules” slightly and present new interpretations to ancient crafts and in so doing evoke the shifts in the currents of their lives, and the lives of those around them.

Cross Currents brings these artists together for the first time, informally in the act of staying together in st Kilda to install the show and conduct workshops and floor talks, then more formally on a short residency on Phillip island, an historic site of connection for indigenous Victorian and Tasmanian women. four days of talking, assessing recent work, making further connections, planning future projects and perhaps even some art-making.

linden is very privileged to be working with five artists of such talent and warmth and is so pleased to be able to, at last, bring them together.


Julie Gough’s Leewuleena, �001

Judith ryan, aBV42 – The annual Journal of the national Gallery of Victoria

The national Gallery of Victoria has recently acquired a major installation work, leewuleena, 2001, by Palawa artist Julie Gough. Gough produced this work when she was staying at leeawuleena in central Tasmania with three Palawa artists who were creating fibre works during their residency program at the lake. in a letter to the author in 2001, Gough stated:

i was drawn to the shore of the lake and was most astonished by the water’s action of constantly washing up, casting out, these forms that strongly resembled the heads of ancient birds. Birds have always followed me, and seem to speak to me in unexpected locations. i gathered these silent, bonelike twigs and put a head to each body. several were collected whole needing no frankensteinian attentions of matching head with body. They became enlivened and surrounded the hut’s verandah wall where we stayed. They created shadow and watched us. it seems they came through time, through the waters and decisions of the lake to wash them near where we stayed. something of the essence of how things were beyond my hands and yet came into my hands is the mystery or language of this work.

i have placed them walking or marching up a gum tree branch in procession as that is how they seemed to arrive in my peripheral vision as i walked the lake shore. They now march up and almost out of the gallery space: the log holds them in wax filled cavities, wax which dripped like bird droppings. These creatures’ movement from floor to wall is suggestive of a further place, a world beneath the floor and after the wall – from where they emanate from and may disappear to. i do not think they are of this time, this world, but manifestations of another that briefly spoke to me.

Leeawuleena 2001 wood, wax, 374.5 x 49. x 7.5 cm


leewulena is of seminal importance in the artist’s career, signalling a new direction for her practice, an exploration of and absorption with the materials and inner voices of her Tasmanian heartland.

Gough’s earlier works were often re-arrangements of all sorts of objects – golliwogs, coat-hangers, trinkets from cereal packets, kitsch objects from the 1950s and 1960s decorated with aboriginal-inspired designs – that question representations of aboriginal people. her work drew attention to some of the most outrageous chapters in australian history and of anthropological practice. The ludicrous became an organising principle for things that make no sense – the outlandish, the unbelievable, the obscene – giving her work an absurdist, black satirical edge.

here, as she explains in her detailed artist statement, the use of natural materials gathered when walking through her country has brought her in touch with the Palawa people and their spirit in the land. The tools of her story telling today are the materials of traditional culture, resulting in a deep sense of continuity with her Tasmanian ancestry.

Tense Past – Narratives of Gaps and Silences, �001

Plimsoll Gallery, hobart 17-23 february 2001Greg lehmann, artlink Vol 21 no. 2, 2001

The business of australia’s history has never been so contentious. all of us are these days called upon to negotiate our view of the past in order to obtain a position in the now. it is about identity. about finding a place in ourselves for the sense we make of that which has made us. The self-assured patriotism which secured the australian population’s notions of itself in the first half of the twentieth century is crumbling. recent decades have unravelled our ability to believe in the nostalgic propositions which have been woven into the australian story.

Julie Gough’s exhibition Tense Past culminates a decade of work which might be described as an archaeology of nostalgia. its most striking work – my Tools Today, uses 173 modern kitchen tools to challenge the social Darwinism inherent in traditional ethnographic descriptions of Tasmanian aboriginals. such descriptions are frequently perpetuated by the simplistic collections of institutions such as the Tasmanian museum and art Gallery, which is shown, postcard – like, as a huge inkjet printed backdrop. The building is pictured circa 1965, the year of Gough’s birth.

This work has an immediacy and pertinence constructed around the artist’s own identity. But her work resists the temptation of offering unambiguous signifiers of her aboriginality.

instead, Gough’s work seeks to engage the audience in a dialogue – to transform the viewer into a participant. she continually questions the mode of representations of otherness which seduces us into a belief that we ‘know’ aborigines. as langton (Well, i heard it on the radio and i saw it on the Television. australian film commission, sydney, 1993:7) observes:

‘australians do not know and relate to aboriginal people. They relate to the stories told by former colonists…”aboriginality” therefore, is a field of intersubjectivity in that it is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation’.

Gough chooses to bracket her own experience and memory within her refiguring of historical narratives, rather than subjectifying herself through stereotypical discourse. Because of an early life in which her indigenous heritage was hidden from her, and her ability to go ‘unnoticed in a crowd’, Gough has arguably been able to enjoy some degree of ‘white privilege’. But if this is true, then it becomes clear from her work that she has been able to use this cover to assume the role of detective, if not double agent.

Pedagogical Inner Soul 1996


she has extracted seemingly inane government photographs of aboriginal children at luna Park to expose the social manipulation of stolen Generations in Pedagogical (inner soul) Pressure. likewise, it is the infamy of pastoralism which is invoked in The Trouble with Rolf. constructed of plaster casts of kitsch aboriginal faces as musical notation along lines of wire and fence posts, this work was developed from the fourth verse of the well-known song Tie me Kangaroo Down sport by rolf harris. The author is called to account for an anecdote of a dying pastoralist who abandons his rights to the indentured labour of his stockmen-with his last words “let me abos go loose lew, let me abos go loose…”. The inferences of power and control are exposed in an otherwise familiar and innocuous piece of australiana. in Gough’s own words:

i believe that the only way to work with imagery, text, inferences that are ‘out there’ already performing their intended roles in society, is to claim these representations, and reuse them subversively outside their original context. The redirection into new performative roles of their power to damage and undermine can question and redefine our understanding of that past in our country’s present and future.

The totalising narratives of history, however, are not only subject of Gough’s inquiry. she also offers intimate and evocative windows into personal memory. her most recent works included in the show, and how it’s been, and rail, are somber and beautiful memorials to memories to which the artist herself has restricted access. They indicate her own obstacles of encounter with her own past. she describes them as “…free floating fragments of specific moments and places i cannot quite locate, or hold, or return to.”

Whether there is reality in history or memory is not the proposition of Gough’s work. it is about the nature of concealment and containment – within the national and the personal. it is about the stories embedded in the gaps of history and the silences of forgetting. it is about the pain of contested identity and the painful beauty of being.

Julie Gough

Ted snell, australian Painting 2000

Julie Gough is a collector, sieving through the discards of others’ lives to make sense of her own. in her 1996 exhibition at Galley Gabrielle Pizzi, titled Re-collection, she explained her strategic use of popular culture, aboriginal kitsch, 1950s’ fabric and toys, utensils and souvenirs as a means of “luring out the recognition-factor inescapable within memory-span in order to psychologically connect the viewer to the story”.1

By positioning the discarded accessories of everyday life with the secrets of her own family history as a Tasmanian aboriginal, and the dark secrets of the treatment of that race by white invaders, she builds a tangible link to that history. Past and present unite at the point of recognition, when the ‘dark secrets’ must be owned and acknowledged as the “household and the museum become one”.2

many artists have used the ordering and containing strategies of collecting to provide a structure for their works, and Julie Gough acknowledges both the benefits and dangers of this approach. she understands that collections are about setting boundaries, establishing limits and forgetting primary usage and meaning. nevertheless, they also offer new possibilities for recontextualising meanings and, through the juxtaposition of fragments, provide the potential to tell new stories and invoke new meanings that resonate with the past.

Brown Sugar, 1995-96, brings together kitsch aboriginal female face-plaques, bags filled with demerara sugar, maps, words to a sea shanty, rope quoits and images associated with sea voyages to describe a two-year journey by one of her ancestors. held together within the linguistic space drawn around the derogatory descriptions of black women throughout white history, these elements – which operate in such a

Brown Sugar 1995–96acrylic paint on plywood, mixed media, 180 x 300 x 12cm

Pedagogical (inner soul) Pressure 1996


familiar and unthreatening way – slowly evoke the pain and suffering associated with white colonisation and its lasting impact on the indigenous population of Tasmania. much of Gough’s work is concerned with making visible the absences in historical records, and this work attempts to construct a parallel narrative that gives form to the

“ledger leaking attitudes” 3 of our documented history.

This strategy gives Folklore – White Law, 1997, its compelling power. comprising a lightbox with an inkjet print image of an old postcard of a diorama depicting a Tasmanian aboriginal family framed by a pair of 1950s’ curtains, this work exposes the myth that was constructed by the white invaders to classify and contain what was unfamiliar. The nuclear family, based on Truganini and Wourredy (who never had a child), are transported from their home to a familiar landscape near hobart, and depicted in this alien environment. The diorama is a fiction whose falsity is echoed by the curtains depicting gnomes in their habitat. The extended family relationships of aboriginal people, their ability to live off the land without requiring the stable fixtures of Western culture, and their independence, is denied in this museum construction. revealing that fiction and involving the viewer in the ‘re-collection ‘of that history has become the central issue in Julie Gough’s work:

my intention is to combine the mythical with the factual, the familiar object with the alien viewpoint, science with the household, to evoke a reaction of the unexpected, of disturbance, a continuation of the non-settled blurring of the truths/fictions of identity, authenticity and historical fact. There will always be more questions than answers.4

1 Julie Gough, Dark secrets/home Truths, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne 19962 ibid3 ibid4 ibid

Folklore – White Law 1997Pair of found curtains and Tasmanian oak lightbox90 x 120cm


Julie Gough: My Tools Today 1��

by clare Williamson, excerpt from the exhibition catalogue All This and Heaven too: adelaide Biennial of australian art 1998. art Gallery of south australia

Julie Gough is concerned with dichotomies: between black and white, the public and personal, the comic and tragic; the sacred and the profane. a scientist and a detective as much as an artist, she collects and dissects artefacts from various pasts and presents them to expose mythologies of history and to determine her place within them.

collecting and shopping are Julie Gough’s ‘tools today’. The ‘op shop’ and garage sale are her sources for both materials and meaning. They hold previously passed over clues into construction of our culture and, in particular, of connections between aboriginal and non-aboriginal australia.

My Tools Today presents a grid of 143 wooden handled kitchen implements from the 1950-60s, ‘impaled’ on long nails, which in turn pierce a large photographic mural on fabric. The mural depicts the façade of the Tasmanian museum and art Gallery, whose collections are still anthropologically based in both presentation and interpretation. Gough questions the role played by such institutions in the understanding of the artefact; the omissions and re-evaluations which are undertaken by one culture of another, and the constant rewriting of history – despite its supposed immutability. she is disturbed that Western institutions of knowledge are now destroying, or discarding early historical, medical and scientific texts which, however inaccurately, helped shape public perceptions of aboriginality.

more specifically, My Tools Today reveals ironies inherent in western attitudes which have judged aboriginal culture as simplistic based on its use of few and rudimentary tools. as Gough has written, ‘this work emerged from reading that my forebears required only a total of 22 tools for their complete subsistence. original historical writings regarded this as factual evidence of the ‘primitive’ evolutionary level of my

Julie Gough: My Tools Today 1998


people – rather than the recent recognition by the West that this, instead, reveals a deliberate attitude of less-is-more than enough’.1 Gough is bemused by Western culture’s obsession with possessions and gadgets and the idea that this could indicate an advanced race. The reliance by aboriginal people on a limited number of simple tools actually reveals a high degree of ingenuity and self sufficiency. That aboriginal people would often leave such tools at appropriate points for use by others is also in contrast to Western desires to possess, hoard and control.

By drawing from the kitsch and the colourful, Julie Gough uses humour to invite her viewers to play a game of ‘spot the primitive’. her brightly painted objects of kitchenalia – hanging in ordered rows – are reminiscent of the obsessively catalogued and installed tools found in many a garden shed. at the same time they play off both the cool grid of minimalism and the coded and classified information of the museum.

‘my intent is to challenge the recorded past by subversively reworking it from my personal view-point of the ‘invisible aboriginal’. Through using ‘familiar’ – and therefore safe/non-threatening visual materials such as domestic, schoolroom, medical, holiday/souvenir icons, i hope to invoke an air of recognition, of a momentarily returned nostalgia interwoven with my unexpected and possible disturbing version of the times or events in question and on view.’2

1 Julie Gough, artist’s statement, Re-Collection, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne, 29 July – 23 august 1997.

2 Julie Gough, Dark secrets / home Truths, catalogue essay, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne, september 1996 n.p.

The artist as detective, the art of Julie Goughmichael Denholm, Periphery issue 33, 1997/8

The art of Julie Gough deals in a very imaginative way with the implications of what has happened to aboriginal people in australia through the dispossession of their land and the attempt to eradicate aboriginal culture by separating aboriginal children from their families. she focuses our attention on injustices that have occurred in the past, thus hopefully making us more aware of the need to act now to ensure that similar injustices do not happen in the future, and that reparation is made to aboriginal people for the immense suffering that has been inflicted on them through greed and ignorance.

Thus her work The Trouble with Rolf, deals with the implications of the ‘freeing’ of aboriginal stockmen/musterers during the mid 1960s when the federal Government passed the equal Wages Bill. Previously to this, aboriginal workers had been paid a pittance or with food or tobacco rations, a policy that considerably limited how much control they had over their lives. This legislation resulted in thousands of rural aboriginals facing unemployment, and being forced off their traditional lands due to the white ‘owners’ of the land allowing them to work on the properties. The forced relocation resulted in large numbers of aboriginal people living as displaced persons on the outskirts of townships, where many of them still remain. rolf harris was a popular entertainer in australia and england, especially known for his television program and his song ‘Tie me kangaroo down, sport’, in which he sang ‘let me abo’s go loose… there are of no further use, lew, so let me abo’s go loose, altogether now…’.

