Aboriginality and Public Space

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Confronting amnesia: Aboriginality and public spaceCatherine De Lorenzo

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Confronting amnesia: Aboriginality and public space

CATHERINE DE LORENZO

For much of their history since 1788, non-Indigenous

Australians have virtually erased from their public art

practice any reference to a conflictual history of occupation.

Yet since the bicentennial of settler occupation of Australia

in 1988, artists, reconciliation groups and government

authorities, amongst others, have sought to address

intercultural issues in the public domain, by reference to

historical contexts and contemporary aspirations. After

providing a brief overview of recent cultural politics in

Australia, this paper examines three prominent public art

projects that address themes of occupation and

reconciliation. All three works, whilst radically different in

purpose, address issues that might be seen as constitutive of

contemporary Australian cultural debates. It is argued that

together they mark a shift in Australian public art practice

even though individually they proclaim starkly different

geneses and purposes.

And that is the job of the artists

the job of the writers

the job of the creative persons

and, of course, it should be the job of the

politicians

to get up there and say:

‘This is the true aspect.

This is not written propaganda.

This is how it is’.

From ‘Belonging Wiradjuri’, Kevin Gilbert.

(Gilbert and Williams 1996, 35)

Some years ago a study was conducted of the press

coverage of Aboriginal issues in the leading newspapers

in Melbourne and Sydney from 1910 to the nation’s

sesquicentenary on 26 January 1938 (Markus 1990, 2–5).

This survey showed that the Melbourne Argus only

occasionally featured Aboriginals (most especially

around the time of the infamous Conniston massacre in

1928), and the Sydney Morning Herald, the premier

newspaper in Sydney, carried no stories at all about

Indigenous Australians. For most Australians during

much of the twentieth century, Aboriginals were out of

sight and out of mind. The absence was not only in the

national press. Ken Inglis, whose study Sacred places

accounts for the changing typologies of war memorials

in the Australian landscape, has observed that,

‘Monuments missing from a landscape can be as

significant as those erected’ (Inglis 1998, 21). Until

recently there have been almost no monuments to

Aboriginals; and as Inglis notes, those that did exist

served either as reminders of Aboriginal ‘treachery’ at

resisting invasion, or represent a type of ‘faithful black

servant’. An example of the latter is the 1908 cairn near

the southern New South Wales town of Kameruka,

erected over the remains of ‘Doolin of the Kameruka

and Bembooka Tribe also known as Tommy the

Huntsman’ who died in 1875. In some instances – such

as Achille Simonetti’s 1889–1897 large figurative

fountain, the Governor Phillip Memorial, in the Royal

Botanic Gardens, Sydney – ethnographic images of

Aboriginals engaged in everyday tasks such as spear

fishing, were juxtaposed with symbolic figures of Greco-

Roman deities such as Neptune, to serve synecdochically

as an Australian embrace of ancient European Classical

traditions. Although the bedrock on which Sydney is

built has countless engravings and paintings from pre-

contact times – sites which have long been prized by

both Indigenous and settler communities (see Hinkson

2001; Byrne 1996) – a determined look around central

public spaces in any Australian city or country town will

show few public art works by settler Australians

acknowledging Aboriginal pre-contact, much less post-

settler existence. Nor are there any documented

accounts of ‘unofficial’ contemporary Indigenous visual

art works that explicitly expose the gaps in mainstream

public art – unless the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (see

below) were to be rebadged as a kind of installation

art work by default. This gap in public art practice

contrasts with an extensive literature on Indigenous

resistance to colonialism – expressed through oral

histories, autobiographies, poetry, drama – as well as a

shift in heritage policies that has resulted in the

recognition of sites of cross-cultural exchange (Hinkson

2002).

The markers of Indigenous presence and dispossession

that exist within the physical landscape are provided by

geographical naming. Even as far back as 1826, the first

minister of the Presbyterian Church in Australia and

Dr Catherine De Lorenzo is an art historian and Director of Postgraduate Students in the Faculty of the Built Environment, University of New South Wales,

Sydney. Her research on public art examines place and identity, her photographic research interconnects ethnography, the socio-cultural landscape, global

exchange and interdisciplinarity.

Visual Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2, October 2005

ISSN 1472–586X printed/ISSN 1472–5878 online/05/020105-19 # 2005 International Visual Sociology Association

DOI: 10.1080/14725860500243979

Downloaded At: 03:58 9 February 2011

later republican parliamentarian, the Scotsman John

Dunmore Lang (1799–1878), scoffed at the imposition

of British names upon the Australian landscape:

I hate your Goulburn Downs and Goulburn Plains,

And Goulburn River and the Goulburn Range,

And Mount Goulburn and Goulburn Vale!

One’s brains

Are turned with Goulburns! Vile scorbutic mange

For Immortality! Had I the reins

Of Government a fortnight, I would change

These Downing Street appellatives, and give

The country names that should deserve to live.

Lang preferred the Indigenous names:

I like the native names, as Parramatta,

And Illawarra, and Woolloomooloo;

Nandowra, Woogarora, Bulkamatta,

Tomah, Toongabbie, Mittagong, Meroo;…

In ‘Colonial nomenclature’ (Elliott and Mitchell 1970,

29), Lang turns a blind eye to the profusion of settler

nicknames – sometimes descriptive, often pejorative –

that testify to frequent inglorious colonial encounters.

According to Byrne (1996, 96), over time, the

Indigenous place names served as ‘symbols and emblems

of essential Australianness’; like artefacts (and unlike

people) they could be embraced for the distinctiveness

and deep ‘heritage’ they afforded the settler community.

