I was born in Mildura in Victoria, then I spent some time in Adelaide, and then I moved to Menindee in New South Wales. I grew up in Menindee pretty much my whole primary school, and then I moved to the Kimberley and spent most of my adolescence there, and in Darwin. I had a little stint in Denmark as a carpenter and then moved back to Adelaide. Now I’m in Canberra.
My family comes from the northern Kaurna area, about 100 km north of Adelaide. It’s basically the Northern Plains, directly between the coast and the Barossa Valley. I feel a deep connection to that area, it always feels like home when I go back.
The work [for Ceremony] is a series of daguerreotypes and cast bronze objects, called The Darkness of Enlightenment. It’s looking at that period of time when European whalers and American sailors were operating off the coast of South Australia. And it’s really just about that first contact between Kaurna people and Europeans and Americans, who were largely not literate and so didn’t record much of their interactions in western literature.
The first 10 years there’s a little information exchanged between Kaurna and the European colonists. And my work is looking at how there are mistranslations and the exchange isn’t quite simple, there’s always information missing. It’s this era when there’s interaction, there’s knowledge exchange but there’s a loss of information, and there is also conflict and people are dying. It’s a very tumultuous time, when information is being exchanged and documented and recorded into western literature, which we later use in contemporary Kaurna language revival.
There were about 12 western documenters out of a population of maybe 1500 in that maybe 30-year period of the European population coming in and colonising South Australia. So only about one per cent of that population recorded Kaurna culture. It’s actually quite small, the documentation. And then people were taken off to missions and language was basically suppressed to the point where they say by the 1880s, there wasn’t a Kaurna speaker from Adelaide. Potentially there were Kaurna-speaking people on the missions. But they say by about the 1930s, the last Kaurna speaker passed away, and then because of racial segregation, people were on the missions until the 1967 Referendum. And then people came out of the missions, started going back to Adelaide wanting to learn their language. It was in about 1989 that people started wanting to speak Kaurna language again and revive it. And so the last 30 years has seen this effort by the Kaurna community to revive it.
There are only a limited amount of fluent speakers, around about five or six, but there are probably about 150 people who identify as Kaurna speakers, myself included. And I’ve just wanted to research and learn about Kaurna language, and so part of that is reading some of the western literature that is recorded on Kaurna people at the point of colonisation.
But what you learn from that is there is a deficit of information. There are lists that are just 10 words long, there are lists that are a bit longer, about 150 words, then there are some manuscripts and dictionaries that go up to about 2000 words. In that process only one songline was completely recorded, while another four were partially recorded. We know that there would’ve been near 1000 songlines. So you’re only just really getting a reference to those, rather than having ones that we can re-explore. We can later connect those things but there’s a deficit and I guess I’m trying to create an emotional work around that feeling, as opposed to articulating it.
I’ve gone through all the stages of grieving, understanding that the South Australian Government tried to ethnically cleanse culture from my Kaurna ancestors, from other Kaurna people. It’s really hard knowing that they don’t put that much effort into trying to foster the revival of language. There are little steps but it’s not monumental. So you have to go through understanding that a government 150 years ago tried to ethnically cleanse your ancestors and then subsequently you don’t have that information. And then from what you can piece together from probably racist people at the time, you have to go through some pretty derogatory text to get to the information, and sometimes it’s poorly recorded. It can be quite degrading knowing all of this was just so that Europeans could take land in South Australia and steal it.
If you want language back, you have to do the hard work. And I know that if I do some language revival, then that’s going to help the next generation. Having a child, it becomes easier for them.
Language revival is really important because it’s the verbal expression of culture. It’s the way that you communicate culture, so it is the vessel that holds everything that is knowledge. You can understand things through English but it only goes so far. The way a word is expressed can hold much more meaning within its cultural context. Like the sound you make when you say Kuwa for crow—that is the sound of the crow. Kuwa is the language of the crow, you are saying its word, you are speaking its language.
‘Placenames are symbolic of what the place means and what its story was and its history. When you lose language, you lose that, but you also lose all the nuances about understanding what something exactly means.
Some of the stories are held within just a word in the language, in a name. Placenames, for instance, are symbolic of what the place means and what its story was and its history. When you lose language, you lose that, but you also lose all the nuances about understanding what something exactly means. Language, history and culture are intertwined.