Human Nature and Material Culture 1994


The Trouble with Rolf 1995

The Trouble with Rolf

in 2003 the long missing verse from rolf harris’s “Tie me Kangaroo Down sport” reappeared in the aBc “for Kids Bumper song Book”

The missing verse reported on by Julie Gough was verse four on original recordings of the song by rolf harris. The verse reads: “Let me Abos go loose, Lew. Let me Abos go loose. They’re of no further use, Lew. So let me Abos go loose.”

rolf harris speaking from the uK, says about this misadventure:

“rather than prompting a greater appreciation of aboriginal music, i seemed to be upsetting people. an anonymous letter arrived, i assumed from an aborigine, who simply wrote `how could you say that about my people in Tie me Kangaroo Down Sport?’

“i felt myself go hot and cold. i knew the verse the letter referred to. When i wrote the song in london for a noisy, beer drinking bunch of aussies at the Down under club, i didn’t think about the sensibilities of aborigines. i was simply trying to pack the song full of every australian reference i could think of. i had imagined aboriginal jackaroos working for the stockman and once he died he wanted them to be paid their wages and let go.

“from that moment on, i never sang that verse again. and every recording since has had that verse removed. unfortunately, the original version is still played sometimes, but i can’t control that”.

Pedagogical (inner soul) pressure which used 40 pairs of used shoes (20 black/20 brown) plus stilts, a shoeshine box, photographs of aboriginal school children in a luna park rotor ride, child behaviour images, and eighty lights, mirrors the life experience of aboriginal children of the 1960s in being manipulated and controlled by the government of that time. her installation records a day-out for aboriginal children from the new south Wales children’s home in 1966 when they were photographed as ‘having a good time’.

Lying with the land 1, 1996 deals with many of the Tasmanian aborigines being buried by Wybalenna cemetery off the flinders island aboriginal settlement. The practice of burial for aboriginal people, was an unnatural means of disposal of the dead, because traditionally, cremation had been practiced. ‘christian’ ethics were imposed at Wybalenna, with traditional practices unsuccessfully prohibited. aboriginal people were introduced to unfamiliar european ways and infected with european diseases, with disastrous results and children separated from their families.

Lying with the land 2, 1996 consists of 16 photographs of midlands family landholders (from 1810 to present) taken by Gough at various Tasmanian royal agricultural shows, Gough juxtaposed, with each photo, their prize-winning entries with items that had been used to bribe aborigines.


Genetic Pool – Moree, 1��

Genetic Pool, moree, using a washing machine, 1960s men’s bathers, and scenic foldout postcards featuring views of the town, is concerned with the reality of life for aborigines in the 1960s. some rural residents then believed that white women would become pregnant from swimming where male aborigines had swum! a bus journey from the university of sydney in the mid-1960s, known as the ‘freedom ride’, focused on swimming pools as targets in ending discrimination against aborigines, in the same way that, in the united states, similar protests had concentrated on discrimination against negroes in diners and on buses.

The disparate materials in Genetic Pool – moree, jigsaw together to offer some of the ingredients of encounter in a story of racial discrimination. The domestic familiarity of the objects in this piece contrasts with the serious reality of the story and yet simultaneously these items ironically serve to reflect how ludicrously unfounded were the fears of white residents.

These elements offer a way of viewing the colour bar policy enforced in swimming pools of some rural townships in australia until the 1960’s.

in the mid-1960’s, sydney university students joined Dr charles Perkins on a bus journey through rural nsW to protest this blatant form of racial discrimination. The event which brought world attention to australian inequality was named the ‘freedom ride’. although it focused on swimming pools, the journey was a metaphor for discrimination at every level of australian society. The target was moree where heated conflict took place between activists and locals. The activists finally obtained entry for aboriginal children to the town pool after initial false promises of access were revoked.

This piece gained real momentum and inspiration after i viewed a documentary about the freedom ride. one local protester, a moree resident, recounted a story explaining the town’s fear of allowing aborigines to swim amongst whites in the pool; it was believed that white women could become pregnant from bathing where aboriginal men or youths had swum!

Genetic Pool 1996

Freedom Rides

it all began on the 12 february 1965 when the freedom ride set off at the end of that day. The aim of the freedom ride, which was to visit the country towns of new south Wales, was to strike a blow against the racial discrimination that was part of everyday life at that time.

When the first freedom ride set off on its journey, aboriginal people were not citizens. Dispossessed from traditional lands, people lived at the edge of towns. This was really living on the edge, a life without services, without infrastructure, without education, without sanitation and without health services.

The places where people lived were called reserves and missions. The living conditions were very poor, there was sub-standard housing, if you could call it that, with no plumbing, no electricity and no amenities. Things were hard for aboriginal people, but perhaps hardest of all for those that lived at the edge of town. racism was everywhere, in the hotels, the shops, in the street. aboriginals were not allowed access to leisure facilities, such as cafes, cinemas, theatres, hotels and swimming pools. if you were black, verbal, and sometimes physical abuse, was common.

The 1960’s signaled the beginnings of global communication, the world was becoming far more interconnected, media, although not the instant media of today, sent its messages around the world within hours rather than the days and weeks of previous times. The world was getting smaller. it was this process that made australians more aware of what was happening in southern states of america as the civil rights movement gained momentum. in may 1964, 2000 university students protested in front of the us consulate in canberra, supporting the us civil rights Bill.

1963, enter charles Perkins, charles had enrolled at sydney university as one of the first aboriginal students to attend the university. »


The work touches upon subconscious waters – water as a mirroring pool of fear and desire, birthing waters, difficult waters, the basic element of water, the universality of water, the essential uncontrollability of water and yet also water as a commodity and tool of power and control in urban nsW.

i collected thirteen fold-out postcards which showed that swimming pools are considered a scenic highlight of rural townships. This piece, with its test-tubes filled with a white milky semen-like substance and a dozen pairs of bathers spinning in a pseudo-scientific centrifugal disinfecting motion, suggests the bizarre notions and dangerous beliefs which start at home and spread between towns and beyond.

Physiological adaptation to cold confronts the events of the 1950s where a czechoslovakian research team place aboriginal people, rather than themselves, as guinea pigs, in refrigerated meat vans overnight. similarly, Imperial Leather and human nature and material culture examine the white-washing of the past, and attempt to reduce everything to one simple denominator, that of whiteness. The title Imperial Leather refers to the imperial invasion of australia and the subsequent mistreatment of indigenous australians. in human nature and material culture, beneath a map of Tasmania constructed out of florid carpet are some bathroom scales. Viewers are invited to stand on them. The scales show an englishman shaking the hand of an aboriginal. as you stand on the scales you see images of a fight between the english and aboriginals and the strung up figure of an aboriginal. on the scales of justice the behaviour of the english, when weighed up, is found to be wanting.

She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not looks at the practice, during the 1950 and 1960s, of adopted aborigines being photographed for the public record as supposed evidence of the ‘success’ of removing aboriginal children from their families. The photographs Gough used were taken at martin Place, sydney, during ‘aboriginal Day’ in the mid 1960s. she loves me, she loves me not evokes the practice of children blowing up daises as they repeat this refrain. By random acts of violence, aboriginal children were placed in vulnerable situations where their chances of receiving love and happiness was dubious.

Freedom Rides continued

charles had travelled overseas to play football (soccer), this experience had shown him a different way of life, of tolerance and acceptance. charles understood the dilemma and situation that aboriginal people found themselves in, he believed there was a better life of equality and opportunity and racial discrimination was causing great harm. charles Perkins decided to confront white australians about racism and the general condition of aboriginal peoples’ lives.

in the us the freedom rides had begun, charles decided the rides were a good way of turning attention towards the dire conditions that many aboriginal people faced in their day to day lives. The next step was to procure a bus and travel rural nsW to protest against segregation and discrimination. Thirty people were on that bus when it set off on the night of 12 february.

The first two towns on the route were Wellington and Gulargumbone. here the freedom ride party conducted surveys, with both aboriginal and non-aboriginal people, to measure attitudes and find out about living conditions. The surveys confirmed that the situation was dire. as this was the beginning of their journey, still uncertain, the party held no protest but chose to move on to the next town.

on the 15 february the freedom ride arrived in Walgett. The party of students decided to confront racism more directly and decided they would picket the Walgett rslas this would be a symbolic act. The memory of the past wars and the anZac tradition had created a deep sense of ‘mateship’ and nationhood in white australian society. aboriginal ex-servicemen, in contrast were excluded and were only allowed to use the rsl facilities on anZac day, if at all.

The Walgett rsl protest achieved its aims. a cadet reporter, working for the herald, was at the scene and took photos of the protest. »

Luna, 1965 1994


Gough also charts her own journey, her personal odyssey through life, such as in 1970 – Luna Park where she depicts ‘a fearful place of ghost rides and a giant mouth’ where one entered on rides in luna Park. Gough, for part of the seventies, lived in a building next to the park where she often heard screams emanating from the big dipper. her 1965 – If You Knew Julie, Like I Know Julie, is concerned with Julie andrews’ film The Sound of Music. Gough believed, until 1996, when she discussed this matter with her mother, that she was named after Julie andrews. The Balsa-Wood-carved (voodoo like) Julie andrews – Gough states – ‘spins endlessly at 16rPm arms outspread to the internally playing throes of the tune The Sound of Music – the introduction (alp scene) to the film. This scene and the entire film, she adds, ‘is apt to kill one in saccharine overload if watched four times in a row’, an opportunity she offers us ‘by endlessly looping the figure and the tune and the psyche’.

her installation, at Boomalli in april 1996, consisted of objects she found including, placed on a pedestal, the 1970 melbourne captain cook Bicentenary phone book which featured on its cover a chart showing captain cook’s voyage to eastern australia, a model of hms endeavour, and a night scene of captain cook’s cottage, fitzroy Gardens, melbourne. Gough, a scavenger of objects, like Joseph cornell, put together in this exhibition various objects that she had found regarding the Pacific, including shells, curtains, coral, and a pair of thongs. above the telephone book, were photographs of her own family, with a photograph of her mother, father and her brother as well as Gough herself, Gough positioning her own situation within history. The world of the exotic, of Kitsch, was part of the world she inhabited, kitsch objects simplistically representing aspects of life in the Pacific which contact with white man has irrevocably damaged.

Gough’s art deconstructs events of the past. she acts as a form of detective, becoming an investigator, ‘searching for the underbelly of meaning’, her aim being ‘to combine the mythical with the factual, the familiar object with the alien view point, to evoke a reaction of the unexpected, of disturbance’.1 her intention, in her usage of kitsch, of colours of the 1950s in paint or fabric, of toys/clothing, puppets, washing machines, kitchen utensils, souvenirs, and in 1970 trashy novels, is to lure-out the recognition factor inescapable within our memory-span to psychologically connect the viewer with the story. she looks to recent history for stories and materials to recontextualise an alternative (visual) mode of representation, to question and combat the single viewpoint or perspective of history maintained by fixing indigenous people in a landscape as ‘unmoving’ unchanging, underdeveloping, non participating, singular and two dimensional’.2

Gough is like the investigator who lifts up the family’s carpet to discover the murky mess that lies hidden underneath it. she imaginatively asks us to question our past, so that we can, as much as is possible, come to terms with its horror so that it will never happen again. such art is needed in the land of hanson and howard.

1. Julie Gough, catalogue essay ‘ Dark secrets / home Truths’, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi 19962. ibid.

Freedom Rides continued

This was the first media coverage.The freedom ride party had arranged to stay in a church hall in Walgett. The party was asked to leave the church hall, so bags packed, they set off into the night. as the freedom ride was leaving Walgett, the drama of the trip took a quantum leap in creating publicity for the cause. foolishly, a grazier rammed the freedom Bus, forcing it off the road. There were no injuries that night, unlike the years of hurt and of racism that had preceded the ride. luckily, by this time, there was also a journalist on board, the incident created headlines in the sydney morning herald the following day.

The next town on the freedom ride route was moree. This time the press was eager to follow the story and more reporters had arrived in town. in moree the freedom ride party decided to take-on segregation at the local swimming pool. following their three point plan; one, to protest outside the council chambers; two, take aboriginal children to the pool; and three, to hold a public meeting, the party achieved success in drawing attention to the prevailing attitudes and pointless discrimination of the time. other new south Wales country towns were visited before the freedom ride returned to sydney.

The freedom ride had created national and international publicity, with the event being covered around the world. as a result of the freedom ride, the plight of aboriginal people in australia had come to the attention of an international audience and with this attention came pressure to reform the attitudes and the legislation that condemned aboriginal people to a life ‘on the edge’ of australian society.


Julie Gough: The Eagle has Landed

Peter hill, australian Perspecta, 1995

Julie Gough is a collector and an assembler. she is living out an idea, an idea which deals with self and identity, and which camouflages its serious intent through doing a humorous cut and paste job on popular culture. But, using a magician’s sleight of hand she lulls our insecurity and then really does saw the lady in half. The idea she is pursuing, or rather the diaspora which she is dreaming, also involves travel. Travel across oceans and deserts to cities where streets are named after dead kings and generals but also along the delicate limbs of her own mixed-race family tree down to the self-conscious roots that anchor her genealogy. in truth she can say: i am a Tasmanian aboriginal / i am russian Jewish / i am english / i am australian / yet what am i.

on a whim she traveled from Western australia to london to meet the leaders of the sKa movement, just as today she travels on a Vespa around the industrial suburbs of Tasmania, out through moonah to Glenorchy looking for matter to turn into art. she is not the first artist to plunder op shops, nor the first to ape scientific classification in her ordering of disparate objects. she acknowledges christian Boltanski, mike Kelley, annette messager, rosalie Gascoigne, sophie calle, and Joseph cornell, but she also admits a fascination with the kitsch folk-heroes of mid-twentieth century life – rolf harris, George romero, mickey spillane, and the monarchs of sKa – Prince Buster and laurel aitken. Despite this, her work is influenced by ‘whats’ rather than ‘who’s’.

