This artwork
visually presents one key broken and unfulfilled promise made between
Europeans and Aboriginal people early in the 1800s. This is a story which
awaits, unsettled and unresolved beneath this island's surface to this day.
This project's central
argument is as follows:
George Augustus Robinson's account
relates a hugely significant moment in Tasmanian, Australian, and my own
family's history. George Augustus Robinson recorded the incident when he
promised a future that he could not possibly render in reality. This was a
desperate lie to a people equally desperate to believe in their own survival.
Years later,
Mannalargenna cut off his hair aboard ship north of Swan Island, probably as
an act of grieving when he finally lost all hope. He died of pneumonia shortly
afterwards on December 4, 1835 on Flinders Island- one month after Robinson
had transported him to Wybalenna from mainland Tasmania and four years after
he had first met and begun travelling with Robinson on his 'Friendly Mission'.
The quoted passage leapt
from page 394 of 1073 pages of incessant details of meals and climate which
swamped and served to render this occurrence less distinct in the body of
words which had consumed and subsumed it.
This account was made personally
potent by time spent in the far north east of Tasmania during the genesis of
the work which became Shadow of the Spear (1997). I witnessed across the sea
the same islands as did the people in the story seven generations ago.
Mannalargenna is my great great great great grandfather.
The power of the
physical presence of the site, and the overlapping seams of history connecting
then and now, became apparent to me when at the location. I realised that a
material conjunction between past and present can provide the dialogue and
means for a story, apparently set within a closed-book, to be reconsidered
within a visual art-practice.
As a consequence, I made
the materials described in the journal and placed them alongside the words
from that time. They work together to speak of my awareness of the incomplete
transaction, and they express the chance for a resolution to take place when
memory is reactivated.
AUG 6, 1831 "Friendly Mission" GA Robinson.
Opposite Swan Island.
This morning I developed
my plans to the chief Mannarlargenna and explained to him the benevolent views
of the government towards himself and people.
He cordially acquiesced
and expressed his entire approbation of the salutary measure, and promised his
utmost aid and assistance.
I informed him in the
presence of Kickertepoller that I was commissioned by the Governor to inform
them that, if the natives would desist from their wonted outrages upon the
whites,
they would be allowed to
remain in their respective districts and would have flour, tea and sugar,
clothes & C given them
that a good white man
would dwell with them who would take care of them and would not allow any bad
white man to shoot them, and he would go with them about the bush like myself
and they then could hunt. He was much delighted.
The chief and the other
natives went to hunt kangaroo: returned with some swan's eggs which the chief
presented me with as a present from himself- this was an instance of
gratitude seldom met with from the whites.