Neither the scant visual typologies, nor the profuse

appropriation of Indigenous naming, adequately convey

the legacy of dispossession and ethnocide that has been

at the very centre of recent debates in Australian history

(Reynolds 1984, 1989; McKenna 1997; Windschuttle

2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2002; Broome 2001; Manne 2003;

Macintyre and Clark 2003. See also Clastres 1988 on

ethnocide). Acclaimed Aboriginal actor Ernie Dingo

expressed the pain of this systematic erasure in a short

untitled poem (Gilbert 1988, 29):

Aboriginal achievement

Is like the dark side of the moon,

For it is there

But so little is known.

This paper is restricted to an examination of three public

art projects developed over the last ten years. The first in

Sydney, the capital city of New South Wales; the second,

a recurrent installation work presented in remote and

urban locations, in Australia and overseas; and the third

in Canberra, the national capital. For each of the

projects, I consider the articulation of the politics of

place and the insights they provide on shifting debates in

Australia about reconciliation. Both are debates that go

to the heart of Australia’s cultural identity. I argue that

two of the projects used innovative strategies to enhance

public discourse about the art itself and the cultural

opportunities they envisaged. The third project, initiated

by a federal government and lacking strong art and/or

community input, appears designed to eclipse criticism

of government inertia. The discussion of this third

project will refer in some detail to two adjacent sites, one

a government initiative, the other an Aboriginal

initiative.

These projects cannot be understood properly without

some knowledge of shifting debates in Australia about

Aboriginal citizenship, land rights, self-determination

and reconciliation. I can only briefly touch upon these

issues here, but not to raise them would impoverish

discussion of the art works, limiting them to a formalist

reading. As the arguments unfold, additional criteria for

selecting and evaluating the remarkably varied case

studies will be given.

CULTURAL POLITICS IN AUSTRALIA

The prolonged history of settler Australian amnesia

regarding Aboriginal Australians was acutely observed

by anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner in 1968, when he

demonstrated what he called a ‘cult of forgetfulness

practised on a national scale’. Stanner concluded that

Australians ‘have been able for so long to disremember

the aborigines [sic] that we are now hard put to keep

them in mind even when we most want to do so’

(Stanner 1968, 25). 1968 was the year following a

referendum that recognized Aboriginals as citizens in

their own country, and thus eligible to vote. It also

coincided with the freedom marches through urban and

rural towns, which challenged de facto apartheid and

demanded equity before the law (Curthoys 2002). But

Stanner’s observations remained prescient for another

20 years, given the glacial pace with which settler

Australians responded to the implications of the

referendum, and the institutional reluctance to

relinquish the colonialist policy of Assimilation of

Indigenous Australians into settler society. Assimilation

had been introduced by the Commonwealth

Government in 1937 and was premised on an

assumption that ‘equity’ meant a kind of homogeneity

disproportionately pale in complexion (see Rowley

1972, 389–403). Inevitably, resistance, exemplified by

the freedom marches, grew. In the 1970s, land rights

marches became a frequent occurrence in capital cities

and country towns. They were accompanied by demands

for self-determination and the return of sacred and

culturally significant lands. The case for reform

106 C. De Lorenzo


quickened in the late 1980s when, in response to the

growing alarm over the disproportionate number of

Aboriginals dying in gaol, a Royal Commission into

Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was established in 1987

(Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

1991). This provoked front-page news on an almost daily

basis for the better part of two years, as all Australians

came to know of the personally and culturally ruinous

consequences of prolonged neglect in the provision of

basic services such as health, education, housing and jobs.

These revelations framed the way many Australians

came to view what Aboriginals called Survival Day,

26 January 1988, the bicentennial of white settlement.

In the 1990s, following a sustained period of land rights

demonstrations in the 1970s and 1980s, there were two

landmark High Court decisions. The eponymous Mabo

case of 3 June 1992, named after litigant Eddie Mabo

from Murray Island, or Mer, overruled the longstanding

assumption of pre-colonial ‘terra nullius’ (land

belonging to no one), opening the way for Aboriginal

land rights claims. The following year the Labor

government introduced the Native Title Act to recognize

and better manage Native Title claims. The second

landmark High Court decision was the Wik judgement

of 23 December 1996, which determined that Native

Title was not extinguished by pastoral leases (Stevenson

FIGURE 1. Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley,The Edge of the Trees, Sydney 1994. Allphotographs taken by the author.

Aboriginality and public space 107


1997). Rejecting an assumption of winner-takes-all in

claims over territories by pastoralists and Indigenous

communities, the Wik judgement was premised on a

fresh way of thinking about pastoral and native title co-

existence. After some years of very heated debate, the

conservative Howard government introduced a ‘10

point plan’ in order to limit the possibility of co-

existence and to assert the rights of Pastoral Leases over

Native Title (Stevenson 1997, 15–20). Furthermore,

1997 saw the handing down of the Report of the Royal

Commission into the Separation of Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families

(Australia). Entitled ‘Bringing them home’, the Report

essentially documented the devastating impact of

enforced government Assimilation policies from 1937

onwards, on the lives of what is now referred to as the

Stolen Generations of Aboriginal Australians (National

Inquiry 1997). Under this policy children of mixed

blood were taken from their parents in order to be

quickly assimilated into white society. Despite the

granting of citizenship status in 1967, many Aboriginal

children were still taken from their mothers in the early

1970s. ‘Bringing them home’ documented the ongoing

personal and cultural costs of this policy.

These histories of political activism, Royal

Commissions, High Court judgements and Acts of

Parliament signify a fundamental change in Australian

culture throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike the

powerful local and national sentiment that informed

thousands of war memorials around Australia, visual

and public responses to changes in Aboriginal-settler

relations had to address issues of cultural distinctiveness.