Julie Gough’s work comes from lived experience and shared collective memory. her work does not echo any fashionable international style, rather it sets its own agenda.

she talks honestly about her development: ‘until 1986, i had an object-obsession personality which didn’t manifest itself in art. in 1987, after completing a degree in anthropology and english literature at the university of Western australia i traveled to europe for two years to meet and join the sKa world with its Vespa subculture. six months after returning to australia i suddenly found that i was an aboriginal person and i drifted into employment in australia’s biggest army surplus store where i stayed – partly due to the fascinating clientele the business attracted – until arriving in Tasmania in february 1994.’

in 1991 she underwent a near-death experience which could be straight out of the pages of carlos casteneda’s mystical journeyings when, as a pillion passenger, she was hit on the head by a huge eagle somewhere on the north-Western highway. shortly after this she began to train as an artist convinced that, ‘art can make a difference, that i found about my aboriginality for a reason, and that there is a place for a didactic type of art’.

so what kind of art does Julie Gough make? Very often she relies on a method of visual overload that mimics popular culture and the desire to attain something which immediately becomes worthless once it is within one’s grasp. for Perspecta, however she has challenged her ideas in a more simplified, neo-minimal way. Visual clarity takes the place of cluttered subterfuge in a series of medical boxes and found data which pit her beliefs about aboriginal identity against the scientific hypothesis that physical intrusion and experimentation can determine a person’s identity.

‘in essence’, she explains, ‘the integral usage of (found) data for each of the medical boxes shows that these studies are self-defeating in their original collect / collate / label / intent due to the confusing and inconclusive results. any person of a particular race would find that even if their hair and blood type correspond with the race they identified with, their fingerprints, earwax consistency, and body fat folds could link them with an entirely different racial grouping.’

Julie Gough is an artist who knows where she is going. Glasgow – her father’s home city – will be her next destination.


Bad Memory: Art, collecting, and the mercurial world of Julie Gough

hannah fink, siglo: Journal for the arts, issue 10: autumn/Winter 1998

‘i am forgotten as a dead man out of mind: i am a broken vessel’. Psalm 31

in discussions of collecting, noah is often identified as the ultimate collector and his inventory of life on the ark as the definitive collection. four Biblical chapters describe God’s call to noah and noah’s enterprise: the building of the ark, the collection of the species, life on the ark and the final disembarkment. yet the punch line of the story-which is noted almost as an aside-mostly passes without comment. after fulfilling God’s plan and receiving God’s covenant, noah, the righteous man capable of realizing God’s grace, plants a vineyard and gets drunk. even worse he debases himself by taking off his clothes in a somewhat lewd manner with the implication that, in contravention of the injunction to be fruitful and multiply, he spends his semen wastefully. stricken by the paralysis of completion – having made the perfect set – noah degenerates into the pointless serialism of the addict.

The indefinite object sustains the collection, and the lesson here – apart from the repeated failure of man to win God’s grace, the very theme of the old Testament – is the necessity of the missing piece. Poor noah still has another 350 years to live, and not much to do. more helpfully for our purposes, noah’s story also illuminates the difference between kinds of collection: between the finitude of the perfect set and the apparent endlessness of the series. read in terms of modernism, and, more specifically, in terms of the contemporary practices of found object and readymade art, we might translate this difference in terms of the multiple and of the ‘unique’ (or aberrant) object.

Given the proximate concerns of collecting and of found – object art – each involves objects and their arrangement – it is unsurprising to find that several contemporary australian artists are collectors whose collecting informs their art. some draw upon the internal logic of the collection itself – such as the Wunderkammer installations of luke roberts, the shop displays of Kathy Temin, and the naturalist collages of elizabeth Gower – while others, such as rosalie Gascoigne, seek the creation of meaning outside the system of collecting in the establishment of an asystematic or purely aesthetic relationship between objects. for Julie Gough, collecting involves her keen desire to understand the past through objects, and to know her heritage as a Tasmanian aboriginal. all, in one way or another, are compulsive collectors; as Gascoigne confesses, ‘i am a victim of those things i find.’1

collecting is something done to fill in time – it is a pastime – yet its ambition to locate the object that exists outside time, is timeless. caught within its enterprise is the conundrum that time is spent whether one spends it or not: it cannot be accumulated. like money, or conserved, like rainwater. Time is uncapturable, and the memorialist is always just a moment too late.

Re-collection (series), 1997

1. from a lecture given by the artist at the art Gallery of new south Wales, December 1997. elizabeth Gower has curated two shows centred on collector-artists: The Art of Collecting 1 and 2, both at linden in melbourne.


The wrangle with time lies somewhere between the imperatives of the collector of clocks and the collection of ephemera: the one measure of time, the other seeks the object that eludes it. as a butterfly skims the currents of air in a seeming slip of time, so the ephemeralist seeks the maverick, untimed moment: the skipped heartbeat, the knitter’s lost stitch. here is not so much the desire to stop time as to seek out its edges, to prise its corners, as though in some houdini-like trick the transient object may break through or stagger time’s strict metronome. like rubbings taken from a gravestone, the ephemeral object stands at the interface of life and death, between our time and object time. for objects exist in a time other than the one we inhabit: they have a life of their own – the inevitable betrayal at the heart of our attachment to ’things’.

Whether – the principle of the collection is variety or similarity, the collection itself is measured by difference, and it is the discernment of the infinitesimal differences between things that the collector approaches the infinite. elizabeth Gower has used ephemera in her art for over twenty-five years. her most recent series amor infinity (1997), comprises one hundred paper plates stenciled to resemble snowflakes-of which everyone knows no two are alike. Gower collects according to personal whim, such as her collection of 217 coat hangers, but also for the purposes of her artworks, such as the thousands of reproductions of insects, animals and flowers cut out from children’s encyclopedias and science magazines and pasted in large panels on tracing paper in the series chance or design. These delineations of God’s grand design, traced in the hand of the commercial artist and the botanist, map a seemingly infinite variety in series and kind.

Where serial objects mark time, the extraordinary or aberrant object theoretically exists outside it. Kathy Temin is a keen op-shopper who most often uses individual ‘finds’ in her work, such as the helmet-shaped 1970s television set that featured in indoor monument: a monument to the home (1995). in a recent work devised for habitat, a conran store in london, she displayed a collection of her ‘favorite things’ in her own version of a shop-cum-museum vitrine. similarly, Destiny Deacon has exhibited her collection of aboriginalia in a shop display case. connexions between collecting, shopping, op-shopping and exhibiting are also explored in luke robert’s 1994 work Wunderkammer/Kunstkamera. This comic version of the cabinet of curiosities (accompanied by a fake exhibition merchandise store and supported by fake sponsors) paradies the classification of the modern museum, as op-shop and museum object alike are collated and nonsensically catalogued.

roberts and Temin are pre-occupied with objects from what Daniel Thomas has termed ‘the recent past’ the just-lived in but overlooked period that falls between the historicized past and the present. rosalie Gascoigne uses objects from this period, yet her interest is not evoking this lost time. Gascoigne began her life as a collector and arranger-at first as a beachcomber, a collector of seashells. her art is made from abandoned objects and materials, junk collected from tips, roadsides and paddocks. she rearranges her finds – sawn-up roads signs and pieces of linoleum, old soft-drink crates, posts from wooden fences, enamel vessels, feathers and newspaper-to evoke the landscape around canberra where she lives. for Gascoigne, aesthetic pleasure is the vital mode of connection with the material world; she chooses her materials for their shape and colour, and eschews any reference to their past use. crucially, the works can only speak when the parts of which they are made have no memory. it is precisely the forgotten nature of the obsolescent object that makes it so valuable to the artist.

Where nostalgia is scrupulously avoided in the works of rosalie Gascoigne, it is of the essence in the art of Julie Gough. yet Gough’s nostalgia is not the honeyed sort. The found – and fabricated – object for Gough invokes memory: bad memory, false memory, lost memory, absence of memory. The word nostalgia was coined in the eighteenth century from the Greek nostos ‘a return home’, and algos ‘pain’, literally to describe homesickness.2 in its current, transferred sense it is a dilatory term, one that carries connotations of a certain limpness of mind: we do not anticipate pain in its construction. for Gough, collecting objects from the immediate past allows

2. one of the first recorded uses of the word was by Joseph Banks, who observed that the sailors aboard cook’s ship were “now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the physicians have gone so far to esteem a disease under the name of nostalgia.”


her to repeatedly revisit her childhood and adolescence, and to begin to explore the aboriginal heritage of which she grew up unaware.

it was a brush with death that inspired Julie to become an artist. she had been working as a shop assistant, window dresser in an army disposal store when, riding as a passenger on a motor bike in the Western australian desert, an eagle flew into her head. The extraordinary coincidence of these two velocities – the motorbike and the eagle – shocked her into rethinking her life. after returning to Perth she began working part-time and enrolled in art school in Perth.3 in 1993 after completing her Bachelor of fine arts at curtin university, she moved to Tasmania.

Julie’s father is scottish, one of a Presbyterian postwar immigrant family with an all but concealed Jewish heritage, which Julie is trying to unravel. her mother’s origins were apparently ordinary: the usual english/scottish admixture, with a certain vagueness about generational origins. she did know, however, that her grandmother was Tasmanian. it was only when she was in her early twenties that her mother told her of her aboriginal heritage – an acknowledgement, as Julie has written, ‘of the self i shouldn’t be aware of – if Government assimilation policies had worked’.4

Julie has always been a collector. The idea that objects might carry secret messages occurred to her early in life: she once hid a message to the future owners of the family home in a door stopper; when she was 14 she wrote to an address written on the flyleaf of a secondhand copy of the novel Jaws asking the previous owner if they had enjoyed the book as much as she had. a devout op-shopper and market scout, some of the categories of her collecting include golliwogs, animal skins with fur, books from which films have been made, shell necklaces, clippings about the extraordinary, breakfast cereal trinkets, Kamahl and rolf harris records, kaftans, rubber body parts, Planet of the apes dolls, plastic rocks, coat hangers and children’s encyclopedias, and wooden handled kitchen implements.

she also, like Torres strait islander and aboriginal artist Destiny Deacon, is an avid collector of aboriginalia, aboriginal ‘inspired’ imagery, and artefacts made by white australians. collecting aboriginalia is part of Julie’s desire at once to rid the world of these effigies of racism and to remaster their meanings in her own arrangements; for example Bad language (1995), which comprises a collection of paperback novels with mandingo – type themes; and Imperial Leather (1994), which involves wax replicas of the feather – wall plaster heads of aboriginal children found in the 1950s living rooms. in recruiting these objects Gough is affecting a kind of repatriation in which she becomes the teller, rather than the butt, of the joke. The meaning of the objects changes according to whoever owns them, and they are only ‘funny’ when in the possession of an aboriginal person.

aboriginal kitsch relies on the trope that aboriginal people, like australian flora and fauna, are what makes australia ‘unique’. for marcia langton the association of aboriginal images with australian fauna, particularly in the 1950s (a heyday of Kitsch), has ‘less to do with still-virulent eugenicist and social Darwinist notions than with the need to associate images of the victims of genocide with the more pleasant and distracting images of cuddly, furry creatures’.5 indeed, the perversions of kitsch so well represent bad and repressed memories; read in terms of the myth of the extinction of the Tasmanian aboriginal peoples, the kitsch object becomes a mascot of genocide – souvenir of the ‘original Tasmanians’.

such a reading, while sounding outlandish, is confirmed in the diorama on permanent display in the Tasmanian museum and art Gallery, the subject of Gough’s folk-White law (1997). The centrepiece at the museum’s aboriginal galleries

– a scene so grotesque one imagines it is already the work of a contemporary artist – features mannequins of a ‘tribal’ aboriginal nuclear family, supposedly modelled on Truganini and Woureddy, basting a plastic crayfish on a fake wood campfire lit with concealed red lightglobes. Gough has enlarged and mounted an old postcard image of this scene (made before the advent of the crayfish) within a lightbox, framed

3. Julie’s first degree was a Bachelor of arts, 1986, in which she majored in Prehistory/anthropology and english literature.

4. Julie Gough, Dark secrets/home Truths (catalogue essay) Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, melbourne, 1996. “my mum told me when travelling overseas. she said i was on walk-about and that it was the ‘abo’ in me. That was her way of bringing it into words, the same way that i use awful kitsch ornaments. it’s our black humour at work. ‘email correspondence with Julie Gough’.

5. marcia langton, ‘The Valley of the Dolls: Black humour in the art of Destiny Deacon’. art and australia, spring 1997


either side by curtains decorated with a gnome – and – red – toadstool – in – the – gloaming motif. one fairytale meets another, as aborigine and gnome alike are depicted as domesticated daemons in a static, invented landscape.

in Re-collection (series) (1997), Gough addresses another work also on permanent display in the Tasmanian museum and art Gallery. This work is based on Benjamin Duttereau’s series of crude plaster bas-relief portraits of the aboriginal traveling companions of George augustus robinson. each of Duttereau’s nameless portraits personifies an emotion – attention, cheerfulness, incredulity, anger, suspicion and surprise – as though aboriginal people were somehow in need of anthropomorphization. Gough has reproduced the six portraits photographically, and added a seventh, bas-relief portrait of her own head. The three-dimensional apparition of the artist’s head poking out at the end of the series at once comments on the ‘second coming’ of the Palawa People and through its dark comedy, alerts the viewer to the dubious humanism of the original.

Both Folk Law – White Law and Re-collection (series) were exhibited in Gough’s recent one-woman exhibition at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in melbourne. yet, confusingly, works that apparently have nothing to do with aboriginality, Tasmania, museology or even collecting were also included in this exhibition. most confusingly, a series of suitcases containing miniature dioramas centering respectively on melbourne’s luna Park (next to which she lived as a child), and the movies Psycho and The sound of music. indeed, these scenes are child-like, depicted as they might be remembered from the distance of adulthood; the difference between the fabricated and the found object here becomes that of an imagined past to the past itself.

