'Mytho-poetic' will open tomorrow night May 3rd. at the Gympie Regional Gallery in Queensland before touring selected regional galleries throughout Australia.I have attached an essay from the catalogue that hopefully may give you an understanding of the threads of associations with history, identity and place that underpins the work.
Mytho-Poetic: Historical
Traces
”The past is foreign and historical
understanding is not so much a recovery of the past as a mediation between our
sense of ourselves and our sense of the past.”
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1)
The stories we claim
as ‘our own’ grasp the framework of our personal references. However, these
stories are transformed once shared with the communities we inhabit. The poetry
of myths are altered and tempered in their response and meaning as they enter the realm of shared
experience. Mytho-poetic descriptions have the capacity to reaffirm a deeper
reflective quality within our personal stories. In so doing they have the
potential to blur the divisions between fiction and non-fiction, the individual
and the collective, the poetic and the rational.
Self-narratives
often run counter to the ‘bigger’ stories of history. In turn, they also
influence and inform alternative meanings of identity and place. Mytho-poetic
structures often employ a non-linear flow in the recording of experience; such
narratives often challenge rational inquiry, yet they are capable of conveying
an intrinsic understanding of everyday existence.
In June 1960, below
a full moon and clear sky, a Fokker-Friendship F-27 passenger aircraft crashed
into the Coral Sea seven kilometres east of the North Queensland township of
Mackay. Having already abandoned two attempts to land
on the runway, due to dense
coastal fog, the aircraft finally made contact with a calm Coral Sea.
Twenty-nine people died. There were no survivors. The investigation into the
crash was unable to determine a probable cause. A somewhat unworldly final
sentence from the aviation accident report reads:
“The accident happened at night and there were
very few visual clues.”(2)
My childhood home
was within walking distance of this coastline. European settlers had named it
Far Beach. The local Yuipera first nation peoples called it Illawong, meaning
‘view of the sea’. An austere granite stone memorial erected at the edge of the
beach between picnic tables and barbeques provides an historic memorial of the
sorrowful accident. As a community and
as individuals we inherit the effects of history through the narratives already
set in place by previous generations. The inherited memory I have of the
aircraft tragedy was gained through my mother’s memory of being seated at the
kitchen table of our South Mackay home and listening to the sound of the
attempted landings. The stone memorial at the edge of Illawong Beach endures to
preserve history’s narrative of the tragic event. It remains a narrative that
is collectively shared. However, its memorial is to absence.
For Gadamer, the
process of connecting identity and place with history relies upon the alignment
of both the familiar and the foreign. He suggests that a more eloquent
confirmation of place is acquired by a mediation that recovers and equally
rediscovers the past. The founding of meaningful connections between history, memory
and place requires an imaginative and poetic searching within the layers of
personal historical consciousness.
The journals and
diaristic notations of Australia’s early explorers abound with evidence of the
coalescing of references to self and place through their navigation between the
familiar and the remote. The
Austrian artist dubbed the ‘da Vinci’ of natural history illustration,
Ferdinand Bauer, accompanied Matthew Flinders on the circumnavigation voyage of
Australia in 1802-03. The visual clues were so foreign and bewildering that
Bauer’s European colour chart containing 250 variations of tints and shades,
used as a reference for his field studies, had to be increased by him to almost one thousand on his return to the northern hemisphere. Bauer’s
method employed clusters of numbers that corresponded to a particular tone on
his chart. The intensive numerical order applied by Bauer to each illustrated
specimen evokes a sense of an individual who, while struggling to make sense of
his witness to an unfamiliar territory, simultaneously creates a map that is a
type of ersatz self-portrait, a mapping of self.
In essence, Bauer’s coded notations reinforced
a European use of language as a means of familiarizing the unfamiliar, ordering
the seemingly disordered. The language of cartography as an abbreviated
numerical ordering of the landscape was part of the broader project of mapping,
naming and possessing territories from the former occupants. In Australia the
mapping of territories by European settlers neglected the pre-existing first
nation peoples’ understanding of boundaries and naming of place. This vain
disregard for the pre-existing cultural inscriptions that had long marked the
boundaries and cartographies of the landscape for Indigenous Australians enforced
a Western spatial consciousness upon place.
At the edge of the
sea that destroyed the Fokker Friendship in 1960, on the sand hills within the
margins of all that was deemed to be enlightened and humanized throughout my
childhood, stood a shanty town. This assemblage of jerry built corrugated iron
dwellings with their sand and prickle grass floors continues to occupy a
poignant site within my memory. At the
very periphery of sea and continent this corpus of bleak shelters opened the
door to another realm - one where the rational world ended and a kind of poetic
madness held tenancy. What arises from such encounters is the possibility for
place to serve as a geographical indicator of liminal space. This transitional
space of the betwixt and between allows for the creation of new stories, which
in turn generate a redefining of the layers of Western definitions of history,
space, time and self.
The preserving of
family ephemera was never afforded any depth of priority within my extended family.
A mix of Irish Catholic self-possession and detached Nordic spirit fostered a
mind-set that discarded the capacity for inanimate objects to invoke memories
of past narratives in any meaningful way. And yet, curiously, both cultures are embedded
with iconography that gesture and summon memories of what remains absent, both
real and mythic.
In 2003 following
the death of my grandmother, I was gifted a collection of postcards whose
inscriptions were created primarily in the first half of the twentieth century.
Postcards have a way of negotiating the relationship between self, memory and
place that corresponds with our experience of maps. Through an abridged use of
language they order, recall and impart descriptions of a particular spatial
environment. Memory is fused within text and image. In a salient fashion they
maintain the colonial plan of appropriation. With the presence of the
photographic image space is transformed into spectacle and display. The
photographs capacity to reduce personal experience to a Western universal
likeness dispossess place of the possibility of engaging with pre-existing
narratives. As such space is denied a more original geographical identity
rendering personal experience of place less authentic. Collectively, through a
juxtaposition of text and image they form an encyclopaedic archive that conveys
a certain European sensibility continually striving to connect and inscribe the
self within place.
The complexity of a
community’s or individual’s sense of connection to place is not measureable by
any simple analysis of the spatial dimensions of their everyday experience. In
order for place to disclose meaning, what is required is a spirit of reflection
that binds self-narratives equally to both the present and the past. It is
possible that formal accounts of colonial history can be re-negotiated through
a blend of personal and historical narratives that maintain a consciousness
that defined territories were already mapped, named and described. For
non-indigenous Australians, the potential for more
meaningful connections between ‘self’ and ‘place’ will require approaches to mapping
that creatively negotiate both the historical and the reflective self.
1 Gavamer,H-G. & Silverman,H. Gadamer and Hermeneutics
(New York, Routledge 1991) 176.
2 1960 Aviation Safety Investigation Report