The few and largely unknown precedents of Aboriginal

themes in public art meant that artists and

commissioning agencies were free to invent new

typologies.

The three projects considered in this paper share an

engagement with Indigenous-settler themes but are

geographically and spatially distinctive. The Sydney-

based public artwork, ‘Edge of the Trees’ (1994), is

situated in the forecourt of new state government and

corporate offices on the site of the original Government

House in the early days of colonial settlement of Sydney.

The installation piece, ‘Sea of Hands’ (1997, ongoing) is

a temporary event that is presented nationally and

internationally in both designed parks and natural

settings. The federal government initiative in Canberra,

‘Reconciliation place’ (2002), is in the precinct known as

the Parliamentary Triangle, at the very heart of the

nation’s capital. They employ diverse visual and political

strategies to resist amnesia and express themes of

commemoration and struggle. They perhaps mark a new

maturity in Australia, and attempt to deal with a painful

part of history. These dark and repressed subjects that

gnaw at the national psyche are at last out in the open

and this in itself is a sign of enormous hope.

‘EDGE OF THE TREES’

Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley’s ‘Edge of the Trees’

(1994), comprises 28 columns of wood, corten steel and

sandstone, each roughly seven metres tall, some with

glass inserts revealing ash, oxides, feathers, hair, shells

and bones. Inscribed and applied on the surfaces of the

poles (Figure 1) are the names of First Fleeters sent from

Britain, and both the Aboriginal and Latin names for

botanical flora indigenous to the area.

The work has acquired a significant status in Sydney for

two reasons. First, it marked the first commissioned

public art piece to be made by an Indigenous (Foley)/

non-Indigenous (Laurence) team, a fact that says much

about social and public art cultures in a city boasting

multicultural tolerance. Second, it resulted from a very

clear and challenging brief by the curator of the Museum

of Sydney, outside of which it stands: the piece had to

respond to oral and written histories relating to the first

20 years of white occupation/settlement in Sydney, as

well as to the historical and contemporary meanings of

the site (Dysart 2000, 25–39). The site is contentious;

not only had over 40,000 years of continuous

occupation been effaced by the settlers arriving in 1788,

but it was also the location chosen by Governor Arthur

Phillip for the First Government House (1788–1846).

The Museum of Sydney project is one of the few sites in

Sydney to acknowledge settler-Aboriginal encounters

(Hinkson 2002, 73); ‘Edge of the Trees’ in particular is

the subject of numerous articles (Best 1997, 2000;

Emmett 1998; Salvestro 2002) as well as a handsome and

well-researched monograph containing, inter alia, a

useful bibliography on the history of the site (Dysart

2000).

Installed at the western edge of the north-facing

forecourt, the interstitial spaces are filled with the

quietly spoken words of the Eora people, audible to

those who enter the grove for a closer look at the visual

detail. In design terms, the work both defines a

boundary to the site alongside remnant nineteenth-

century row housing, and marks its presence on a pebbly

‘dirt’ precinct, in contradistinction to the hard paving of

the forecourt on which there is a partial footprint of the

former official residence. It is not surprising that this

sophisticated resolution of public art, social history and

108 C. De Lorenzo


urban design has won awards, including the Royal

Australian Institute of Architect’s Lloyd Rees Award for

Civic Design 1995. Yet for all its design panache and

typological innovation, it is, as Best has argued, an

immersive piece that ‘resists the Gestalt that makes

visual appropriation possible’ (2000, 87). The

conceptual audacity is complemented by subtle

resolution, with the result that ‘Edge of the Trees’ has

become so normalized it is hard to accept that it has not

been there for decades. It both marks a site and belongs

to it.

What can we learn from this piece ten years on? There

are two points I want to elaborate for this paper. One

concerns its genesis, the other its innovative form; both

of these can be seen to engage with an ethical

understanding of the public sphere.

Much of the innovative impulse of ‘Edge of the Trees’

stems from the imagination of curator Peter Emmett

who devised the brief, and from the synergy between the

key players – the curator, the artists and the design

architect (Richard Johnson) – who worked to elicit

meaning, delight, cohesion and provocation. It evolved

from the commitment of informed and imaginative

individuals who seized the opportunity to make a

difference. In Australia, where settlement history has

long been positioned within a framework of progressive

Enlightenment and only recently been challenged by

counter histories of occupation and resistance, a work

such as this was politically (and aesthetically)

courageous. Interestingly, ten years later, much of the

political edge in ‘Edge of the Trees’ has now softened

into an assumed baseline for other public art works

seeking to address similar issues and inter-racial

processes.

The brief for ‘Edge of the Trees’ invited artists to

consider the keywords ‘Place, Environment,

Aboriginality, Eora (the indigenous peoples of inner

Sydney), Contact, [and] Edge’ (Dysart 2000, 28). It

quickly assumed a symbolic role for reconciliation, not

only because of the interaction between the two artists,

but for the opportunity it afforded visitors to engage

with affective materials, sounds, words and forms, as

well as cultural and political concepts. Given the lack of

competition in the city centre, a work addressing

Indigenous and non-Indigenous encounters was enough

to enable the newly proclaimed ‘public icon’ (Kerr, cited

in Dysart 2000, 43) to carry a powerful political role. In

retrospect, ‘Edge of the Trees’ can be viewed as the first

of a series of public art projects in Australia to address

‘truth and reconciliation’ themes. Australia has many

local area reconciliation groups for Indigenous and non-

Indigenous residents; some of these have commissioned

public monuments to enable participants to deal with

tainted and difficult pasts and, hopefully, more

constructive futures. One particularly poignant

development has been the Myall Creek Massacre

Memorial (2001) in northern New South Wales, where

direct descendants of both settler murderers and the

Indigenous survivors commissioned a monument to

mark the site of the massacre of 10 June 1838 and

express their desire for productive personal and

community relationships from hereon (NSW

Reconciliation Council 2005). Such initiatives provide

an Antipodean counterpart to internationally acclaimed

projects such as Esther Shalev-Gerz and Jochen Gerz’s

interactive Monument Against Fascism (Hamburg-

Harburg, 1986–93), where residents were invited to sign

their names onto a lead-lined column 12m high by 1m

square in order to indelibly register their opposition to

fascism, before the column was slowly lowered into the

ground leaving space for reflection on the idea that ‘only

we ourselves … can rise up against injustice’ (translated

text from artist’s statement at the site).