The work starts as an idea. So in this case, it’s the interaction between Kaurna and the colonists who had documented language on the frontier of South Australia. I’m predominantly a landscape photographer, so I use landscape to talk about that interaction, visiting places where that transaction of language happened and areas that were transmission points between the colonists and Kaurna. For instance, Kalungku was a child who was kidnapped from Rapid Bay; she was later documented speaking Kaurna in Tasmania and she said where she was kidnapped from—that was the site that I wanted to capture.
With these images, I wanted to convert them into daguerreotypes rather than doing it the historical way of photographing the exact landscape, because the chemistry’s really dangerous, it’s hard to transport, the exposures are really long. I use a digital version, and I transfer it over to film, copy the image. I can do any adjustments I need to do to improve the image or put things in that I need to be in there or take things out that I feel are distracting. Then I basically print a daguerreotype, but it still goes through all the historical processes of printing. Then I make the image, get it ready for presentation. And there’s another element where 20 objects are selected to sit alongside the daguerreotypes in a salon hang. Those objects are signifiers of each of these stories that talk about the transmission or lack of transmission of language on the frontier. They’re cultural objects, they fill the gaps of what’s in the photographs. It isn’t easy to read, it’s deliberately a little ambiguous.
There are many components, all the background information, which is 10 years of learning Kaurna language and history, all that has taken time. That was in itself a journey. This work is a conclusion of a feeling that I have about the information that I’m learning and how I’m learning it and some of the problems within that.
Then there’s doing the field work, which started about 12 months ago, to photograph those landscapes, and then six months to do all the editing, getting it all ready, and then the few weeks it takes to make the daguerreotypes, because it’s a physical process. It’s chemistry, things go wrong, essentially; it’s a very time-consuming process, and then, eventually, there’s a work on a wall in an art gallery.
I don’t think there’s a clear moment when I wanted to become an artist. I was a really good drawer at a young age. So art has always been there, but I never thought that I would be an artist, I just fell into it by I accident. I was working as a carpenter and I wasn’t really enjoying it and then I decided that I really wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a photojournalist, a war journalist, and I started studying it. Being a war journalist means, unless the conflict’s in your own country or an English-speaking country, you’ll have to go to a place where they speak another language. I decided that was really difficult. I was at university studying photography for visual arts to do photojournalism and then there was this gradual shift to wanting to understand how nineteenth-century photographic processes work. And then there was a range of alternative processes, historic and experimental. I was just swept away in it, and then all of a sudden, I was an artist and I wasn’t going to be a photojournalist.
But there is a vein of the same thing. I ended up focusing on how history affects us in a contemporary sense. So there is a journalistic thing happening within my practice naturally. I’m still reporting on things. Writing has been a component, research has been a component. The things that I originally set out to do, I still do but just in a different way.
I enjoy aspects of artmaking but there are aspects I just really hate. I can’t move away from the things that I don’t like because they’re necessary. I enjoy research but it really is hard work, hard to the point where, sometimes, I hate it. A lot of the stuff I look at is really traumatic. So that affects me, it’s actually part of my family. But you have to. The language revival is the worst, because it’s like people fucking murdered people for land and then destroyed a language deliberately, and you have to go through all the information about that. It’s like a minefield. Just because the nation hasn’t managed to figure out a way to talk about it, you’re carrying some of that burden.
Aboriginal people are the oldest continuous culture in the world, and practising Kaurna culture and contributing to a grand art history that is more than 65 000 years old—I feel like continuing that. I’m just one of the steps in the longer history of making Aboriginal art. So keeping it going is really important. I’m not just continuing my ancestors’ traditions but it sits in a wider narrative, the continent. And there are the feelings that I have about being able to give that to my son and teach him.
I think if you live in Australia, having a good understanding of Indigenous cultures is pivotal to understanding the art history of this country, which is a lot older than places in Europe. When you think about a culture that’s been handing things down in an unbroken narrative of art history for that long, and then people wanting to carry that on for another 65 000 years—it’s quite amazing. And you are just one of a million grains of sand in that history, but it’s important.
I want people to understand that point of colonisation and how effective that was on Kaurna language, and what that feeling of loss and history and impact of colonisation has on the contemporary community, myself included. I also want them to feel it, to see it in a visual way and to be able to feel emotions about that, because it’s one thing to read this or be told this, it’s another thing to understand history, to feel history. Sometimes you just have to feel things to understand them.
