Julie Gough: Tense Past
ISLAND | Issue 159
Julie Gough, Missing or Dead (installation shot), 2019, photographer Rémi Chauvin, Dark Lab
Text by Mary Knights
On the Queen’s Domain in the middle of a Hobart winter, people silently wander along a narrow track through a dark grove of she-oaks, eucalyptus and acacia trees. As night falls, long shadows cross the path, black crows screech and the smell of the damp earth lingers in the bitterly cold air. As far into the bush as one can see are missing person posters tacked to the trees, each with the name of a Tasmanian Aboriginal child who went missing, was lost or died in the first decades of colonisation. This is Julie Gough’s immersive and confronting artwork Missing or Dead 2019.
Snippets of information gleaned from archives reveal that these children, torn from their families, endured short and brutalised lives. Arthur Tasman (1821–35) was incarcerated in the King’s Orphan Asylum when he was eleven years of age and died there three years later. Ada Byron (1833–48) was left in the Orphan Asylum when she was just five years old, discharged into the care of Mr Atkinson of Launceston to work as a servant when barely a teenager, and found dead after a suspicious fall at Cataract Gorge when only fifteen. Sometimes the traditional names of the children are recorded on the posters – such as Nolahallaker, born in 1801 at Preminghana (Cape Grim), abducted from Robbins Island when a girl, and eventually, when taken from the sealers, exiled to Wybalenna.
To be made aware of tragedy befalling one child is distressing; learning the fate of one hundred and eighty-five missing children is devastating.
“To be made aware of tragedy befalling one child is distressing; learning the fate of one hundred and eighty-five missing children is devastating.”
Missing or Dead was an off-site component of the major exhibition Julie Gough: Tense Past staged at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) during the 2019 Dark Mofo festival. TMAG is the second oldest museum in Australia. Britain’s imperial aspirations and Tasmania’s brutal colonial history are embedded in the very fabric of TMAG’s buildings and have shaped the collections, which now include over a million specimens, artworks and artefacts, and span a range of disciplines – from art to zoology. To develop the exhibition Julie Gough: Tense Past, I invited Gough to undertake research and create new artworks that would disrupt lingering colonial narratives and to reinterpret collection material from her perspective as a Tasmanian Aboriginal artist. Gough can trace the matrilineal line of her family tree to Woretemoeteyenner (c.1790–1847), one of the daughters of Mannalargenna (c.1775–1835), who was the leader of the Trawlwoolway people of Tebrikunna, north-east Tasmania. Gough’s father was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and has Irish as well as Scottish ancestry.
Reflecting the artist’s focus on uncovering and re-presenting hidden and conflicting histories, the exhibition juxtaposed conceptually and aesthetically powerful artworks by Gough with potent artefacts borrowed from fourteen collections from across Australia. The ambience of the exhibition echoed traditional museum displays from an earlier era and included old-fashioned glass cabinets, silver artefacts, gilt-framed portraits and colonial prints. However, the familiar atmosphere was disturbed by an almost imperceptible, surreal slippage. The traditional powder blue and eucalyptus green paint on the gallery walls bled across the floors, bracken was piled under a museum cabinet, strips of bark were displayed in a bell jar, sticks were stacked in a corner and a subtle soundscape permeated the spaces: the wind in the trees, the crackling of fire, snatches of song, the chiming of a grandfather clock, and the sound of gunshot.
One of the most powerful artworks was an evocative multilayered installation about dispossession, titled The Gathering 2015 & 2019. Twenty-eight small wooden crosses, each marked with the name of a pastoral estate established on land granted to settlers in the 1820s and 1830s, are laid out on a large cedar table. In memory of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people who once lived there, stones taken from the entrance of each property rest on the crosses. On the wall above the memorial, video footage taken by the artist shows seemingly peaceful rural properties behind fences and gates, physical and symbolic barriers to Country. Stills of historical correspondence and newspaper articles integrated into the video expose the colonists’ concerns about their safety, land values and ‘hostile Aboriginal people still at large’. At the end of the video, instead of credits, the names of settlers who signed letters to Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur (1784–1854) expressing their gratitude for the removal of Tasmanian Aboriginal people from the midlands are superimposed over footage of the countryside on fire.