The second point to be made about this work concerns

comparable commemorative typologies. Inglis (1998)

cites numerous examples of markers and monuments

that simply name the dead. The practice is widespread in

Australia, as elsewhere, whether the subject is as

perennial as war or as pandemic as HIV/AIDS. In the

Laurence/Foley work, naming is not specific and

comprehensive (as in Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s

Memorial in Washington DC). Instead it functions

synecdochically for the resilience of the Indigenous

people of Sydney, the powerless convicts, and the

always threatened local environment, as much as

it does for the early empirical scholarship on the local

Eora language and flora, and the more recent

sociocultural efforts at Indigenous/non-Indigenous

reconciliation. Naming stitches together past and

present; it weaves cultural differences into a complex

tapestry that speaks to all participants; it can revive the

past not for sentiment or guilt but as a vital catalyst for

change. The inscribed and literally sotto voce naming (via

embedded speakers) in ‘Edge’ quietly affirms that the

prolonged amnesia ultimately failed to obliterate

cultural memory. Indeed it suggests that simple and

determined efforts can change perceptions for new

generations.

By turning the site from what could have been an

ideological bloodbath – stemming from polarized views

of heroic nation-building on the one hand to illegal



occupation and dispossession on the other – into one

inviting critical reflection and new insights for

collaboration, the participants demonstrated a

commitment to an ethical art practice. The choice was

made to go beyond ideas of ‘best practice’ in new genre

public art, where place is understood as both palimpsest

and potential, and to tap into a barely articulated history

of faltering dialogue and longing for mutual

understanding. Through non-confrontational means it

opens a debate on values that reaches beyond the

specifics of the site. At an interpersonal level, one

imagines the participants engaged in Marcia Langton’s

concept of Aboriginality – ‘a field of intersubjectivity in

that it is remade over and over again in a process of

dialogue, of imagination, of representation and

interpretation’ (Langton 1993, 13). The result is an

innovative artwork that breaks through typological

conventions in order to give expression to this dialogic

process. Insofar as the results of this process are aired in

a public place, ‘Edge of the Trees’ invites its audience to

reflect on the implications of that dialogue – or lack of it

– in their own lives. ‘Edge of the Trees’ addresses an

Aristotelian idea of ‘good’: making use of the public

sphere to bring to the foreground ‘competing

counterpublics’ (Fraser 1992, 116) – in this case:

women, artists and Aboriginals (Cooper 1998, 30). It

gives voice to aspirations not normally recognized in the

social and aesthetic mores operating in the city centre.

FIGURE 2. Australians for Native Title andReconciliation (ANTaR), Sea of Hands, 1997 topresent.

110 C. De Lorenzo


‘SEA OF HANDS’

The second case study concerns ‘Sea of Hands’

(Figure 2), an installation project undertaken by

Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTaR)

since 1997. Two Sydney-based installations of ‘Sea of

Hands’ have been selected for analysis because of the

opportunity they provide for examining the nexus

between an activist project and carefully chosen places.

In ‘Sea of Hands’, thousands of two-dimensional, cut-

out plastic ‘hands’, each signed and attached to a wire

stick, are inserted into the ground for temporary events,

sometimes lasting only a day. Every hand in the piece

represents a supporter of Aboriginal and Torres Straits

Islander land rights. ANTaR, one of a number of

reconciliation groups in Australia with collaborative

Indigenous and non-Indigenous members, works for

land rights and social justice:

To generate in Australia a moral and legal

recognition of and respect for the distinctive

status of Indigenous Australians as First

Peoples. Recognition of Indigenous

Australians’ rights, which include self-

determination, their relationships to land and

the maintenance and growth of their cultures,

is essential to creating a just and fair society for

all Australians. (ANTaR 2005)

ANTaR uses ‘Sea of Hands’ to draw an analogy between

the massing together of a simple and effective symbol of

friendship and the cultural sea change that can occur

when the silent majority work together for equity and

justice. At its different venues, ANTaR often

commissions Aboriginal artists to devise an installation

theme and design.

‘Sea of Hands’ was launched with the installation of

70,000 hands at Parliament House, Canberra, on 12

October 1997 (ANTaR 2005). Since then the project has

acquired over two and a half million hands, lending

itself to simultaneous installations in multiple and

geographically distant locations. The author participated

FIGURE 3. ANTaR, Sea of Hands in Redfern Park, Sydney, 2002.



in several Sydney-based installations, including one at

the Sydney Botanic Gardens (1998) and two in the

inner-city suburb of Redfern (1998 and 2002).

This paper will focus on the Redfern Park installations.