What is going on here? art historically, the suitcases might evoke Duchamp’s The box in a valise, the artist’s portable suitcase-museum of miniature versions of his most important works. literally, they refer to key events in the formation of the artist’s imagination; Julie says that The sound of music is the film that has most influenced her work. in contrast to the generic figures of the textbook and tea towel, Gough addresses her heritage through the sometimes mercurial gaze of her own imaginative past. in My tools today (1997), she has superimposed her ‘tools’ (as opposed to the’ traditional‘ tools of Tasmanian aborigines) over a photograph of the Tasmanian museum and art Gallery –a comment at once on the reductive absurdities of anthropology and on the artist’s own practice. another work shadow of the spear (1997), refers both to the tea-tree spears of robinson’s companions and to a fence in the backyard of the Gough family’s apartment block in st Kilda. This apparent conflation of personal and historical memory is not so much to translate the historical in personal term but, for the artist, presents the only possible way of addressing, or ‘knowing’, the past. in the coalition of these works we find a complex, contradictory picture of contemporary aboriginality. We might also find an exploratory approach to the representation of Tasmanian aboriginal history itself – and to the question of how or whether at all one might represent its genocidal past. for to represent Tasmania’s aboriginal history is to address the question of how or whether at all genocide might be represented, a question intricately explored and debated in holocaust scholarship but rarely addressed in terms of aboriginal art history.6

Within modernist discourse the multiple or serial object commonly refers to the simulacra of the modern world and the attendant dilution of meaning reproduction engenders. for Gough, the multiple represents an accumulation rather than reduction in meaning. Just as the piles of shoes and spectacles in the holocaust museum in Washington necessarily fail to describe illimitable evil (although, through intimate connection with the bodies of the dead, perhaps do so more immediately than any other material representation), so the meaning of the serialized object is cumulative but never definitive. Put another way, one might say that in endlessly repeating something it is never represented: the infinitely repeated object ceases to be descriptive. in terms of modernity one thinks of ad reinhardt’s definitive black canvas – the metaphoric black hole at the heart of our century – which he repeated

6. louis nowra has written brilliantly of rover Thomas’s depictions of massacres – of how they are represented as events incorporated in the land, like blood soaked into the earth: ‘Blackness in the art of rover Thomas’. art and australia, spring 1997


continually. repetition, for Gough, is a way of chipping away at the unknowableness of the past, but also of respecting its core of unknowability. This is also, in part, the artist’s professed desire not to ‘trespass’ on traditional Tasmanian aboriginal culture: an enactment of a continual approach, a desire to know without the presumption of knowledge.

one might compare Gough’s approach to that of Kathy Temin, who also invokes her childhood and adolescence in her work. Temin’s installation indoor monument: a monument to the home (1996) consisted of a room appointed with dysfunctional orange and black furnishings, like a marion Best rumpus room gone wrong. on the screen of a freestanding 1970s television set scrolled mispixellated text—letters that her father, a holocaust survivor, had sent to Temins all over the world to find out, after the scattering and loss of the war, whether they were related. The memory that Temin works around is an absence of remembrance: her father never spoke of his war experiences. in this work Temin does not attempt to represent the holocaust but rather her own experience of the holocaust – which is of not having experienced it. as a first – generation survivor, Temin could only have experienced the holocaust emotionally or imaginatively.

as much as Gough’s work is about bad memories – a misrepresented and misremembered past – it also centres on an absence of memory: the repressed knowledge of her aboriginal heritage as a child and adolescent, and the grievous rupture in cultural memory particular to Tasmanian aboriginal history. Gough’s work is about memory yet centres on memories she does not herself possess—the amnesia that, in terms of her practice, is the necessary missing piece that sustains the collection.

The work magnum as cook in the time/space continuum, also exhibited in Gough’s 1997 exhibition, included a variety of both found and fabricated things: a painting of the TV character magnum, photographs of the artist’s family, hawaiian dresses, and even a commemorative matthew flinders Wedgwood plate. it also included about seventy shell necklaces produced for the Pacific tourist market, collected by the artist in op-shops and markets in hobart and rural Victoria. These manufactured souvenirs contrast starkly with the given exquisite shell necklaces found in museums and made by contemporary Palawa artists today. Where other skills, such as that for basketry, have been abrupted and are being re-learned through study, the making of these necklaces has been continuous: and as Gough has written, they have “always been a central form of cultural expression for Tasmanian aboriginal people.” in their poignant articulation of both the fragility and the strength of the links with the past, one might suggest that if there were a monument to the voiceless nations of the dead, it could be found in the living form of these fragile, beautiful things.

Magnum 1997 (detail)


secTion TWo – The Biennale of syDney


� The biennale of sydney

locus

Zones of contact, The 2006 Biennale of sydney was the fifteenth Biennale hosted by the city. The 85 artists in the event came from all corners of the globe to participate.

seven artists who live in australia were also chosen by curator charles merewether. These artists were Djambawa marawili whose work was exhibited next to Julie’s work, locus, on Pier 2/3. ruark lewis (from sydney), Tom nicholson, rose nolan, imants Tillers and savanhdary Voongpoothorn. The 2006 event was held in sixteen venues across the city with, in my view, Pier 2/3 being one of the more spectacular.

commenting about the Biennale, charles merewether said about the event:

Zones of contact is an exhibition about today. it deals with the issues of out time – the ideas and concerns that shape out lives and our sense of the future. There is a general global movement that is reflected in Zones of contact; the experience of having one’s homeland occupied or of living in another person’s culture and the sense of physical, psychological and cultural displacement arises, along with the impact has on the land, environment and sense of belonging. The exhibition also celebrates the positive interactions between people, where connections are made and familiarity, understanding and intimacy is made possible.

locus was assembled on location in Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay. The installation was on the ground floor level of the pier, there are two stories, and the work was located towards the seaward end of the pier next to, and in contrast to, the work of Djambawa marawili. The lower level floor of the pier had a number of works by a diverse range of artists.

The upper level of the pier contained antony Gormley’s, asian field, a work of many thousands of clay figures made by chinese villagers and then the photos of the villagers themselves, alongside an image of a clay figure that they had made. asian field occupied the entire upper floor of the pier. We discuss some of the difficulties that Julie had during the process of completing locus, in antony’s case things were no smoother. There was the huge task of setting out the hundreds of square metres of tiny clay figures, and all the time there was always the danger of the falling domino effect and breaking the small, fragile figures. on the day before the opening antony along with andrea and Peter hylands and a number of students from around sydney were still on their knees putting the figures in place. This task almost over, antony discovered that the photos of the chinese villagers and the photos of the clay figures which were meant to have sat alongside that of their creators had become hopelessly muddled up somewhere in the process of delivering them to Pier 2/3. This meant more painstaking work, more like detective work this time, to match up the photos of the villagers and the clay figures that they had made.

Making Locus

During a discussion with Peter hylands at Pier 2/3 and during the construction of the work, Julie says this about locus:

‘locus can mean a number of different things, a point of convergence or a segment of a strand of Dna. it means things that are peculiar but all makes sense to me and my work at this point in time.

i am creating intuitively a work in this space as part of a one month residency in sydney. This work investigates how much of an impact and collision and derivation is me now, from childhood and from ancestry, and whether they are incommensurable or whether they do make sense to who i am.

making Locus 2006

locus 2006

The work locus incorporates pages from henry reynolds, Fate of a Free People: a Radical Re-examination of the Tasmanian Wars, published by Penguin australia in 1995.

Dr P J martyr describes Fate of a Free People as “a re-examination of the Tasmanian Wars with a close explication of a petition to Queen Victoria of march 1847, signed by eight Tasmanian aborigines living at Wybalenna settlement on flinders island”. The matter of the petition – to prevent the return of Dr henry Jeanneret as superintendent of the settlement, where he had been vastly unpopular - has tended to be swamped in the dismissals of the matter by subsequent historians as ‘natives being quaint’. reynolds instead uses this petition as the point from which to rework a radical perspective on aboriginal occupation of Tasmania, their subsequent military defeat and the surrender of their land”.

Julie Gough, although respectful of the work, sees the book as another version of history to be worked through, another layer of things to be sorted, the disturbing leaf litter of a disturbing past. The book, therefore, plays its part in the construction of Locus, its pages like leaves, pierced by tea-tree sticks.



The work tries to answer questions about how is my struggle born from being indigenous and Tasmanian and at the same time growing up next to an amusement park in st Kilda in melbourne? These things are kind of perplexing and probably unanswerable but i decided to make a work which has aspects of both to talk about that meeting point of childhood and ancestry.

The mediums, and i am trying to limit myself, are tea-tree from Tasmania, tea-tree sticks, a forest that is not yet completed, so there is still seven square metres to complete of the forest and it is about 3.5 metres high. in the midst of the work is a scaffold reminiscent of a lunar Park roller coaster on which i am constructing a canoe made of cuttlefish and tea-tree.

i am representing myself as this canoe that is both positive and also sad in a way. it is constructed from bone but it can float and it can carry things, but it is talking about loss of culture or desire or what can be rebuilt from something that has been fractured and damaged from many pieces. i am placing myself on this ride down the roller-coaster into the forest that i see as my ancestry. The work is trying to carry this story, it is looking like super nature, the natural materials have taken over, for the viewer anyway but not for me, the culture story. so anyway i am investigating the floor. originally i was hoping for the forest to free-stand on the beautiful timbers of the pier floor by joining all of the forest together with twigs but this would have taken too long so plan B is that i am investigating alternatives.

What i am in is this phase of having to work through and solve problems, aesthetic, cultural and conceptual, all at once, to make the best overall rendition of a story, so that people get something major and amazing, hopefully from a distance the impact of it visually and as they get closer often the impact of my work has some underlying extra’.

Peter Hylands. The work is also physically complex to but together, it is a huge task. Is it going to plan?

‘There was no plan, the plan was to arrive and find 400 tea-tree sticks and as many boxes of cuttlefish bones that i could accumulate myself and with friends. so the plan was to arrive with two huge piles of raw materials and take a risk which i am pleased i am doing but on the other hand it is bad for the stress levels.

i have been working for two weeks and i have about 10 days left, there was a slow start as we did not like the original location of the work and the work had to be moved. so it took a group of twelve people to talk it through and decide that it should be moved. We had to decide whether it was the best thing for the work and the show and the space to move it and could we do this without damaging the floor. This took three days, everything is quite laborious but also exciting when you get through the next challenge. it is a series of unforeseen problem solving, art is just that, and when you are in this special zone where, if it was all smooth sailing there would be some thing wrong. i think you are meant to push it as hard as you can with the resources you have available’.

Peter Hylands: What about the canoe Julie?

‘i am the canoe and i am made of these pieces. i am making new decisions as i make the work. This is the canoe in construction, organic in process, i have been working with tea-tree sticks since 1993. i find them incredibly useful. What has happened here is that i came with this incredibly loose idea to create a canoe based on the traditional Tasmanian indigenous canoes, last made in this way, as far as i know, in the late 1830s. They would have been made from bundles of bark. i felt really strongly that i wanted to use this white bone, the cuttlefish. i can carve these with my butter knife, a beautiful medium to carve.

Do i transform the canoe to a next phase and create a white interior by covering the floor with cuttlefish? i do not want to loose the feeling of fragility. i am making a kind of ghost canoe. since yesterday the second round of cuttlefish went on, there is a lot of glue visible but i don’t think that matters at a distance.

making Locus 2006

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i sense the tragedy of covering the fragility of the canoe. in the hotel room in the middle of the night i can work on the piece virtually on my computer.

moving the canoe onto the work itself, onto the roller-coaster will be scary, the installation crew are very worried about. i imagine there will be some damage so i will have to do some repair work up there’.

in the event the work came together on schedule and the canoe survived its trip to its final resting place within the work without damage.

everyone could breathe a sigh of relief.

unsettledness: Julie Gough’s locus

Judith Ryan: Zones of contact 2006

unsettledness is palpable in Julie Gough’s work, as she oscillates between uncovering scars of violent encounter in australia’s wrongly-commenced national history and rendering tangible her memory of and longing for the she-oak and tea-tree country of coastal north-east Tasmania: her spiritual mainspring.

at the core of much of Julie Gough’s practice is a deep sense of disquiet, occasioned by the realisation that australia is still enmeshed in dialogues of invasion, control and silencing, as evidenced by her seminal early work, Imperial Leather (1994). Gough teases out instances of historical injustice, located in place, time and actuality, and renders them as three-dimensional installations that stand up and face the viewer.

alternately, constructions of weathered driftwood, abalone shell, bull kelp, or tea-tree reveal her Tasmanian identity: multiple organic forms cast silent shadows of beauty and truth. Gough forged this new direction in 2001, while undergoing an arts Tasmania Wilderness residency in her maternal Trawlwoolway homeland of Tebrikunna. rather than focusing on sinister or brutal chapters in australian history, the tools of her storytelling became organic materials massed together to reflect shorelines and inner states of being: ‘the places between past and present, day and night, conscious and unconscious.’ 1

The Biennale of sydney project locus (2006), like Gough’s chase installation of 2002, plays on an uneasy juxtaposition of contrary elements from the artist’s experience. it is constructed from a conglomerate of materials and forms that have shaped Gough: a forest of tea-tree sticks, a roller coaster, a giant slide formation, a canoe of cuttlefish bones. The surreal construction forms a point of junction between past and present, between indigenous and non-indigenous histories.

locus alludes to two contradictory places and cultures that both figure strongly in Gough’s life journey: luna Park, st Kilda, where she spent her childhood, and the Tasmanian homeland, where her ancestors walked, amid tea-tree, she-oak and brilliant night skies. Two lives, memories and ancestral activities come together as Gough, symbolised by a Tasmanian canoe-form, courses down a giant slippery slope like that once within the Giggle Palace. a cosmic traveller, she is surrounded by sticks both resonant of the ‘giggle palace’ of luna Park and the coastal tea tree hugging much of Tasmania’s periphery, a canoe created from cuttlefish bones, emblematic of ancestral presence.

The work is a silent homage to the sea that sustains Trawlwoolway culture, but it holds in counterpoise the rowdy shrieks of laughter, disquiet and wide-eyed terror that would emanate from entering the Giggle Palace or riding the Big Dipper, cultivating Gough’s relish for the absurd and incongruous. from deep inside the jaws of luna Park, an adventure playground of laughter, dreams and raw fears, Gough is transported on a wave, encountering a midden, a coastline, sea currents and star systems: both worlds resonate in her imagination. The dichotomous materiality of locus poses the question “Who is it that can tell me who i am?’2

1 Julie Gough, artist’s statement, 2001

2 lear, in William shakespeare’s King lear, act one, scene four.

