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16 postcards of Black, nigger, Native places around Tasmanian encountered during an 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, Blackmans Lookout, Black Tommy's Hill, Blackfellows Crossing, Black Phils 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, 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, 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.

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...