In Australia, the name of the suburb Redfern is symbolic

of ‘Aboriginal Sydney’ (Anderson 1993a, 1993b; Burnley

and Routh 1985; Shaw 2000). Central to Aboriginal

Redfern and only a couple of minutes from Redfern

Park is the Block, the central gathering place for Sydney-

based Kooris (the term used by south-east Australian

Aboriginal peoples to refer to themselves). For nearly 90

years the Block has provided a refuge for rural

Aboriginal people looking for family and networks – via

the lightning-fast Koori ‘bush telegraph’ – and for

people harassed by the law. Its importance escalated

after 1973 when then Labor Prime Minister Gough

Whitlam handed the site to the Aboriginal Housing

Corporation (AHC) to repair and enhance existing

terraces into affordable housing and related amenities

for Aboriginals (Bellear 1976). Hailed as a milestone for

Aboriginal self-determination, the site has been

bedevilled by ineptitude and crime. In December 2004 it

was subsumed under the state government’s Redfern-

Waterloo Authority (Sydney Morning Herald, 29

November 2004) in an attempt to gentrify the suburb

and whittle away Aboriginal self-determination. Redfern

Park is the only significant verdant open space in the

suburb, and thus a place for public assembly. It acquired

new importance in December 1992 when (Labor) Prime

Minister Paul Keating delivered his Redfern Park

Speech, the first time an incumbent head of state

accepted responsibility on the part of settler Australians

for past atrocities:

We [non-Indigenous Australians] took the

traditional lands and smashed the traditional

way of life. We brought the diseases, the

FIGURE 4. View of central Land Axis, Canberra showing: (1) Australian War Memorial; (2) Commonwealth Place; (3) Reconciliation Place; (4) Old ParliamentHouse; (5) Parliament House; (6) High Court of Australia; (7) National Library of Australia; (8) Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Original photograph taken in March 2004and annotated by the author. Permission to use the image kindly granted by the National Capital Authority.

112 C. De Lorenzo


alcohol. We committed the murders. We took

the children from their mothers. We practiced

discrimination and exclusion.

It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And

our failure to imagine these things being done

to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to

make the most basic human response and enter

into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask

‘How would I feel if this were being done to

me?’

As a consequence, we failed to see that what we

were doing degraded all of us. (Keating 1992;

for a reflection on this see Macintyre and Clark

2003, Chapter 8).

Because Redfern brings together both the struggle for

Aboriginal self-determination and settler

acknowledgment of past atrocities, and because it is easy

for local Kooris to participate in events there, the staging

of ‘Sea of Hands’ in that locale carries heightened

impact.

The second, expanded, installation of ‘Sea of Hands’

(Figure 3) in Redfern Park in 2002, designed by Deborah

Lennis, was held to acknowledge the on-going

commitment of many Australians to the spirit of

ANTaR. The large circle of multicoloured hands in the

centre of Figure 3 represents the many people from

throughout Australia who support Aboriginal rights and

reconciliation; the bands of yellow and green (and blue

and white) represent non-Indigenous Australians; and

those of black, yellow and red represent Indigenous

Australians. Strictly speaking, ‘Sea of Hands’ is an action

piece, not an artwork. Yet its simple and powerful visual

presence, its versatility in being uprooted and replanted

in key sites around Australia – from city centres, to

beaches and the outback, including Uluru – and even

around the world, must surely be the envy of many a

public installation artist. Unlike ‘Edge of the Trees’, ‘Sea

of Hands’ always attracts large numbers of Aboriginal

people. The perky colourful hands, the keynote speakers

and the live Aboriginal country and western music

create a festive atmosphere, and give the event a vitality

often lacking in more measured and controlled formal

public artworks. At the 2002 installation, Pat Dodson,

the Aboriginal elder from Broome in Western Australia

and a key player in the reconciliation movement, spoke

of the success of the grass-roots spirit of the group,

which recognizes that reconciliation is a way of life that

fosters dignity, pride and support for Native Title land

claims. ‘Sea of Hands’ gives visual expression to a

people’s movement. Like many memorials, it happens

with and without the input of artists. Like any effective

installation artwork it leaves its mark in visual memory,

long after the hands have been packed away and

reinstalled elsewhere.

The power of ‘Sea of Hands’ stems not from compelling

aesthetics nor from its immense scale, but from the fact

that it represents the aspirations of so many Australians,

black and white, to change inequitable social mores. It

comes from a vast network of groups working for peace

and reconciliation. The sheer number of hands signed by

supporters suggests that the transformative collective

experience operating within ANTaR is endorsed by a

much larger community. ‘Sea of Hands’ shows that

many Australians are learning to engage in dialogue with

each other, to question their perceptions of history in

the face of alternative experiences by others, and to give

testimony to the satisfying transformations this has

engendered. In changing themselves they are helping to

change society.

An astute government, one imagines, would recognize

the groundswell of opinion in favour of critical and

open dialogue, and seek to build on it. The third

project to be considered, however, would suggest

otherwise.

RECONCILIATION PLACE

Reconciliation Place (2002), Canberra, is a project of the

federal government’s National Capital Authority (NCA)

and constitutes a linear zone parallel to the base of the

Parliamentary Triangle along the southern edge of Lake

Burley Griffin. The apex of this triangle is at New

Parliament House on Capital Hill, with the central axis,

often referred to as the Land Axis, stretching beyond the

baseline, north across Lake Burley Griffin to the

Australian War Memorial (Figure 4).

Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley Griffin, in their

award-winning 1911/12 urban designs for Canberra,

always envisioned the foreshore area of the

Parliamentary Triangle to be a gathering point for the

citizens who serve and are served by the Parliament

(Weirick 1989; Turnbull 1998). A vestige of this vision

might be detected in the Howard government’s

Commonwealth Place, opened in February 2002, and

designed to bring people to the foreshore by providing a

cafe and a museum annex. The grassed-over parabolic

U-form designed by Durbach Block Architects +Schaffer Barnsley Landscape Architects, resembles a

skateboard ramp with a split through the middle so as to

‘[respect] the powerful Land Axis’ linking Parliament

House to the War Memorial (NCA 2001, 2002). Because



FIGURE 6. Simon Kringas and Sharon Paynes, Reconciliation Place (view towards High Court of Australia),Canberra, 2002.