Judith ryan is the senior curator, indigenous art, national Gallery of Victoria, melbourne, where she has worked since 1977, having curated over 30 exhibitions of indigenous art and published widely in the field.

Locus 2006

Previous 2 pages:Locus 2006


secTion Three – The films


� we walked on a carpet of stars

beginnings

The film We walked on a carpet of stars grew out of some work we did with Julie Gough in 2005 before and during the exhibition Ware & Tear. Peter hylands did some initial interviews with Julie in relation to the exhibition and then, because Julie has such an interesting story to tell, we decided we would follow Julie as she collected for and constructed her work locus at the Biennale of sydney. The film came about thanks to the creative collaboration between Jean-Pierre chabrol who directed the film and Peter hylands who wrote and conducted the interviews.

This film is called We walked on a carpet of stars because we did just that on our first night in Tasmania. Walking along the beach that first night the wind blew, it was cold and the starlit sky was crystal clear. at our feet the wet sand, like a mirror, reflected the night sky, and like the thousands of ancestors before us, we walked on a carpet of stars.

in making this film together with Julie, we would like the viewer to think about the indigenous People of Tasmania and remember the people that walked on a carpet of stars in a time when landscape and nature were intact. To then consider the descendents of those people, like Julie, who through intermarriage and removal, now have their own stories to tell.

The filming took place in northern Tasmania, Victoria and in sydney, new south Wales. it goes without saying that the places in northern Tasmania where we filmed are very different from the hustle and bustle of Walsh Bay in sydney.

The tension builds in the days before the opening of the Biennale of sydney as Julie works (and thinks) hard to complete the work on schedule. The Walsh Bay Pier is a very different space, not only in the physical sense, from the Tasmanian experience of collecting materials and the relaxed discussions around campfires of a few weeks earlier.

The process of creating locus was complex. The thinking through of ideas, the collecting of materials many hundreds of kilometers away from sydney, getting the materials to sydney in good shape, and perhaps the most complex of all, the construction of the work.

location Tasmania

The film is made in the granite country of coastal Tasmania and, because of the granite’s high quartz content, when the granite breaks down, it creates very beautiful white beaches which squeak underfoot as you walk on them.

aboriginal middens, the shell and bone deposits of previous habitation, are to be found throughout this country. from time to time we found a midden and looked in wonder and gave our thoughts to the people that created them.

We fell head over heels in love with the wildlife that visited our campsite at night. animals such as the Bennetts Wallaby, and we should probably not have favorites, but my favorite of all was the Tasmanian Pademelon. There were echidnas and well over a hundred different species of birds including firetail finches and striated Pardalotes. This was, of course, also muttonbird territory (short tailed shearwaters) and we kept a watch out for Wedge-Tailed eagles, this sub-species is now very rare in Tasmania because of its destruction by landholders and others. i am sad to report that we did not see a Wedge-Tailed eagle on the entire trip.

much of the vegetation was a kind of coastal heath land with woodlands dominating further from the coast. Xanthorrhoea, a grass like plant with a tall central flower spike


was also dominant. Where there are dunes a number of succulents grow and behind the dunes, wetlands, depending on the season, expand or retract as the rain or the sun plays out the cycle of the seasons. To complete the picture there are Banksias and Black Peppermint, she-oaks and Bull-oaks scattered throughout the woodland areas.

all this nature gave us a beautiful place to stay, what is worrying of course, is that as development encroaches all of this beauty comes under more and more pressure. The dead wildlife on the roads tells a powerful story of carelessness.

We spent happy days with Julie, walking the seashore and gathering newly washed-up cuttlefish bones which seemed in plentiful supply. These were relaxed times compared to the tight schedules awaiting us in sydney.

location sydney

Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay is a beautiful building, nestling under the sydney harbour Bridge, the Pier is an example of a building from an era long before container ships travelled the oceans with their cargoes of containers stacked high. There are two main levels to the pier, anthony Gormley’s work, asian field, occupied the entire first floor.

The ground floor, the location for locus, was the venue for a number of artists including adrian Paci and Diango hernàndez, both from italy, adrian Paci’s work, a five-metre-high crystal chandelier, noise of light is powered by 10 generators that light the Pier 2/3 Biennale exhibition space.

The Pier would have been a place of enormous activity and filled with the noise of waterfront workers shouting, the banging and clanking and the sounds of ships and cranes. Pier 2/3 had once again come to life, this time with the artists who were to exhibit at the Pier. There were also a number of volunteer helpers and Biennale staff who had come to assist the artists.

Pier 2/3 was a remarkably noisy place, the trains rattling across the sydney harbour Bridge, the massive steel construction of the bridge amplifying their sound. The noises from the bridge were accompanied by the sound of ships’ horns, helicopters, light aircraft and commercial jets passing overhead. all this made for an atmosphere of compressed activity.

a number of things happened during construction of the work locus, the first major problem was that Julie was not happy with the original position of the work. after lengthy discussions with Biennale organisers, it was agreed that the partly constructed work would be moved to a more suitable position on the ground floor of the pier. This proved to be a major task and involved a large group of volunteers and Biennale staff who together moved the work, centimeter by centimeter, to its new location.

The frame that held the base on which Julie’s canoe was to sit also created some heartache. in the end Julie decided to reduce the height of the main vertical poles holding the work up.

The next major issue to arise was deciding on the floor surface of the work. locus was constructed on a wooden base and Julie came up with the idea of using an old architectural plan of luna Park in melbourne to form the floor covering of the work. after more intense discussions with Biennale organisers it was decided that to introduce the plan at this late stage, would mean deconstructing and reassembling the work and this was considered far too difficult given the time available before the opening of the event.

Julie decided to use sawdust as the floor surface and the new floor covering was then prepared. sometimes silly things can go wrong and that is what happened next. Pier 2/3 has a number of large sliding doors on either side of the length of the pier, these doors were once used by waterside workers when cargo was being unload or loaded.

Pier 2/3

Pier 2/3


During a heritage inspection of the pier workers opened the sliding doors, it was of course a very windy day, causing havoc to the delicate work inside the pier.

The making of the canoe was also becoming a major challenge, issues of construction and design meant a number of changes in plan.

The creative cowboy team

The filming in each location was the work of Jean-Pierre chabrol. The sensitivity, skill and care in filming the images of landscape and artwork are the result of many years of experience in filming art related projects. Jean-Pierre, originally working in france, now lives full time in melbourne, australia. Peter hylands and Jean-Pierre originally met through a mutual friend in Paris.

The final editing of the film was also the work of Jean-Pierre, this is a complex task as for each finished film there are many hours of filming for the editor to work through. The creative cowboy process usually goes something like this. We choose our subject, after extensive research, we then do a rough script which contains an outline of the film and the questions we want to ask. We do the filming (with high definition cameras) in the various locations we have chosen. The raw filming is then downloaded onto the creative cowboy systems and Peter and Jean-Pierre select the bits of the film we want to include in the main feature. The final phase is compiling the film in the sequence with the images required. Keeping the film interesting, regulating the pace and creating a pleasing visual experience for the viewer all take a great deal of experience and sensitivity.

andrea hylands provides curatorial and art related input and aurélie chabrol looks after the business matters of the company. creative cowboy uses freelance practitioners in the areas of additional sound recording, stills photography and graphic design.

The key questions

We walked on a carpet of stars is a film that considers the indigenous people of Tasmania through the eyes of artist, Julie Gough. Peter hylands asks Julie Gough, does anyone remember? and why do you think we should remember? Julie’s answers to these questions form the foundation to the way the artist thinks about developing her work, seeking out the hidden histories, the stories that should be told. This is more than just a squeak in the sand, Julie says.

Peter hylands asks, you are back to multiples? and Julie speaks about multiples being a way of accounting for the missing dead, for time lost and for country lost.

in his editing Jean-Pierre has allowed the sea and the waves to give us the time and the dignity to contemplate these matters.

Julie Gough and Peter hylands


� selected discussions: ware & Tear and other interviews

ware & Tear

Ware & Tear was a major exhibition curated by andrea hylands at a property called hillgrove in central Victoria. The artists contributing to this exhibition included Julie Gough, John Wolseley, Peter churcher, robert Jacks and andrea hylands.

The dialogue between Julie Gough and Peter hylands began as the exhibition came together with andrea hylands and Jean-Pierre chabrol suggesting that creative cowboy films documented the development of Julie’s work. This was the trigger for the series of interviews with Julie and these, in turn, led to making the film, We walked on a carpet of stars.

for the Ware & Tear exhibition Julie created the work Regeneration and a description follows:

Regeneration, 2005 (outdoors and indoors)

The lasting impression i carried with me after visiting chewton was the crushed quartz fragments erupting through the much mined, altered surface. local quartz provides the medium and location of the outdoor component of Regeneration placed so that the elements would eventually regain their hold on the form created.

Quartz is a magical, potent material existing before and outliving human time. This aspect of timelessness was central to my appreciation of the material and recognition of what form to configure the quartz. nature to nature, place to place, within me i carry some knowledge, some blood, some cultural memory of my ancestors. one ancestor, Woretermoeteyenner, was a Tasmanian aboriginal woman who traveled widely during her life, meeting and working with people of many cultures through the first half of the 1800s. Woretemoeteyenner’s name means eucalyptus leaf and i feel strongly connected to her in the presence of these majesterial beings. a representation of a Tasmanian eucalypt leaf is one object, left signaling my visit, that i feel able to leave behind outside here as an ephemeral marker from deep within. in planning a circular journey between the indoor gallery and the outside installation site i developed the indoor work as a point of departure and return. a trail of six bronze leaves tracking up a eucalypt trunk provide a different means of memorial than the more unstructured external quartz leaf that changes with every rain. The golden bronze refers to the alluvial gold fields of chewton and also the alchemical magic of molten metal. each cast leaf traces a generation from Woretermoeteyenner to me, the same leaf, our regeneration.

selected discussions

The purpose of this part of DVD 2 is to introduce a range of topics which can be used for further discussion and debate in an educational context. The discussions are in a sense a trigger for creating themes for artwork. The discussions also introduce ideas and issues that relate to the concerns that drive Julie Gough’s creative output and therefore provide us with a more detailed understanding about these concerns and the way Julie interprets them.

in the case of Tasmania, history has been particularly open to interpretation. it is this contentious and contested past that forms the rich and tempestuous backdrop to Julie Gough’s artistic output. The issues that relate to Tasmania’s past are now on the international stage with museums in Britain in particular faced with a changed (and charged) interpretation of what can be done to human remains in the name of science.

We hope the various discussions between Julie Gough and Peter hylands will form a backdrop to further interpretation of a troubled past by students keen to add meaning and purpose to their artwork.

above: Ware & Tear – at work



� selected works

This chapter is a transcript of the discussion between Julie Gough and Peter hylands (on DVD 2) of the powerpoint presentation of selected works by Julie Gough. here Julie describes the meanings behind her work.

use this chapter to develop themes and ideas for your students. each work can be the focus and a theme for a lesson and for further art practice and development.

selected works, a discussion with peter hylands

Medical series

Peter Hylands: Julie we have discussed quite a lot of the philosophy behind your work. It would be great to look through some of the of the work you have done over the past 10 years and talk through that. I am particularly interested in the medical series which I think you actually completed in 1994. It then appeared in Perspecta in the Gallery of NSW in 1995. I wonder if you can just take us through some of these images.

Julie Gough: yes, its an important work, it was a way for me to express how i felt about the way science, anthropology, medicine, generally had tried to decide upon race by particular characteristics that i think were rather arbitrary. Tests that seemed very obscure and so i decided to find as much information as i could from books that had been out of print for decades in the university library and in the Tasmanian library. They were in the Bliss section, the out of date books but they are not de-accessioned, they are there because they are not really just curiosities, they are an important way to look at a past and how people thought of others.

so this series consists of 10 boxes i made from pressed metal into different forms, i created the textural overlay on acrylic or screened it onto the back of these boxes. When you open the lids and display them on their stands the text is directly from the books, of explaining how the scientific rationale and tests often done upon aboriginal people’s bodies, to prove a racial difference. as you run through each of these cases, or case studies, you find there are ones that measure intelligence by a man called Porteus, a scientist who in the 1930s right through to the 1960s conducted maze tests where he passed paper and pencil to indigenous people, not just in australia, and timed how fast they could work their way out of the maze. he then concluded that indigenous australians had the lowest iQ of the peoples he was testing. yet the people he was conducting tests on, it was for them the first time they had ever used paper and pencil. it was for them an impossible task, i think.

Peter Hylands: What was the reaction when you showed these works?

Julie Gough: The Porteus maze test conducted intelligence of aboriginals peoples and they were tracked in time how long it took to work out a maze test in paper and pencil and it was the first time they had used these so called implements as tools. so they fared really badly and were given iQs of between 9-12 adult years. in this test, people from central australia just above alice springs were used .That is one of the 10 case studies.

Peter Hylands: Who was Porteus?

Julie Gough: stanley Porteus, he was actually a school teacher in rural Victoria for so called defective children, in the early 1920s. he made his way to honolulu where he was much ‘lorded’ at the university of honolulu. a building was named in his honour. i think it has recently been revoked because a lot of his understanding of race, intelligence and racial difference are extremely suspect now.

Medical series 1994

medical series: Intelligence test 1994


in one of the other cases, one measures ‘brain capacity’ another measures physiological adaptation to cold by which people in the central Desert in the 1950s were placed in refrigerated meat vans over night by a czechoslovakian research team to establish their physiological adaptation to cold.

Peter Hylands: Do you know how the experiments came about? What was the trigger that made them happen? Were they sponsored by Governments?

Julie Gough: i think aboriginal people were easy subjects, easy targets for these tests and there was extreme curiosity, since the 1800s, in what difference is, what race is, and it infiltrated australia rather early, with social Darwinism. mixed in with this is also the idea of ‘civilising’ and ‘christianising’ the natives. often enough, science and religion came hand in hand each facilitated the other, i think.

Peter Hylands: These experiments have eerie similarities with what was going on in Europe and parts of Asia during the Second World War.

Julie Gough: it is so true; stanley Porteus fell into disfavour and was much upset during the period of the second World War. somehow he climbed back in with the same racial tests in the 1950s. so the world did rather forget quickly that these notions were very dangerous.

