'I don’t think you can live in Australia without considering the past. Every day, when I go to the beach, floating in the water, looking back at the land, I imagine living here in this paradise and then having the colonials arrive. I always feel that I’m on indigenous land.'
Colonial Grab is an animation of scenes traversing time and place, peopled by an aristocratic couple who time-travel from pokie parlour, to desert, to sitting room, to colonial landscape. The sequence starts with a well-to-do European woman, whose flamboyantly feathered hat and dress are coloured in Ross’ signature fluorescent yellow, playing a ‘one-armed bandit’ poker machine. When she scores a win, we are transported to central Australia, where a burning sun overlooks an ancient landscape. A science-fiction inspired disturbance in the landscape – a digitally produced eruption from the treeline – produces a cyborg-type wasp with surveillance cameras for its eyes and body. This ancient land is clearly keeping some secrets.
Playing the slot machine again, the win transports us to a colonial landscape by John Glover that morphs into the woman’s sitting room, where she creates ikebana sculpture with the trees plucked from the Glover painting. Joined by a well-to-do colonial gentleman, the couple then enter the Glover landscape to place the ikebana pieces in its centre. The precise and violent organisation of indigenous plants and people from a John Glover painting into an ikebana arrangement – a form designed to please a specific cultural sensibility through its highly stylised rigour – echoes Glover’s own colonial, painterly arrangements. The use of the Glover trees with the Aboriginal people still on them allows Ross to show the absolute disregard and lack of respect for the original indigenous inhabitants. And yet there is nuance and resistance. The colonial couple curtsy in a small show of respect when returning the potted trees to the land, the trees break from their containment, even if it does result in their own destruction. These incongruous sculptures grow larger until they burst out of their crystal vessels and are strewn across the landscape. Walking through this scene of detritus the couple then pull down an ornate curtain cord to reveal another untouched colonial-style painting of the Australian landscape ready for reconfiguration.
The ‘colonial land grab’ poker machine played by the woman, like the colonial land grab itself, is a gamble: a risky proposition dependent on chance, luck and the high probability of losing it all. Ross’ video narrative proposes that whatever the probabilities, the house – or in this case, nature – always wins.