FIGURE 5. Simon Kringas and Sharon Paynes, Reconciliation Place (view towards National Library ofAustralia), Canberra, 2002.

114 C. De Lorenzo


FIGURE 7. A ‘sliver’ at Reconciliation Place, Canberra, 2002.



the concrete had not yet set on Commonwealth Place as

the graders moved in to prepare a tightly adjacent site

for Reconciliation Place, and because both projects were

initiated by the NCA, the two must in part be read in

tandem.

Combined with Commonwealth Place, Reconciliation

Place forms something of a T-shaped plan. It runs as a

cross-axis to the central north-south Land Axis

reaffirmed by Commonwealth Place: from the neo-neo-

classical National Library of Australia (Figure 5) on the

west to the sculpturally Brutalist High Court of Australia

(Figure 6) on the east – the very place in which the Mabo

and Wik judgements on Aboriginal rights and land

claims were handed down.

Within a western framework, the pedestrian link from

the library to the law courts is one rich with artistic and

cultural potential. The winning entry, designed by a

‘youth team’ comprising an architect (Simon Kringas),

an Indigenous representative (Sharon Paynes), an

exhibition design consultant (Alan Vogt) and three

architectural assistants, comprises a paved corridor with

sculptural elements referred to as ‘slivers’, a grassed

central mound ‘housing a ‘‘lip-shaped podium’’ seven

metres deep and 45.6 metres wide ‘‘along its back’’, and

a lawn area 85 metres x 114 metres’ (NCA 2001).1 The

slivers, intended to ‘offer a robust opportunity for

community participation … over time’ (NCA 2001), are

worth examining in some detail before stepping back to

consider the impact of the project as a whole.

According to an Australian Government website (http://

www.nationalcapital.gov.au/enhancing/

reconciliation_place/), Sliver 1 features a boy in a

bungalow, Sliver 2 is inspired by the landscape from

central Australia, Sliver 3 highlights ‘strength, service

and sacrifice’ commemorating Indigenous achievement

in sports and the defence services (Figure 7), Sliver 4

announces ‘Ngunna yerrabi yanggu’ [‘(you may) walk

on this country now’] a welcome of the traditional

Ngunnawal owners of the Canberra region, Sliver 5

celebrates Aboriginal leadership focusing on two

Aboriginal men, Sliver 6 acknowledges the 1967

citizenship Referendum, and Sliver 7 incorporates

extracts from seminal legal cases on land rights. The

actual order of installation varied slightly2 but overall

the images were chosen to demonstrate equality, justice

and contentment.

Images of pride and contentment tell one story, the facts

another. After World War II, the demobbed soldiers

(Sliver 3) lost their status as wage-earning mates of the

white men and returned to a society intolerant of

cultural distinctiveness. The children in both Slivers 1

and 3 were those who were posed by photographers at

the institutions housing the ‘Stolen Generations’.

Documented histories (e.g. Nungas and others 1988),

which demonstrated a sense of betrayal during the

decades that elapsed between the taking of the images

and their use in the slivers, were ignored. As a result, the

government’s own website noted that the sliver

‘Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

FIGURE 8. Central mound Reconciliation Place, Canberra, 2002. Looking south from the central axis in Commonwealth Place, all that can be seen ofParliament House is the flagpole.

116 C. De Lorenzo


children from their families’ (Sliver 1) was not installed,

‘following concern of the National Sorry Day

Committee’ on the extent of consultation with

Indigenous people who had been removed from their

families as children’ (NCAd).3

The failure in this project to match theory with practice

can be attributed to the process of realization. It did not

need a media release from two government ministers4 to

confirm that the ‘Reconciliation Place Steering

Committee’ approved the designs (see http://

www.ministers.dotars.gov.au/wt/releases/2003/march/

WT22_2003.htm): they reek of bureaucratization. The

themes for the slivers and the visual and textual

information on them had to be approved by both

Houses of Parliament (Ware 2001). At the time these

decisions were made there was only one Indigenous

elected Member of Parliament. As the then ANTaR

National President, Phil Glendenning, noted:

‘Indigenous people must be equal partners in defining

the agenda of reconciliation … to leave Indigenous

people out of the agenda is a recipe for disaster’ (ANTaR

2001). This process is a very long way from the stated

goal offering ‘robust opportunity for community

participation … over time’. Far from practising what it

preached, the ‘Reconciliation’ project provoked a protest

march in December 2001 at Reconciliation Place

organized by Link Up (NSW)5 and the National Sorry

Day Committee to protest at the ‘sanitised version of the

experiences of stolen generations children’ (ANTaR

2001).

The oversights in the detail of the slivers can be seen as

symptomatic of the project as a whole. Upon

completion of the first stage of Reconciliation Place in

mid 2002, a flattened grassed mound emerged as the

fulcrum of the piece. Described by the winning team as

‘a contemplative space … outward looking’ (see http://

www.nationalcapital.gov.au/competitions/recplace/

win_ds.htm), the base of the mound carries an

inscription bearing witness to the intentions of the

Government at the time of its opening on 22 July 2002:

‘Reconciliation Place/ A place which recognizes the

importance of understanding the shared history of

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and which

reaffirms our commitment to the cause of reconciliation

as an important national priority’.

