Issue No. 13 September 2006 — Making Badlands
abstracts
In this address, I think out loud about the work we need to do with history in order to understand better how to live well in the present and future. I call this process “vestige work”. Rummaging in Australia’s aftermath cultures, I try to re-dress the disintegration in our story-systems, in our traditional knowledge caches, our landscapes and ecologies. My job is to investigate and recuperate scenes and collections of artifacts that have been torn apart somehow, torn by landgrabbing, let’s say, or by accidents, or exploitation that ignores rituals of preservation and restoration. Typically, the scenes and systems I investigate were once a good deal more coherent, but now they are ailing or out of balance. I’ve come to understand that most of Australia is like this, that the place we inhabit is our best evidence about our unbalanced selves and that this place has so much raggedness in it because it is patterned to the society that has used it so roughly.
This paper sets out to explore the relationships between language, landscape, representation, photography and writing. It does so by taking a particular place through which these streams intersect – the vast, million-year-old salt lake known as Lake Ballard in the heart of the Goldfields region of Western Australia. What complicates this landscape and its representation is the fact that this place is also the site of a significant art installation – in 2003, British sculptor Antony Gormely developed his Inside Australia installation at Lake Ballard, as part of the 2003 Perth International Arts Festival. This paper invokes the notion of the ghost from Jacques Derrida as a means of exploring the way Gormely's figures haunt, not so much the landscape itself, but the very discourses that have previously articulated the means of its representation.
In his study of Central Queensland’s ‘Horror Stretch’ Ross Gibson elucidates the truism that a landscape is established somewhere in-between the physical geography and its cultural overlays. This paper analyses my own approach to places as a post-colonial migrant and artist. As a transient, I often get to know a place on what I perceive to be its own terms. Even as I observe vegetable, animal and human elements, the form of the geology is perceived as features, relative scales, spaces and, distances. The remnant surface litter is conveyed as patterns and textures. During these moments a fundamental sense of place is established. This may be vague or fleeting. It may be protean. If the impression is significant it may lead to a desire to linger, to return and so, an ongoing relationship with a place may ensue. Subsequently arises a desire to seek out cultural knowledge. Then genius loci becomes compound. It is difficult to deny or mitigate Gibson’s tragic interpretation of the human contribution to landscape. There is certainly tragic irony in that, at this point in Earth's geological time, it may be easier to imagine a possible future Earth without life than to apprehend the primordial state.
The movement from public to domestic space is discursive as well as physical. In my paintings I explore this transitional zone. I model this idea both in my choice of images and in the way that I work with the ambiguous relationship between painting and photography.
Frames and borderlines are architecturally present in the structure of a home however this paper considers how these borderlines can dually exist as a metaphor for the psychological states of the public and private self.
The aesthetics of photography and painting are intertwined in my visual work to set up a tension for the viewer. The image is at once, framed and autonomous, yet like a trompe l’oeil portal, open to the projection of the viewer. The notion of a “badlands” in my image making is hauntingly implied by transient borders and undefined perspectives.
This paper investigates a peripheral space within the city of Melbourne which until the 21st century escaped the jurisdiction of any Melbourne Authority. Although geographically situated at the confluence of the Maribyrnong and Yarra Rivers , and bordered by the main road to the West and the Railroad; neither the Railways, the Harbour Trust, the MMBW, the City Council, nor the Crown Lands Dept. had responsibility for this land.
Unfolding the repressed history of this space from the early days of white settlement, when the Aboriginal population were shunted to this unwanted swampland, the paper examines the processes of change at work on this site over the past two centuries, as it has evolved from the periphery to the front line of the new docklands precinct. From tip site to shantytown during the Depression, to wasteland, and now in the 21st century, to invaluable real estate, the historical and contemporary sense of Dudley Flats alters, as its identity swings from the otherness of destitution to the otherness of elitism.
As a landscape haunted by displacement, loss and waste, the everyday lives of the women who inhabited this site during the Depression are taken up in my art practice. Themes of ‘making do' ‘getting by' scrounging and scavenging as Aussie traditions that flourished on this site are examined in light of my own creative process.
Bob Hawke's recent proposal for turning Australia's “dead heart” into the world's nuclear waste dump is a classic example of badland making and a timely reminder of the relevance of Ross Gibson‘s Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002). Closer to my home, in Central Queensland, a controversy is raging about globally significant developments in the Shoalwater Bay Military Training Area.
Australia (if not the whole world) may well be a badland in the making. The ways in which a powerful institution exploits a place is intimately related to pre-existing ideas (myths and assumptions) about that place. Ross Gibson asks us to seek “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands” (3). One response begins by asking: is the badness in the land or does it reside elsewhere? If we analyze the discourses and practices of the various agencies and institutions governing the badland we may be able to formulate useful tactics of resistance to their strategies of domination.
This paper discusses an active production, as a badlands, of the suburb of Macquarie Fields, in the western region of Sydney. It draws on media representations of the riots which took place there in early 2005, on policing strategies for youth, and on government planning and policy practices. By juxtaposing these representations, strategies and practices with the long history of attempts by residents to seek change, the paper situates these riots as a meaningful act of resistance to a dominant ordering. The paper uses Judith Butler’s notion of structure of address to consider the ways in which the riots amount to an address by residents. The failure by governments to take this address seriously means that the terms of a basic moral authority are not met.
Professional nurses began to emerge as an identifiable group from the late nineteenth century. Their establishment and eventual domination of nursing was characterised by separation and antagonism as they asserted themselves over untrained nurses. This paper examines the struggle for professional domination as it occurred in Australia during the early twentieth century, and particularly focuses on the accusations of unsafe practice levelled at untrained nurses. This tactic drew on public images of untrained nurses depicted by nineteenth century authors such as Charles Dickens – of gin-swilling nurses who would not wait until the patient had died before pilfering the belongings. Thus, a “badlands” concept was created in the minds of professional nurses, whereby untrained nurses at the bedside in private homes were actively endangering the lives of their patients because of lack of skill and knowledge. However, recent historical research has increasingly challenged such images, and suggests that while many nurses did not have formal training, they were not necessarily unsafe or ineffective in their practice.