The other work here of Body odour – differentiating race by odour and the work eyeball weights could apparently tell you what race you were. for me personally i was studying and trying to come to grips with what race is because i was searching and seeking my own family. my family’s identity, history, genealogy because of my own background, coming from many different cultures and races and feeling most connected to my mother’s side of the family, Tasmanian aboriginal people. i was most horrified by the testing that had been done on my own people in the 1800s when we were near extinct; so many abhorrent tests were done.

Peter Hylands: And your own people are Tasmanian Aborigines?

Julie Gough: yes, that’s right. People were sent overseas to be studied, children were adopted, some went to sea and were never seen again, other parts of human bodies were sent overseas in bags to the royal college of surgeons, in lime. yes we were scientific curiosities back in the 1800s and today so many of us have mixed heritage though we strongly identify, many of us, with just one. i think it is often questioned of us now, how do we determine our race, when physically we may look european or something else?

This work is about finger print patterning, supposedly an identifier of race. hair differentiation, teeth as well. That is the series.

Peter Hylands: Rolf Harris of course lives in the UK and he has recently been given an exhibition at Tate Britain in London, which I think was a pretty successful exhibition in terms of the number of people that went to see it. You have done a piece of work called The Trouble with rolf. Can you please tell us about that, Julie?

Julie Gough: When i made this work in the mid 1990s. i was confused about rolf harris and i still am. he has this very famous song called Tie me Kangaroo Down sport which is almost like an australian national anthem, especially popular through my childhood in the 70s. it was something that every child sang at school and yet one of the verses sings let me abos go loose lew, let me abos go loose, They are of no further use lew so let me abos go loose, so altogether now, then into the verse Tie me Kangaroo Down sport.

That plagued me. What did that verse mean? Why was it there? is it negative? calling aboriginal people abos, which is a derogative term, most people don’t use nowadays. What i found was i wanted to pull the song apart, recreate it sculpturally on a wall.

What i discovered through my research was, at the time when he wrote the song, it was a period in the mid 60s when aboriginal people were strongly advocating for equal rights, return of land but also equal wages and the equal Wages Bill was

medical series: Brain Capacity 1994

The Trouble with Rolf 1995


passed in the mid 60s. ironically, incredibly sadly it meant that rural stockmen found themselves unemployed because people would rather, at that time, not pay aboriginal people the equal wages, they would rather fire them from their positions on their pastoral stations.

The great tragedy of this is, aboriginal people found themselves dismissed from land that had been on their traditional country, where they had been on the land working and living in various ways for tens and thousands of years, maintaining cultural practices.

By this equal Wages Bill, they were then hoisted off their own country and found themselves, instead, living around country towns dependent on welfare. so i think the song is actually saying, in a round about way, let them go loose, they are of no further use, this is referring to this period in australian history, a very bleak period, and he is making it seem a little jolly, but it is also rather grim.

it is hard to get a handle on what rolf is saying. i took it rather badly when i made the art work and called it The Trouble with Rolf, i think in his own way he is trying to bring the situation to some attention but the rest of his song refers to flora and fauna, verses about kangaroos and koalas and so on, so i decided to play it that way, which is literally in a derogatory way, with the use of repetitive motif of aboriginal faces, cast in plaster, the stockmen from the mid 50s used for wall ornaments. They are spelling out the musical notes in this verse.

Peter Hylands: It would be good to know what Rolf Harris was thinking, perhaps we could find out one day?

Julie Gough: i would like to know. i tried to contact him when i was in england in the late 90s and had no luck. an artist i know from Western australia, living in england, who knows rolf, actually obtained his autograph for me. ‘Keep up the good work Julie’. i don’t think he is aware of what my work is, so i need to make some contact.

Peter Hylands: Julie, can we talk about your series Magnum as Cook in the Time/Space Continuum, I think you did in 1997. Talk us through some of the images in that exhibition please.

Julie Gough: sure, the work came about from actually finding one element in a second hand market, more like a fete. it was a painting of magnum P i, the detective. it cost $5 and was painted by an artist called Dixon. The painting inspired me, to keep going with this thought.

Magnum 1997

Magnum 1997


he was painting, in the style of an icon, someone famous in reality and yet he is a TV personality portraying a detective, in the Pacific. i realized that what i knew of the Pacific; sadly enough through my childhood watching this television series and hawaii five o and that is a fairly sad thing to admit to.

i wanted to work with this concept of what we know and how we know it. magnum played the same role i think in my twisted version and understanding of history. magnum same Difference, cook as i spell out in cowrie shells on the perimeter of this particular triptych.

The two paintings i created in acrylic on board, in the same style and scale, to show what could be coming up behind magnum or Tom sellick: sharks, islanders? What do we know? it is all obliterated and obscured by these characters, characters that bring history to their own cultures. To the West, magnum shows us the Pacific, just as cook did two hundred years earlier.

This work grew and consists of a whole lot of elements about my own immediate family. i started reflecting on what we know and who we are and how we have been designated as australian citizens through various happenings including this trope of exploration and cook.

We lived in melbourne in the early 1970s. i found the 1970s melbourne phone book and it was like a biblical tome of that time. i placed it in the centre under the images of my family in the 1970s with Tropicana coral and shell lamps, illuminating us with this phone book that says, we are basically listed, almost biblically from this covering point of cook exploring, discovering this continent, so called.

Peter Hylands: How many different works were in the exhibition all together?

Julie Gough: Well, one large installation, which consists of two walls each side of a corner. i am interested in the idea of works facing each other as you approach it, in this gallery in sydney, Boomalli. it was the original exhibiting aboriginal artists Gallery they invited me to create work in it. i was honoured. it is an important space, with a long history of indigenous artists from around australia, many artists contributing work in different ways.

i collected curtains about exploration. i collected hundreds of shell necklaces from the Pacific, from peoples’ holidays. i created two Pacific style dresses. The viewer walked through and explored the space. in the corner is an element of curtains and plates, a Wedgwood plate about explorers and one plate i made up myself using materials, acrylic and resin. it had text inside the plate, a copy from something from a comic strip i found, using poor english children in the Pacific quivering in a corner, in a hut, they whisper a question to a native woman called luluna, asking, “luluna, why are your people so sullen and antagonistic all of a sudden?”

it is taken from a 1950s children’s annual. This whole misunderstanding of culture is in this corner, simmering away and there are floral thongs that you can put on, and stand in there, standing in this confessional space. That is how the work came together in that little corner.

Peter Hylands: Moving on from this exhibition you have also been interested in race and the representation of race on book covers, for example, you have actively been making collections of books of various kinds?

Julie Gough: yes, i can’t stop collecting, it’s sort of tragic space wise for my home and studio. The series is called Bad language and i really enjoyed making it. i kept discovering, in opportunity shops books, about sex, the black body, slavery and plantations and ownership of women basically.

i bought one and then two and realized i needed to keep buying them until i had enough to do something with them but then i realized in themselves they were enough, i did not want to dismantle or dismember them anymore.

Magnum 1997


They were right for me at that time, as they were all about language and bad language at that. They are seedy, seething and sexual and yet so hidden from society, so many of them are in these second hand bookshops but no one seems to own up to owning them. They are not in any visible places.

Peter Hylands: So they came from somewhere?

Julie Gough: Where, though, where? They are under peoples’ beds. They never have the names and addresses and ‘return to the owner’ inside the book covers.

Peter Hylands: This work is owned by the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Julie Gough: That is interesting in itself. When i have been to Perth i have seen the work displayed in different spaces. That is unusual, for something acquired as indigenous art work, that you may find it in with the indigenous paintings, it looks awry and confusing there, also a little disrespectful. Then you see it exhibited with contemporary art, it also seems strange and blurry there. i like the idea of working in between, not fitting into any one category.

Peter Hylands: We were talking earlier about echoes of Europe, and another one of your works that I find extra-ordinarily eerie, is the work ‘Pedagogical (inner soul) pressure’, which you did in 1996, which actually ended up in the gallery in Cologne in Germany. As I recall you telling me, that it made a great impact, on the people who had visited the exhibition. Perhaps you could take us through some of the images.

Julie Gough: yes, it’s a work that seems to slip between different categories and cultures. There is something that inspires me to work in this way, which i think is that detective sense, that underbelly of society and culture, not necessarily pleasant stories.

i like to use familiar objects quite often, and sometimes objects that people remember with some familiarity, it may be pleasure or may be uncomfortable. using a lot of school shoes i think 40 pairs of black school shoes, 20 pairs of Brown shoes from second-hand shops. i decided i wanted to work the concept of the institutionalization of aboriginal children, and where they were forcibly removed. in many cases most aboriginal families have had members of the family forcibly removed over the last 200 years.

Peter Hylands: that removal went on all around Australia, not just in Tasmania?

Julie Gough: no, every corner of australia, with mostly devastating results and terrible stories, but some of them were positive, but most have not been. The children and their records were often not available to them or the kinds of records that were kept had been quite insidious, in my opinion.

Bad language 1995

Pedagogical (inner soul) pressure 1996


so this work came about from visually seeing and accumulating work from the mitchell library in sydney, when they made public government photographs taken of aboriginal children on their special days off. When children were rewarded with special trips to luna Park in sydney in the mid-60s this work came about and i found the images made publicly accessible for 20 cents per print.

They were printed on fax paper, the images would fade rapidly at that time so i re photographed them. i don’t work in this way now, as i find it disturbing to work with images of strangers. That idea of being disrespectful, which is what i was getting by making the work but still by doing that you are entering into that possibility, again a re-negotiation, that may not be successful.

The kids in these photos in the middle of the shoes between the second-hand children’s stilts are being propelled up the sides of the rotor ride. They have been photographed on every ride in luna Park. i think it was in 1966, they were photographed second by second, partaking in all these rides. instead of a day of joy it seems as though they are taking part in a scientific experiment.

The kids in the rotor-ride are being centrifugally spun, and they are sticking like flies up the side of a cylinder. That was the most alarming ride for me that they were on that day. They did look like they were having fun, however, this i find insidious, that there is this perceived necessity to photograph them doing that.

The shoes are aligned, almost like boys and girls in a way, with the brown and black, i was thinking that at the time and that fortuitously i was given a set of images of kids that i placed in elongated leather tongues in the shoes which i could cut and insert these slides, lit with miniature lamps in each shoe, which then gave the work an odour of second-hand shoes. This was really interesting and not necessarily pleasant, this hot leather smell to the work and the slides in the shoes, they are actually child behavioural slides, kids pretending to eat, sleep and be happy and play together, argue, be miserable be happy, and that whole idea of synthetic relationships with each other, is what the work is about in this controlled environment.

Peter Hylands: What was the reaction from people in Cologne? Can you describe that for us?

Julie Gough: sure, i was invited to take work to the cologne art fair in 1995, and i went across in 96 with this work and a few other works. all of the works were about aboriginal australia generally and general stories of things, such as the removal of children, and removal from country. What i found was, and what i did not expect, was the connection from people of Germany with the works. seeing it through their own eyes, and seeing it as pertinent to their own culture. The immediate response to this work was one of great grief and sadness, and in part, that was because they were reading the shoes as objects about holocaust and that absence as well.

on some level, we were feeling similar sadness and yet with very different stories. i was confused and worried about this, but actually in the end, took heart from realising that the works were working for different people in different ways, but still carrying the general feeling wanted.

Peter Hylands: in the work she loves me, she loves me not, which also went to Cologne. There are a series of slippers with roses, talk to us about the meaning of that work.

Julie Gough: yet again, these are works with found objects coming together to create a story, which i think can’t be told in the same way, with just words. That is why i want to make a visual work, to me it is about that instinctive approach visually with something physically and then slowly the message slips into your visual mind and brain outside a written spoken language.

The work is about this, together the plastic roses and synthetic slippers and images of children standing with non-aboriginal mothers tell the story. There is no apparent joy or happiness there, apart from one where there is an aboriginal mother with an aboriginal child, looking quite comfortable together.

Pedagogical (inner soul) pressure 1996

She loves me, She loves me not 1996


These photos were all taken in the mid-60s, by the government for some reason, i think it was the removal policy of the time, which perhaps was to illustrate success and yet does not seem to do so.

The concept here is about synthetic relationships, the plastic roses, the acrylic nylon style slippers with their little bows on them. she loves me, she loves me not it is arbitrary, and unknowable what the future will bring, when we are forced into these relationships.

Peter Hylands: As you have been researching this work and looking for image, is it evident that there is a sort of paper trail of removal by Australian governments, or has a lot that documentation vanished? Is there a lot to be unearthed and to be found? Working as a detective did you find much of it?

Julie Gough: There is a lot that has already been uncovered, what is interesting is that i made this work prior to the large report that came out on the removal of children, i think in 1997, the Bringing them home report, which went into great detail and a considerable amount of research, especially interviews, because it’s true that the lot of the stories have not been recorded.

Peter Hylands: It must be an overwhelming temptation for Australian governments all around the Country to want to shred this material?

Julie Gough: it’s hard to know because there are so many individuals involved, who fortunately are still alive and many have come forward to talk about their own part in this; sometimes as agents of removal, and for apparently for good reasons, and the consequences of these removals can be disastrous, and they feel great remorse and grief that they have contributed to this whole process.

it joins up with the link-up, the program for children to find family and vice versa, specifically created for, and by aboriginal people to reconnect families, because so many people are lost out there. There is always the fear of having relationships, for example, marrying your own brother or sister. This can happen. it is incredibly irresponsible.

Peter Hylands: One of your works, which really tackles racial stereotypes, is my tools today. Can you talk us through that?

Julie Gough: This was made in 1997, and i was angry at the time, still wading through books, textbooks written sources, quite often to gain inspiration to create something visually. What i found was, through looking at the reports and records at the Tasmanian museum and art Gallery, that they had produced publications saying that aboriginal people were the most primitive on the planet, because they had a most minimal tool kit.

Different reports suggest 19 to 21 types of tools, which apparently means primitive, whereas i take this to mean less is actually more. it’s a way of showing that you are in tune with the environment, and you don’t need hundreds and hundreds of tools to survive.