This is an intriguing statement; it appears to

acknowledge a paradigm shift in Australian

historiography that incorporates Aboriginal perspectives

into mainstream history whilst coming from a

government that regards new Australian histories,

incorporating the oral histories of Aboriginals, as having

exaggerated white guilt. The term the government uses

to refer to a critical reading of Australian race relations is

‘black armband view of history’, a phrase borrowed

from historian Geoffrey Blainey (McKenna 1997). This

is not the place to discuss this or related controversies,

such as Keith Windschuttle’s excoriating condemnation

of much recent Australian history, where he claims that

valid archival-based settler histories have been unfairly

displaced by unreliable Indigenous oral histories

(Windschuttle 1996, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2002 and

responses by Broome 2001; Reynolds 2001; Manne 2003;

Macintyre 2003). Suffice to say that, given its sympathy

to the reactionary criticism of revisionist histories, the

idea of reconciliation cannot carry the same meaning for

the Liberal Howard government as it did for the

previous Labor Keating one. The grass-roots enthusiasm

of the earlier case study, ‘Sea of Hands’, appears to have

been traded for a top-down determination in a manner

that bears all the hallmarks of a passionless sense of civic

duty. The opportunity to seize the moment provided by

ANTaR’s activities, and imaginatively respond to the

peoples’ aspirations to bring about a fairer and more just

society was missed.

What is most puzzling about Reconciliation Place is that

this inscribed mound completely destroys the axial

concept of the recently installed Commonwealth Place, a

project that appears from the designs to have been

acknowledged by the winning team for Reconciliation

Place, but evidently was not fully understood. Although

in choosing their winner the jury stipulated that the

mound be no less than 100m diameter and sufficiently

low so as not to obliterate a view of the lake from the

steps of Old Parliament House (NCA 2001), the

completed project prevents viewers at the water’s edge

from seeing anything of either Old Parliament House or

the more distant (new) Parliament House. As Figure 8

shows, near the point of intersection between the

buildings at Commonwealth Place and Reconciliation

Place, the mound obliterates all but the very tip of the

gigantic and distinctive flagpole atop Parliament House.

Although one eminent landscape architect has claimed

that ‘both are design achievements of which the nation

can be proud’ (Vernon 2002a, 90), I believe the evidence

shows that the sociocultural and design intelligence

embedded in Commonwealth Place was cancelled by

Reconciliation Place.

To add to its controversy, Reconciliation Place is seen by

Aboriginals as a desecration of part of what was once a

sacred site for Ngunnawal women. Consequently, most

Aboriginal people want nothing to do with



FIGURE 9. Place Opened, Koori Mail, 7 August 2002. Permission to reproduce kindly granted by Koori Mail.

118 C. De Lorenzo


FIGURE 10. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy outside Old Parliament House, Canberra, 2003.

FIGURE 11. Office at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra, 2003.



Reconciliation Place (Indigenous Solidarity Action

Network 2001), especially since the Indigenous person

who sought to install an Aboriginal flag on the mound

was arrested and charged.6 In one stroke, the ill-

conceived scheme thwarted the design concept of

Commonwealth Place and alienated Aboriginal people

(Figure 9).

Indeed, another professor of landscape architecture has

called for the meaningless and misplaced mound to be

removed, so as to restore the urban design integrity of

Commonwealth Place (and something of the original

Griffin plan for Canberra), with manifestly no loss to the

Aboriginal community (James Weirick, panellist in a

symposium on Monumentality, held in Sydney

November 2002). Even the winning entrants’ design

statement acknowledged the arbitrary selection of the

site when they claimed that the project would ‘provide a

framework – a potent structural, spatial and experiential

environment, with the potential to receive meaning over

time’ (my italics) (Reconciliation Place 2001). The low-

lying minimalist project is a curious kind of anti-

monument: chameleon-like, it can be used to showcase a

notion of reconciliation – albeit drained of meaning and

rejected by the very people it purports to acknowledge –

or it can disappear from view and from consciousness.

Ironically, despite that fact that its (low) height spoils

the integrity of sections of the Land Axis, the author has

been astonished at the number of people who have been

to Canberra since it was installed, and have not noticed

it. Virtually invisible, the curious inversion of an open

space into a non-site has effectively silenced the very

kinds of public debates that one imagines the Griffins –

and many contemporary Australians – would have

welcomed.

I introduced Reconciliation Place through its

relationship Commonwealth Place to its immediate

north. Similarly, a clearer understanding of

Reconciliation Place can be gained by comparison with

another site a hundred or so metres to the south. Here,

in full view from the mound, sits the richly symbolic site

of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (Robinson 1994;

Vernon 2002b). The Tent Embassy was first erected on

Australia Day (26 January) 1972 outside what was then

Parliament House (now Old Parliament House and the

site of the National Portrait Gallery). The Tent Embassy

was revived from 1992 to stand for the struggle for

freedom, independence, justice and peace and above all

for Aboriginal sovereignty (Indigenous Solidarity Action

Network 2001). As Figure 10 shows, unlike the

abandoned Reconciliation Place, the quietly active Tent

Embassy is a small campsite comprising a cluster of

sheds and humpies (shelters) that transform the

manicured lawns into a mini Aboriginal settlement,

redolent of the makeshift settlements on the outskirts of

country towns (Budden 2002; Dow 2000).

