The Royal
Botanic Gardens, set in thirty luxuriant hectares on the
shores of Sydney Harbours Farm Cove, is the main
centre for enquiry and information relating to the study
of botany and horticulture in the state of New South
Wales. It is also promoted as a cultural and historical
site of some significance. This is appropriate, given
that this is the place where seven months after the First
Fleet sailed into the Aboriginal Cadigals Warrang
(Sydney Cove) in 1788, horticultural and botanical
activity, in the European sense, started. Nine acres
of land at the newly named Farm Cove were cleared to
establish a government farm. The area was ultimately
found to be unsuitable for cultivation with its poor soil
and lack of a reliable water supply. Unlike the
Aboriginal inhabitants who had enjoyed and used the area
effectively for food gathering prior to European
incursion, the first colonial farmers waged a constant
battle against the elements, inappropriately prepared and
hindered by their inability to comprehend a
hostile ecological frontier. The site of the
first farm is maintained by the Gardens as a historical
feature.
The First Farm Display, like every re-presentation of
an historic site, draws on the cultural assumptions and
resources of the institution that creates it. Decisions
are made to emphasise some elements and to downplay
others inevitably to assert some truths and to
ignore others.
In 1996 when I first explored the First Farm Display
as a potential site for an installation I studied the
extant visitor information signboards. I noted the
absence of any references to the political milieu,
inextricably caught up in the machinations of the British
Empire, which had established the foundations of the
Gardens. Instead I discovered descriptions of how Settler
endeavour had begun to adapt and transform the
environment through the use of agricultural tools. Texts
and images alongside the manicured vegetable-patches and
mini-orchards also detailed the seeds and plants
carefully transported by the First-Fleeters from foreign
climes. The descriptions, in keeping with the
Gardens conventions which ignored Aboriginal
languages featured the formal Linnaean
nomenclature. This was a legacy of the empirical approach
to nature developed a short time before James Cook and
Joseph Banks set sail in the Endeavour in 1768. In the
Gardens I even came upon an illustrated panel
commemorating the last resting place of the
Scottish Martyr Joseph Gerrald, leading
member of the British Reform Movement, tried for sedition
in 1794 and sentenced to fourteen years transportation to
New South Wales.
The Gardens myopic and nostalgic views of the
sites history became the catalyst for Ground
Zero, the installation I presented in Australian
Perspecta 1997: Between Art and Nature. The work was
located, adjacent to the First Farm Display, in the Palm
House. This structure is believed to be the oldest
surviving glasshouse in NSW, erected in 1876. It was
built to display a variety of exotic plants which could
not survive outdoors in Sydney, but currently functions
as an education centre and a venue for the
display of flower paintings and related craftwork.
Ground Zero attempted to provide a context for
the examination of historical amnesia. It functioned as a
temporary museum, referencing that most effective of
frontier agricultural tools, the firearm. In addition,
the installation featured texts gleaned from Europeans
on the ground in 1788. These texts evoked a
more accurate picture of the period directly after
landfall. This is an account by William Bradley, First
Lieutenant on HMS Sirius: An officer and a party of
men were sent from the Sirius to clear a way to a run of
water on the southern side of the bay; the natives were
well pleased with our people until they began
clearing the ground, at which they were displeased and
wanted them to be gone.
The Swelter project followed on from Ground
Zero and was also an extension of my curatorial
initiatives in other heritage sites in Sydney,
particularly the Artists in the House! program for
the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales. This
earlier exhibition featured the work of fourteen artists
over a twelve month period, working in Sydneys
Elizabeth Bay House. It was presented as a series of
interventions examining the presentation of
the house-as-museum. The project also dealt with the
Trusts curatorial interpretation of the history of
its original residents during the 1830s, the
family-members of Alexander Macleay, Colonial Secretary.
Swelter comprised eight, month-long
site-specific installations at the Palm House, and sought
to focus on the socio-historical background and spatial
qualities of the location and its surroundings. The works
were intended to respectfully disturb conventional
perceptions, and to invite a re-appraisal of the notions
of both the botanic garden and the
historic site.