But in a strange way, i created something that is an attack on the museum. i created a large ink jet print on fabric, about 3.5 m wide by a couple of metres high and pierced the museum with huge nails through metal eyelets, to which i suspended fairly contemporary but actually more from the time of my birth, wooden tools, kitchen tools, and what i was trying to do was to obliterate and nullify what they were saying, by saying these are my tools today, what you say does not make sense and does not apply to me. and yet this is a kind of sadness and tragedy, i do have hundreds of tools today. i have lost the ability to live in a place with less, and it is an impossibility for me to return to the state into which we once were.

She loves me, She loves me not 1996

My tools today 1998


Peter Hylands: Your work has also moved outside? There are a lot of installations, you have made that are in the landscape?

Julie Gough: yes, i think since late 1997-98 i started travelling more around Tasmania, camping and by 1999, had started work in The Parks and Wildlife as an interpretation officer in Tasmania. i was working outdoors, gaining inspiration outdoors with people speaking one-to-one. it was a very different way of gaining inspiration, and since then, i have not looked back. most of my work is using material collected outdoors, and is often sonorously responding to place.

Peter Hylands: When you went to London you went to Goldsmiths, as we have already discussed, one of the projects you worked on was ebb tide. Could you talk us through that?

Julie Gough: yes, i had a concentrated period of time where i under took a one year mfa at Goldsmiths college in london. i wanted to work on my own culture in a way that was not as disrespectful as archeologists and anthropologists had been in the past, but in a way subversive, yet acted the same kind of way, as the people who collected objects.

instead of working with cultural objects in museums i visited throughout Britain, i realised i was more interested in the collectors of these objects. They had been British, i thought i could do something with them, with their personality.

They had become just these names, but mysterious, without faces for people back in Tasmania, people that had collected baskets and shell necklaces and human remains and even young children as scientific exhibits and experiments, people to experiment upon.

What i ended up doing was finding 16 people i wanted to find out more about. i located images of these people. i visited The Pitt rivers museum in oxford, the museum of mankind in london and researched in their archives. i managed to accumulate images of mostly men, one was a woman, lady Jane franklin, who adopted two aboriginal children and then dumped them when she went back to england, one in the orphanage and one went to sea in 1840s. The rest have collected all kinds of objects and people and human remains. so i thought, how will i work with this – this imagery of people and what they did, and their impact still living on in Tasmania, in peoples’ memories?

so i decided to use pyrography as a tool, the act of burning, a kind of metaphor, burning impression, burning into memory, i burnt their portraits onto life size ply wood. as i created them they were just the upper half of the torso and i could only see them floating in the sea, endless, interminable sea where they would be drifting always. much as our own memories, loss and absences and cast out there somehow.

i decided to place them in different ways and work with them digitally. This did not come to anything until i went to the sea in the south of england, to Dorset, to the lighthouse at Dorset, which in Tasmania, Dorset is ‘my country’.

my people came from Tebrikunna, the north east corner of Tasmania. i went to Dorset in england. i decided to enact a kind almost ritual ceremony of sorts, what i was really thinking when i was making these people, was how to undo the things that they have done.

i created these messages and put them in bottles and threw them into the ocean, on a particular day of the year, a certain time for the tides to possibly carry my bottles right out and back to Dorset, Tasmania. i was out there at 6 a.m. on the edge of the Portland Bill lighthouse in Dorset and a friend was filming the event.

People did find the bottles. in the messages i requested that they write to me in Dorset, Tasmania. at the lighthouse there when i got back to Tasmania i found people had written to me and i wrote back. i asked in this letter that the objects be returned to the people of the original cultures, mostly objects that ended up in museums.

Ebb tide 1998

Ebb tide 1998


so i thought that was the work. i enacted a ritual, people are being bought back from some kind of anonymity, visually they were now realized by me. i understood who they were, how they looked, where they ended up. i visited some of their grave sites in london. The ones that had passed away in london, and what i found i was exhibiting for my masters and i was still inspired by the possibility of what to do. They were installed in a room with a super eight projection, hovering over and above them on the wall. a loop was an endless loop that travelled across the room on wooden pier like structures.

Peter Hylands: Really this was the beginning of your experimentation of working outside, so this whole process almost added a dimension to some of your future work?

Julie Gough: yes, it was really important, yet i was so constrained and often indoors in london, and it’s a huge surprise what happened, when i got this invitation in the mail from Tasmania. They had located me. a gallery responsible for finding artists for the inaugural Sculpture by the Sea in Tasmania, this exhibition no longer exists.

The exhibition was to be located along the Tasman Peninsula, in southern Tasmania. however, this was a place where aboriginal people had quite a fraught dangerous and sad history, because it was a place intended to be for the incarceration of aboriginal Tasmanians. Governor arthur in 1830 had decided to create something called a ‘black line’, a military engagement over several months took place, where all of the aboriginals were reportedly supposed to be pushed into that peninsula and not be able to return to the rest of the island. so when that became the site of that Sculpture by the Sea event, i realised i could take these British people, portraits in wood, to Tasmania, and enact something out, related to this removal incarceration of objects and people.

yet, i would be guilty of the same endeavour on these people, really amazing, though it was. i had no money, but the artist fee, was exactly, almost to the pound, the cost of the British post to send the wooden figures back to Tasmania. The work reached Tasmania a short time before i did.

i drove in a van with two other invited artists, who were also installing work in the exhibition on the Tasman Peninsula where i envisaged a tidal flat, or bay where i could install them. i was still working with this idea. it was a great process because i had not identified the place perfectly except in my dreams. so there was a huge risk involved in doing this project. i turned up to this tidal flat, i’d spoken to some locals, but not many, about this endeavour. i found it was ideal. i managed to install all the 16 figures, and over several weeks of the exhibition they were covered and uncovered with the actions of the tide and this was a perfect metaphor for the ideas of memory and lingering and unsettled pasts. i wanted to transmit through this presence of these people, to our minds and lives.

locals were wading amongst the figures. a woman came and told me she was greatly affected by the work and space. it was great to know it had that effect on those not necessarily part of the art audience.

The figures were mounted on metal posts which began to rust, rather rapidly, the bolts through the head suddenly became visible and looked like bullet wounds, which was also a little alarming not anticipated, not deliberate but still gave another meaning to the work, so i became interested in what outdoors and nature could act upon art, it would be often unanticipated.

Peter Hylands: You have done a lot of collecting of natural objects you have been using in your work including tea- trees, you might want to talk about that a little more?

Julie Gough: This work was installed in 1998, Ebb Tide – the whispering sands. Then i think in 1999, i began employment with Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife service as an interpretation officer of indigenous culture. i found myself outdoors a great deal and i was also assisting artists making outdoor work for interpretive trails and an indoor

Ebb tide 1998


Visitors’ centre. i could not help but be influenced by what i was doing, collecting material for my own work, which took a different turn and became much less reliant on acquiring through shops, i collected raw materials. i realised i could make work through intuition and not necessarily through a book image etc. it was great.

and from early 2000, i started devising more and more works related to the natural to these natural materials, but also wanting to spend more time out in country in Tasmania and it really culminated in 2001 with a residency i was awarded in north-east Tasmanian, in my traditional aboriginal country, where i spent two months alone in the lighthouse cottage in Tebrikunna at the lighthouse, in Dorset. Dorset was strangely enough, four years earlier, the place i had made the work about england and returned the bottles to the sea. The messages i wrote to people and asked them to contact me at back of this lighthouse, there i was back in this place.

and that whole episode, where i walked, collected and thought a great deal about time, and how there is a kind of shadow and ripple between present and past -sensing place and difference through that ripple was very important. in 2001 i created about a dozen works that culminated in an exhibition called Heartland. These are the images of the residency.

Peter Hylands: What was this one called?

Julie Gough: Heartland, i was asked by Gabrielle Pizzi, if i would like to show there in 2001. i said this was fortuitous, i was making work at this cottage, out there in north east Tasmania and it would be ideal to show it as a whole exhibition. it consists of many passages that relate to each other as one giant work.

The work became a way of thinking about time and place and movement, and most of the works are about trying to get out of the space we find ourselves in now. i was trying to track back and figure how i would have lived in the past in my home country, and at the same time, that impossibility of never doing so, ever imagining it physically, being capable of living that work and past.

so this work claiming country, is a series of three ropes, i made by twisting lomandra, it’s a tuberous plant you can eat its roots. it has a fantastic capacity to make string and rope. leading you up and out of the Gallery through the ceiling, there are knots and memory, tracking and tracing your self through those things.

This work cowrie, pipi, cowrie, pipi, crow. it is a repetitive mantra; i did not know how to do the craft. The craft of shell necklace making tradition, has not been maintained in my family. now only a very few Tasmanian aboriginal women can still make shell necklaces and a way that harks back thousands of years. so i created it with the lomandra and kelp. it is a way of looking at the necklace, but not actually making that same way and type.

night sky journey is a piece related to the sky. The story of the sky, because our creation stories in Tasmania are about coming from the sky. after a fight in the heavens, and then falling down in the south east corner of Tasmania into the sea. There was a fight between moinee and his brother. he landed on Tasmania. in the form of a kangaroo, his tail was responsible for forming the crevices and valleys. he wants to stand up and be a man and he has to break his back legs so he can stand up tall.

This work is about these stories and trying to understand them as you look up nowadays at the open sky. Knapped rocks created from very sharp rocks from road widening works. i saw the capacity of the rock to flake, resembling artifacts. i collected them and took them to the lighthouse, knapped them on the lawn. They made a remarkable singing sound as i created artifacts i could not believe it, i got excited about that. Women used to make them to climb trees, for possum, and also to scrape the Tea-trees. They also created chisels to ease shell fish off the rocks. so there was a connection with the past through making this work. i want to look at it as a rock climbing wall, a contemporary sport, indoor sport, so i created kelp climbing

Heartland 2001

Heartland (Detail) 2001


shoes from Bull Kelp. Bull Kelp grows as forests in cold waters around Tasmania. it’s a great resource, you can make buckets and other things with it. so there is this climbing wall, but it is also about the stars above.

Peter Hylands: This series was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, how did that transaction occur?

Julie Gough: i don’t know, strangely enough, i ended up being employed by that Gallery for one and a half years. it was very interesting, but before my employment they acquired this work. i was overseas on another series of arts residency, when the money found its way into the bank. i was very happy. i’m not sure how it happened, someone kindly managed to give it to the gallery.

Peter Hylands: With your work, Julie, much of it ends up in public galleries, do you have a practice where you want to sell the work to private collectors? Does this happen?

Julie Gough: it would be lovely, most of the work is unmanageable or of a scale, not ideal for a home. The story may be unpalatable for a home or even an institution, the more intuitive and abstract the work is becoming, about my inner self, the more appealing.

mildura art Gallery bought the work She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not, which i found hugely surprising and encouraging. it is a work about desperate times, also critical of government policy. so i really am inspired by galleries that take the work, when the stories are controversial.

also, the thing about working with natural materials means the work’s lifespan may be limited, so that’s another risk. another piece of my work was acquired by the national Gallery in canberra, they contacted me, because they decided they couldn’t put it out on public display, because of the bathroom scales, in which i painted the work. you are supposed to stand on the scales and your weight would indicate your historical place in the story, your weight and it would show on the screen of the bathroom scales whilst looking at a map of Tasmania made of carpet. The gallery could not understand what to do, because it was a work intended for personal interaction, but it went against the gallery’s policy of ‘not touching the art.’ so i made a second one, scales for the public and i donated to the gallery, suddenly it could be on display! There are always ways of negotiating difficult terrain.

Peter Hylands: Yes, I guess, installation work can be very difficult for private collectors to display, unless they have large houses and large gardens.

Julie Gough: There was a wonderful lady, she wanted my work Time capsule (bitter pills). it is a small work, i made it on a beautiful day in Tasmania, sitting on the beach, looking out to sea.

There was cuttlefish skeleton next to me, i picked it up and started to carve it. a cuttlefish is the bone of the cuttlefish. it was this beautiful medium, and suddenly i was thinking about traveling and the art work became another means such as in Heartland exhibition, all that traveling made it take on another meaning, anything was possible, and there it was. These tablets emerged the size of little capsules and i thought yes, “and what if i swallowed one of these, will i go back two hundred years, prior to the invasion of europeans, and that whole decimation that followed?”. and i was holding it and i felt i could almost activate something. i created this tiny, tiny piece on rocks that sits on a wall. i kept carving until i had a whole lot of capsules. i presented it to the gallery in a pill bottle. The person who bought it was enthralled by the work, i personally like this piece. it was not a financially rewarding piece at all. The concept i came to really pleased me, and also somebody purchased the piece and was really pleased with it.

Time Capsules (bitter pills), 2001


Peter Hylands: The notion of collecting, I find really interesting, as typically art collectors, not only in Australia, but many countries in the world tend to stick doggedly to collecting paintings. So is it the breaking away from that tradition of collecting that is so important and so rewarding?

Julie Gough: There is no compensatory return, i think it’s hard to resell something of mine. i don’t know how long the carved cuttlefish tablet will last. i like the idea, that if any of my artwork was disintegrating, i would be able to replace it in my lifetime or fix it. it occurred to me it is between the purchaser and the artist that this is an important transaction.

Peter Hylands: A few years ago, I think it was in 1999 you found your way to John, Paul, George and Ringo territory in Liverpool, and you made a series, a work which was a commissioned installation called Home Sweet Home. Can you talk us through that?