The Gathering was site-specific and immersive. Alluding to pastoralists’ aspirations for wealth, elegance and status, the gallery was furnished to suggest a colonial dining-room, with balloon-back chairs, subdued lighting and plush burgundy carpet. The bespoke carpet, designed by Gough in collaboration with Margaret Woodward, was inspired by the crimson flock wallpaper hung in the dining room of Woolmers Estate in 1856, which, despite silverfish damage, was still opulent. Playfully subverting colonial pretentions, Gough and Woodward deconstructed the wallpaper pattern, fragmenting ornamental flourishes to suggest broken bones and shells, and replacing bouquets of English flowers with thistles and silverfish to symbolise invasive species.
Gough confronts frontier violence and the murder of Tasmanian Aboriginal people in Hunting Ground (Haunted) 2016 and Hunting Ground (pastoral) 2016–17. Noting that ‘between the 1790s and the 1830s, over forty years, most Tasmanian Aboriginal people, perhaps 5000, mysteriously disappeared’, Gough scoured historical sources for contemporary accounts of killings and nailed the evidence onto trees and fenceposts, literally mapping the locations where the incidents occurred. The source of information and video documentation of each crime scene was shown in the gallery.
The casual disregard for life expressed by the perpetrators is horrifying. For example, James Bonwick (1817–1906) reported a conversation that took place near Hamilton in 1820 in which: ‘Mr Shoobridge’s father was out dining with a country settler, when a man came in, and called out, “Well, Master! I’ve shot three more black crows today,” meaning, Blacks.’
Gough also plots massacre sites on landscapes by colonial artists such as John Glover (1767–1849) and Joseph Lycett (1774–1828). Using time-lapse photography to create a video, she subverts their picturesque visions by adding, frame by frame, red crosses, bloodlike stains and confronting statistics. Once marked, each image is covered with soil, just as these ugly truths have been concealed and buried.
Missing Tasmanian Aboriginal people, the absence of their descendants and the disruption of language and culture are recurring themes in many of Gough’s artworks, including Luna riabi (song) 2019, a plaintive sound installation that drifted intermittently through the exhibition. Gough created the artwork by singing the lyrics of a Tasmanian Aboriginal song that had been transcribed and set to music by Mrs Maria Logan (1808–86), an Irish piano teacher, and her husband Charles (1804–64). George Augustus Robinson (1791–1866) mentioned the song in his journal on 22 October 1836: ‘Spent the evening at Logan’s in Macquarie Street. Mr[s] Logan set to music a song of the aborigines, POPELLER etc., the first ever attempted.’
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A number of Gough’s artworks refer to the forced removals and separations that happened to members of her own family. Crime Scene 2019 and Scene of the Crime 2019 investigate a shooting that occurred in 1825 in which Dalrymple Briggs (1808–64), Gough’s ancestor and Mannalargenna’s granddaughter, was shot by Dr Jacob Mountgarrett (1773–1828) when she was a twelve-year-old servant in his cottage at Lake River, Norfolk Plains. Damning eyewitness accounts recorded by a police magistrate in Launceston detailed that the drunk and belligerent Mountgarrett had shot the child and noted her distress and cry of ‘Murder!’ Presumably under duress, the girl contradicted the witness statements when interrogated, saying that her master had shot her accidentally while trying to shoot a possum.