The approaching visitor first smells the smoking gum

leaves before reaching the friendly campsite. Indeed,

when the author was conducting research there in

February 2003, those manning the site urged her to

bring to a wider public both the history and struggles of

the Tent Embassy, and the ironies of the juxtaposition

with Reconciliation Place. They even likened the

intrusion of a politically correct Reconciliation Place

with the then-impending invasion of Iraq by the

Coalition of the Willing: in their judgement, neither

project had any business being there. Nowadays, when

an event is held with Aboriginal people in the south-east

of Australia, Aboriginals welcome people to their land

and, where feasible, hold a smoking ceremony (of gum

leaves) to cleanse the site and the hearts of the

participants. When the author was conducting her

research, the people at the site performed a smoking

ceremony to, as it were, bless her global dissemination of

the issues.

Illegal and undesigned, the Tent Embassy has been

regarded as an eyesore (Figure 11) and an

embarrassment by most governments. In the past 12

months the various sheds have been fire-bombed in an

attempt to frighten the protestors away (reported in The

Guardian, 22 September 2004). Its very presence exposes

the conformity of the bureaucratic context in which its

sits. A gentle and colourful oasis within a spacious and

reserved setting, the Tent Embassy functions as a

symbolic refusal to relinquish the struggle for

sovereignty. It both passively resists neo-colonialist

values, and actively maintains the rage against past

injustices.

CONCLUSION

In summary, then, a few points can be made. ‘Edge of

the Trees’ in the Sydney central business district is

considered by the mainstream art and design

community to be one of the more successful public art

pieces, as measured by visits to the site and general

acclaim (Best 2000, 87–88). Its success stems from the

serious and creative ways in which it incorporates

understandings of place and intercultural relationships

over time. The layered and coherent interpretations of

the open site set a benchmark for historical and design

coherence unmatched by many subsequent inner city

public art developments. In devising a carefully scaled

120 C. De Lorenzo


response to the historically significant site, the artists

catalysed fresh thinking about public art and

contemporary Australian values.

Reconciliation Place is a highly designed project within a

highly designed open space. Had the brief required an

engagement with the ancient and contemporary

meanings of the place, as many theorists of new genre

public art have long advocated (Lacy 1995), the project

might have revealed interesting and shared stories of the

site, from ancient times, to the Griffins, and beyond.

Had the NCA encouraged imaginings beyond the

archaeology of the site, they might have elicited a project

that explored the nation’s collective memory so that

‘when we recognise what we have in common we will see

the things which must be done – the practical things’

(Keating 1992). As it is, however, the over-designed

‘slivers’ desperately need the kind of imaginative insight

good artists can inject into the public domain. If its

purpose was to eclipse the notoriety of its nemesis – the

nearby Aboriginal Tent Embassy – it failed. The Tent

Embassy continues to cheerfully disturb the status quo

as it invites people to imagine a transformed society far

removed from the anodyne rhetoric of its neighbour. It

blithely disregards the formality of the tree-lined lawns

as it invites cultural exchange and ‘[activates] its wider

landscape as a dynamic medium of protest’ (Vernon

2002b). To return to the poem quoted in part at the

outset, Kevin Gilbert articulates the coherence and

ethical urgency of art and political engagement (Gilbert

and Williams 1996, 35–36):

As a poet I’d just like to read you something

and remind you, too,

that today we have Aboriginal artists

sitting over at the Embassy

the Aboriginal Tent Embassy

outside the old Parliament

talking about Aboriginal culture being eroded

talking about Aboriginal children dying

talking about genocide

that is being practiced now

by the denial of basic human services

such as clean drinking water

such as adequate medication

such as shelter.

We are not so interested in the word ‘ethnic’.

That’s not where it’s at.

We are not peasants.

We want our children to live.

We want our children to be able to survive

as Aboriginal People.

The ‘Sea of Hands’ straddles all these strategies. It has

both a deliberate visual component as well as a

politically activist one. It evokes memories of stencilled

hands painted on ancient caves, as much as it shows the

hands that are willing to rise up and be counted. It

colonizes available meaningful spaces and seeks to both

transform them and the hearts of the participants. It

gives visual expression to a people’s movement and

demonstrates that change is possible. Evidently, there

are many people who have engaged in dialogue about

change in their own lives and the evidence of this change

of heart is strangely compelling.

Together, through very diverse social and aesthetic

programmes, these case studies suggest that Australian

public spaces are no longer blighted by Stanner’s ‘cult of

forgetfulness’. In 1984 Henry Reynolds said of

Australian historiography: ‘Slowly, unevenly, often with

difficulty, white Australians are incorporating the black

experience into their image of the national past’

(Reynolds 1984, 15). Over 20 years later, this might now

be said of art and other activities in Australian public

spaces. Reconciliation is tough and confronting and no

easier for individuals than governments to effect. But at

least some efforts to address race relations in the public

domain have been started, and that is a major historical

and ethical breakthrough.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 3rd

Savannah Symposium: Commemoration and the City,

February 2003. The author would like to also thank Dr

Deborah van der Plaat, Elisabeth Burke, Len De Lorenzo

and the two referees for their critical readings of the

paper.

NOTES

[1] As will be noted below, the width of the central mound, as

stated on the government’s NCA website, appears to be at

variance from the jury concern that the diameter not be

‘reduced to less than 100 metres’ (NCA 2001).

[2] A Koori Mail report of 7 August 2002 suggests the first

four slivers were numbers 3, 4, 6 and 7.

[3] The statement (tartily) adds that three government

organizations had each supplied ‘$25 000 to the National

Sorry Day Committee to undertake national consulta-

tion’.

[4] The Hon Wilson Tuckey MP, Minister for Regional

Services, Territorities and Local Government, and Phillip

Ruddock, Minister for Immigration, Multicultural and

Indigenous Affairs, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister

for Reconciliation.



[5] An organization for linking adopted Indigenous children

with their biological families.

[6] This information was provided by people at the

Aboriginal Tent Embassy, February 2003.

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Documents

Aboriginality and Public Space