Julie Gough: yes, this came as a surprise, because i thought i had been almost pigeonholed, myself, as an indigenous artist, making work about indigenous concerns and realities and about australia specifically. so it was huge to have that opportunity, to be invited to an international exhibition, held overseas, and to be funded to go overseas to find the story and the materials to find the inspiration somewhere else.

it was heartening to be taken on that level as a human being and an artist firstly. i realised i could work outside those boundaries that i’d almost made for myself. i was flown across to liverpool for two weeks, and there were a huge number of artists in the exhibition, i think around 50 from all over the world. The concept was curated by guest curator, Tony Bond, from the art Gallery of new south Wales and the title of the exhibition was Trace. Trace, that idea of tracking and tracing and finding and locating people, and most artists were involved in that and finding narratives with found and collected objects and found and connected histories, some of which was connected with their own histories. so, people from the americas and cuba were creating work about the slavery history of liverpool and its connection with the new world, sugar and slavery, cotton plantations. There were also artists from ireland, because of the movement and the diaspora of the people from ireland through liverpool.

i found myself uncertain of where i could fit in and what i could track that seemed suitable. What i ended up doing was through a series of happy accidents, that i never believed were quite accidents. There were various locations already available to artists throughout the city, and also if not, we could find our own. i was immediately taken by this place called the Blue coat school, which now has a lot of things happening in this huge building. at one stage it was a children’s orphanage and through research i have found that children were employed in doing menial tasks. Their little fingers were important in working and making pins, sorting bristles and sorting out senna, lots of tasks through the 1700s and 1800s.

i was not sure what to do with this information, but i kept being drawn back to this place, and then to the archives and wandering around liverpool and thinking. i found myself at the top of the anglican cathedral which is huge. from the top of the cathedral you look down and see what looks like a tiny, tiny quarry, which is actually a cemetery. in the cemetery itself is very strange, you go down into a kind of rock wall to get into the cemetery. and there in the cemetery were six tombstones from the Blue coat orphanage, of the children of liverpool, who had their headstones, and there was name after name, date, age of these children, deceased, and some of whom were incarcerated, more or less, in this Blue coat orphanage, asylum.

i thought, okay, here are their names. something is happening now. i had already been in the museum and seen they had graphite for sale for some reason and then i realised i wanted to work with cotton, which was intrinsic to liverpool history.

i went back to the cemetery, with these huge pieces of cotton, and the graphite and took rubbings from the headstones. as i did this all these locals came out from



similar crevices of the quarry. a great number of people live there and wander through there, some alcoholics, and they were constantly talking to me. it was an interesting experience, it was not friendly, but it was not menacing. it was like i was part of the place, for a limited time, and then i realised i wanted to create their names in a deep way impressing their names with pin. Pins they had made in these asylums. so i had the idea there and then, put their names back in the orphan asylum as beds where they had lived, comforting yet menacing and sad.

Peter Hylands: That first trip to Liverpool was to think about the concept and the work you would create and then you had some months to make the work?

lots of things happened when i came back months later with these things made. Because i took the fabrics back to Tasmania and i employed three women and flew my mother, from Victoria, to work in Tasmania, and she helped me to infill all their names with pins. it took months and two of the women had blood noses over these pillows beds. it was intensive labour, and we were almost enacting the kinds of work, these kids had done themselves in sitting and working constantly.

Julie Gough: Back in australia, i needed $1200 worth of pins, and hundreds of dollars worth of pillow fill, and it was fortunate, because of the scale of the exhibition, the that there were funds. i also had sponsorship. Then it came together. i made the beds, and they were sent back to liverpool and installed and i flew back, i was not sure how it would be received. it was kind of odd i thought, what was happening throughout the exhibition, people would read out the names of the children, like a litany. it was a bit spooky, because this is where they had passed away and there were their names being spoken after hundreds of years, some in the late 1800s some earlier, and quite young. so, it felt right, that were yet remembered back there in that place again.

Peter Hylands: What happened to the work after the end of the biennial?

Julie Gough: This is an interesting story, the work went into storage in the Tate. But it was not the kind of work they were interested in, it was an oddity, perhaps a museum of local community and culture would have been interested in it. But it was too big for the museum in liverpool. it went into storage and the last i heard, it was going to be one of the curators at the Tate who was interested in having the work, but i feel i let it go without adequately following it through. i do not feel good about it. i don’t feel like talking about it. They wanted to freight the work back to me and i said, “i feel that it belongs in liverpool”.

Peter Hylands: We have spoken about the theme of your work, of many coming together to form the work and within the series you have made from Tea-tree there are a number of works which you have shown outside, and also inside as well. They live both outside and inside.

Julie Gough: yes, i am really interested about that idea of outdoor, indoor and also tea-tree is such a strange and interesting material, it is very evident in Tasmania and it is a coastal tree. it’s a melaluca, a tall plant, often 7, 8, or even 10 feet high.

Peter Hylands: And often twisted by the wind, it can be quite beautiful.

Julie Gough: its ghostly and can grow in swampy land and dry land and it can be quite a dense forest, it is difficult to get through it. you can get glimpses through it. it is quite reminiscent of Tasmania. i like to use it too for that. also it was a medium for aboriginal people, in the old days, as spears, digging sticks and chisels. it was multi purpose, and also used as a lean-to -hut -style material to place bark over.

With this work, Stand, it is the use of the multiple, where i’ve used many sticks. in some works i used a few sticks as spear like objects. in stand i created it on a hill, a farm property in central Tasmania on the midland highway. it is 8 x 8 feet square and is a room with no ceiling. inside. i placed a lamp lit continuously for 10 days and 10 nights, as a kind of memorial, because it was in a particular place on a property called lovely Banks. The place was inhabited by many Tasmanian aboriginal people




in the past, and when the people were dislocated when farmers came from Britain, they brought over sheep, taking over the central part of Tasmania. it was lightly forested and heavily grassed. it became a lookout against aboriginal invaders, whilst prior to that aborigines had witnessed the coming of the europeans. so here it is, a stand made of Tea-tree. it could also mean to fight the good fight and take a stand against something. it was also a place where a young aboriginal boy had been taken to that property and bought up by a non-aboriginal family on lovely Banks, right on that particular site. The next life of that Tea-tree, was when i removed it from the hill.

i was invited by the national Gallery of Victoria, (nGV) to make art work for the centenary of federation. This was when many states became one nation. at the centenary in 2001 i was asked if i could make work that looked back at the nGV collection as it existed and also investigate the one hundred and fifty years of that history generally. i decided to use the same Tea-tree, (Stand), and take it to Victoria and install it in a very different way.

instead of standing firmly on the ground and making a room. it would be suspended, hovering above the ground and become a dense forest. so it was reminiscent of its original place and way of being as a plant in Tasmania. it was really speaking about the mess that we are all in australia. here i think, we are still in the space of deep dark uncertainty and not coming to terms with our conflicting pasts. culturally, i’m talking about aboriginal and non-aboriginal people who had been here many generations, so there are people who have come here recently in the last one to three generations but other people have been here six generations and have darker stories to tell and much more to come to terms with i think. so making the work Chase, a reconfiguration of those sticks in stand, is about the movement and the lack of movement, that stultifying stillness we have found ourselves in and not really figuring out how to get through this oppressiveness.

i decided to work with the painting which was the original commission in 1901, one that glorified that past, by e. Phillips fox, The landing of captain cook, where the supposed discoverer, explorer and maker of this great country australia arrived. he is heading off into my chase, Tea-tree forest and looks like he is sleepwalking, which is what i think he was partly doing. The flag with red colours, the naval flag and the red colour on the various clothing, of people coming off their ship from england, i reproduced it in Chase in the sticks.

There is red fabric, as though there has been some kind of fight. There is quarry and prey all lurking in there, leaving traces of themselves, in this stick formation and on the other side of the work, on the right with sticks. in between is the work i created in 1994, called Imperial leather, and that is based on the union Jack.

Imperial leather is actually a soap brand. i cast these aboriginal face ornaments of children, which were popular on australian lounge room walls in the 1950s. People used to hang ornaments, pictures of kangaroos, koalas and also portrait faces of aboriginal men, women and children, really odd collections of australian flora, fauna and indigenous people together. i recast this little boy’s face in wax, which looks like soap. i placed on ropes, ”nooses’ and they then become a kind of soap, and on the union Jack, which is actually pieces of red tie dyed red toweling i placed in the formation of the union Jack on this big board, like a giant painting, really a three-dimensional work.

however, the idea is of cleansing and control and alignment to that imperial order. so here the two works e. Phillips fox and Imperial Leather are kind of negating each other, and saying, wait a minute, there are two stories here and they are very different and which is true? The sticks are a confusion, of where we are at, trying to figure out the mess that we are all in.

Chase 2002

Imperial Leather 1994


secTion four – rememBer


� in memory of charles perkins

in section one of this teacher’s book we discussed the freedom rides and charles Perkin’s contribution towards influencing change in australian society through his activism and his own exceptional communication skills.

here is what the Deputy Premier of new south Wales, The hon Dr andrew refshauge, had to say about charles Perkins following his passing in 2000.

i move that this house: (1) acknowledges with sadness the death of charles Perkins; (2) conveys our respect and condolences to his family and friends; and (3) his extraordinary work across a lifetime to bring about a better future

for aboriginal people.

The news of the passing of charles Perkins made it a sad day in our country’s history. charlie was a catalyst for an undreamed of revolution in aboriginal affairs; he was a pioneer of aboriginal activism. While a nation was being born and shaped, a race was dying and fading into the shadows. charlie Perkins was aboriginal australia’s modern-day warrior who fought not with spears but with words. Perkins had humble beginnings. he was born in 1936 of the arrente people at the Television station aboriginal reserve in the northern Territory. at age 10 he was taken from his tribal lands and his family—although in these circumstances his family was willing—to the st frances children’s home in adelaide, where attempts were made to rob him of his aboriginal culture and heritage. he was subjected also to discrimination and taught to devalue and dismiss his aboriginality.

many things contributed to Perkins embarking on the fight for aboriginal rights: being made to stand outside the pub to be served, aboriginal people being forcibly kept on reserves, the declaration of aboriginal-free areas and the forced removal of children from their families. at a time when the willingness of aboriginal people to stand up for their rights was gaining momentum and people who did so were gaining respect, charlie was there. charles Perkins was part of a younger generation that had learnt the language of dissent and the symbolism of social action. he was at the cutting edge of the struggle for the rights of the aboriginal people. Perkins’ contribution to shaping the nation had been priceless, none more so than his freedom rides through north-western new south Wales towns. They highlighted the real life for aboriginal people and showed the exclusion, and the acidic and acrimonious reality that aboriginal people had to live from day to day.

charlie showed clearly how local administration acted to exclude aboriginal people from the everyday life of towns. he was confronted with raw anger, hostility and hatred from some of the white population wherever he ventured. When he spoke of the freedom rides he spoke of how “off they had gone, in full ignorance of what was ahead, with not much courage and not too much knowledge, but he thought let’s do it anyway”. at Walgett and then moree, freedom riders were confronted with ugly crowds of spitting and fruit and rock-throwing townspeople. Perkins felt every inch a threatened man. he said: i thought i was going to get bashed up. i was punched in the back of the head. i had egg thrown down the back of my shirt, sand poured over my face and over the top of my head, and blokes, women too, pushed and shoved and bottles were flying through the air.

at Walgett there was a heated confrontation outside the local rsl club, which barred aboriginal membership, even to those aboriginal soldiers and nurses who had fought and nursed during World War i and World War ii. in moree they confronted the management of the swimming pool, which barred aboriginal people from using the pool and, after hours of demonstrating, a group of aboriginal children were allowed in. The disclosure of this blatant discrimination, coupled with the open hostility of moree and Walgett residents, gained much publicity and favourable comment from many


spheres of australia. Growing headlines and public opinion were so strong that some changes were forced in the towns that were visited, as many uncomfortable parallels were being drawn between south africa and australia. Perkins had become the eyes of a nation that for so long was blinded to the plight of its aboriginal people. he introduced many people to an australia they never knew existed – an ugly australia that was far removed from the tag “the lucky country”. The Perkins-led freedom rides in the 1960s rejuvenated the push for black power in white australia. from his actions grew a new-found confidence in aboriginal people: they began to assert themselves; they stood up and took back control of their own destinies. leading aboriginal activist Kevin Gilbert was right when he said: no people are willing to stand by and see their rights, their human rights usurped or eroded and not do anything.

lyall munro Jnr was one of the children allowed into the moree pool on that stormy day back in 1965. he has often remarked that he saw the power of direct action that day in moree. he later became an activist for aboriginal rights. charlie played an integral part in the dramatic progress of aboriginal affairs in the late 1960s and 1970s. a rich tapestry began to emerge of both federal and state government programs directed towards improving aboriginal health, education, housing and employment. charlie had become a bureaucrat in 1969 when he joined the commonwealth public service and eventually was appointed Deputy secretary of the Department of aboriginal affairs in 1979. But even from within the walls of bureaucracy charlie was not averse to speaking his mind publicly, even when it meant breaching public service protocol.

from time to time conservative politicians called to have him sacked because of his outspokenness, which only indicated how much his passion for his people outweighed his allegiance to the public service. charlie spoke often of the helplessness he felt being locked up in the paper welfare of the public service, and just like a sand trap it quickly swallowed him up. sometimes we need to remind ourselves that some people are not meant to be in cages; their feathers are just too bright. charlie’s journey may have ended but his legacy will always remain etched in australian history. he committed his life to fighting against racism and ignorance. During his time he awakened the sleepy consciousness of australia. During his final years charlie focused his energy on the aboriginal youth in australia who he felt were real victims of not belonging and of inferiority. he spoke of a young man:

i stood in a bank here recently and watched a young aboriginal man almost whisper to the teller with his head down. and that typifies to me the feelings and experiences of many young aboriginal australians today in australian society.

australian society, as much as any other society in the world, values people according to the colour of their skin, their race, their wealth and the suburbs they live, and the tragedy is young aborigines are devalued in australian society.

They learn and receive messages from society of low worth and expectations of mediocrity and failure.

i challenge these messages and dream for young aboriginal australians and i encourage them to believe in themselves.

charles Perkins was to australia what nelson mandela was to south africa and what martin luther King was to america. one of his most enduring gifts would have to be that he gave this nation of ours a soul. charlie is survived by his wife, eileen, and his three children, hetti, rachel and adam, and his grandchildren. his three children showed great courage on the day of their father’s funeral and shared with us some of their personal memories of life with the man we all called charlie. We pass on our sincerest condolences and sympathy to the Perkins family. he will forever be in our hearts.

Dr refshauge (marrickville, Deputy Premier, minister for urban affairs and Planning, minister for aboriginal affairs, and minister for housing) [11.30 a.m.]:

nsW legislative assembly hansard 1/11/2000

DeaTh of charles nelsonPerKins

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