Artists were accorded free rein, with no curatorial
constraints other than to keep to the preservation
guidelines set down by the Royal Botanic Gardens and
Domain Trust. These considerations focused on maintaining
the integrity of the structural elements of the Palm
House as well as the surrounding vegetation. The works
that emerged were innovative and provocative (and indeed
seldom respectful of convention). Principal themes
revolved around notions of home, alienation and the
uncanny.
The first installation set the tone. Jackie
Dunns untitled work offered the Palm House to the
public with its floor deeply covered with straw into
which small hollows lined with blankets had been burrowed
shelters eked out of a barren environment.
Attempts at finding a secure home within the house of
glass were frustrated at the outset by the transparency
of the structure. Rough wooden barriers criss-crossed the
windowpanes as if those could prevent the outside
from becoming inside. Two army tents hung inverted
from the steel roof-trusses. With their voids exposed,
they became becalmed keels; the right-way-up
instantly became the way down-under.
Glasshouses, even though created in the name of
Science, were most often used in the 19th Century as
spectacular showplaces for the exotic and foreign
indeed for displaced things: for plants that did not
belong, that were away from home. (Jackie Dunn)
This was followed by Anne Grahams Violet
Glasshouse, an attempt to seek refuge in the
gentility of an archetypal British glasshouse. Barely
germinated blue-toned violets and pansies proliferated
around orange plastic pools containing gurgling
fountains. These resembled bell-shaped life rafts - and
they were waterlogged to the brim. The almost soporific
calm was syncopated on either side of the Palm House by
ensembles of blue folding chairs and milk-crate tables.
Blue, plastic curtains did little to temper the
unexpected insertion of an Australian vernacular. Bottles
of water, botanic reference books on the tabletops and
transparencies of moonscapes pasted to windowpanes
completed the invitation to sit and rest awhile.
Glasshouses have a magical quality. They are also
containers of worlds within worlds. Glasshouses can
provide an exotic environment in a cold, inhospitable
place or the smell of home in foreign places.
(Anne Graham)
Tom Arthurs Washingtons Palms
defied the natural order of things. The installation was
viewed through the glass of the locked Palm House door.
One could scarcely hope to be able to describe all the
elements of the work, or ascribe meaning to them here.
Where would this surreal journey begin? With the
taxidermied dog, its human skull devoid of a cranium,
exposing the petfood-filled cavity? Or for that matter,
with the stuffed dogs feline counterpart, upright
on its hind legs, transfixed, clawing at a mutilated
portrait and the dog/man with the megaphone.
Arthurs work paid homage to the mutability of
language and to the beauty of its associative powers.
The words Palm House reminded me of a
Currier and Ives print of George Washington dressed in
Masonic Regalia, his palms bared to the fore. There is a
species of palm which also bears his name (Washingtonia
robusta); perhaps that is the connection. (Tom
Arthur)
On entering Debra Phillips installation you were
transported into the vast expanse of Lake George in the
form of a huge photographic print leaning against the
back wall of the Palm House. It resonated with the
particular uncanny of that inhospitable, yet beautiful,
place outside Canberra. There was no invitation to ground
oneself just a sense of melancholy. The marble
feet of the sculptures Discobolus and Summer
resting on the Palm House floor had literally been
displaced, removed by the artist from the Gardens
sculpture graveyard. Poster-sized images of
two types of shoe buckle worn by Captain James Cook were
stacked on the floor. The public was invited to take some
of these with them.
The attrition of statues has come from erosion and
corrosion, from damage and vandalism and changes in
public attitude. Many have long since been removed to
languish in the graveyard, while still others
have been dismembered or dispersed. (Edward Wilson,
Gardens historian, cited by Debra Phillips)
Martin Sims Frequency alluded to the
supercharged domains of satellite, radio and
television transmissions. From this virtual hothouse
atmosphere of electronic particles, dense configurations
of general and special purpose antennas hung down from
the trusses of the Palm House a hovering,
threatening cloud of low flying backyard battle-stars. An
incessant barrage of electronic noise filled the space,
seeping through window-frames, startling passers-by with
the intermittently recognisable cadences of arcade
warfare. This was familiar territory, but not local
rather, global. The sounds were recorded in video
game parlours in Tokyo, Kobe and Nagasaki.
Electro-magnetic fields finally have us colonised.