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Many of the artworks included in Julie Gough: Tense Past interrogate historical collection items related to the Black War, the Black Line and George Augustus Robinson’s mission to ‘conciliate’ Tasmanian Aboriginal people. An iconic artefact from the TMAG collection is one of the pictorial boards designed by George Frankland (1800–38), Surveyor General of Van Diemen’s Land, titled Governor Arthur’s Proclamation to the Aborigines (1829–30). Numerous copies of these boards were hung on trees in a naïve attempt to communicate through figurative strip illustrations ideas of coexistence, equality under the law and the consequences of murder. Gough appropriates and re-presents the figures in several artworks – including The Promise v3 2019, and Impasse: Stolen Ground 2019 – to create narratives that reflect escalating violence, killings and stolen children.
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One of the most confronting artefacts in the exhibition was a map titled Military Operations Against the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, subtitled No.9 Field Plan of Movements of the Military, drafted by Frankland and published in London in September 1831. It reveals the strategic planning of the ‘Black Line’, which was implemented by the colonial government over six weeks in October and November 1830 to sweep lines of men across the midlands and corral Tasmanian Aboriginal people on the Tasman Peninsula. It also identifies key military personnel and positions, including Captain Vance Donaldson (1791–nd) of the 57th Regiment (West Middlesex) British Army who held the line between Lake Echo and Lake Sorrell on 12 October 1830. A mahogany campaign decanter box, once owned by Donaldson, has an unsettling presence in light of its association with the Black Line. While the military operation was deemed a failure and resulted in the capture of only two Tasmanian Aboriginal people, in her artwork We ran / I am 2007 Gough explores the terrifying impact that such a show of force must have had. Wearing loose calico pants similar to those that Tasmanian Aboriginal people were forced to wear in captivity, she documents herself running along sections of the Black Line.
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Another significant artefact on display in Julie Gough: Tense Past was one of the handwritten journals kept by Robinson as he travelled around lutruwita/Tasmania on the oft-called ‘Friendly Mission’. In an entry dated 6 August 1831, penned opposite Swan Island, Robinson recorded his duplicitous encounter with Mannalargenna, Gough’s ancestor:
This morning I developed my plans to the chief Mannalargenna 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 Kickerterpoller 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 … 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 ...
Only four years later, in 1835, Mannalargenna died in exile at Wybalenna on Flinders Island. That same year, the settlers living in the District of Bothwell presented Robinson with an engraved sterling silver presentation cup: ‘in testimony of their acknowledgement of the benefit this Colony has derived from the successful conciliation of the Aborigines of this Island effected by him’. The Bothwell Cup was produced by David Barclay (1804–84) and Joseph Forrester (1805–c1860) Scottish silversmiths, one an assigned convict. Considering that the cup symbolised unfinished business, Gough crafted an ornate lid for the cup from clay dug up from Bothwell, where much blood had been spilt. Insisting that the dispossession, violence, murder and the fate of lost and stolen Tasmanian Aboriginal children be acknowledged, Gough created a tiny but tense diorama using figures appropriated from Frankland’s pictorial boards. Titled Impasse: Stolen Ground 2019, a settler armed with a shotgun and an Aboriginal warrior holding a spear stand face to face, intent on killing each other, while behind them a European woman clutches an Aboriginal baby.
Disrupting traditions and conventions, Julie Gough: Tense Past was developed in the very heart of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Gough interrogated the archives, reinterpreted collection artefacts and, through evocative and powerful artworks, she revealed the impact of Tasmania’s violent history on her own family and confronted all Tasmanians with our colonial past. ▼
CREDITSJulie Gough: Tense Past was staged at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery from 7 June to 4 November 2019. The exhibition was curated by Dr Mary Knights, Senior Curator of Art, TMAG and presented by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Dark Lab and the 2019 Dark Mofo Festival, with generous support from the Australia Council of the Arts, Gandel Philanthropy, Godfrey-Hirst Carpets Pty Ltd, the University of Tasmania, Hobart City Council, the TMAG Foundation, the Pennicott Foundation and Geoff Hassall.
This arts feature appeared in Island 159 in 2020. Order a print issue here.
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