... our vision is actually determined by our weight
and oriented by the pull of earths gravity, by the
classic distinction between zenith and nadir. (Paul
Virilio cited by Martin Sims)
Leaven, Nigel Helyers installation,
stunk. The unmistakable odour of active yeast hit you on
entering the Palm House. Depending on the direction of
the wind as you walked nearby, you could be forgiven for
thinking that it may be a particular plant species
special ability to so violently offend. Helyer had
transformed the glasshouse into an incubator. Nurturing
and proliferation were his botanic cues. Sitting on
metal-clad trestle tables, huge pots or vats were unable
to contain their swelling, crusty tsunamis of sourdough. Leaven
tread a fine line between the celebration of our staff of
life or daily bread and the horror of uncontrolled
microbiological life forms.
Seeds, like cooking receipts are designed to
travel, designed to take hold. In a not too dissimilar
manner, human culture is equipped with the capacity and
the desire to take purchase on new terrain, to co-mingle
(either peacefully, or with violence). (Nigel Helyer)
Joan Grounds and Sherre Delys collaborative
installation Familiceae Obligatum opened just
prior to the start of the holiday season. This work was a
pastiche evoking memories of family gatherings,
particularly the traditional Christmas
dinner. An inverted, appropriately frosted fir-tree hung
from a Palm House roof-truss, presiding over these
dysfunctional, yet somehow convivial family groupings of
potted botanic species. Empty containers indicated that
participants were yet to arrive. Concoctions of
blood-and-bone festered in wineglasses. The Christmas
turkey was mocked up from compounded horse-manure and the
entire flyblown conglomeration was safely ensconced
behind steel-mesh fencing. A hilarious Queens
Christmas Message and other musical fare completed
these iconoclastic festivities.
Surprisingly, after beginning with gusto the initial
enthusiasm expressed by the Royal Botanic Gardens Trust
for the Swelter project soon diminished. Opening
hours supervision of the Palm House, the responsibility
of the Friends of the Gardens committee, ceased as
its members found the challenge of interpreting the works
for the public overwhelming. Chief Executive and Director
of the Trust, Frank Howarth, adopted a low profile
regarding Swelter, later stating that the
project was responsible for considerable and lively
debate and discussion among Gardens stakeholders
and regular visitors, in particular the Friends of the
Gardens who struggled with the role and relevance of the
project to the Gardens. He did concede, however,
that Swelter was successful in encouraging the
visitation of a new audience to the Gardens whose
interests lie more with the visual arts and crafts...
this provided the gardens with the opportunity to
interpret its role within the community and promote its
core business plants to a new
audience.
Was the project ultimately to be assessed in terms of
its effectiveness as a marketing tool? The Trusts
rationale was convenient, if somewhat idealistic, and
certainly at odds with the intentions of the project
which were to question the rhetoric of the historic site
as presented for public consumption.
At the time of writing theres an exhibition
titled The State of the Waratah in the Palm House.
The Waratah is the floral emblem of New South Wales and
visitors to the show are urged by the signboard to
be inspired by early prints and drawings of Waratahs and
eye-catching contemporary art, including photographs by
Max Dupain (circa 1967 83), ceramics, paintings
and glassware. The tired old nostalgic pitch to the
public is evident again and the Palm House has returned
to its former incarnation.
But something is different. Something has changed.
Gone are most of the original First Farm signboards. The
display is now called Cadi Jam Ora First
Encounters. The text panels now ask questions such
as, Who were the first Europeans to settle in
Australia? The Military seems to have been
neglected, but we are told that seven hundred colonists
were convicts; four of them black (no gender given); one
hundred and eighty-eight were women; and there were
twelve nationalities present. Another question: How
did the Aboriginal people react to the invaders?
No direct answer is given, but there is the
acknowledgment that within less than a year
almost two-thirds of the Cadigal had been killed by
smallpox, while those that remained were driven inland,
far away from their ancestral land
Opposite the neat rows of cabbages, broad beans and
carrots there are now informally landscaped clumps of
indigenous plants those used by the Cadigal people
before invasion. Text panels provide not only common and
Linnaean nomenclature, but the Cadigal language has been
included as well (if only in a limited manner). Where the
indigenous name has not been determined, this has been
acknowledged.
Despite all these positive changes the First
Encounters Display still has the appearance of a
germinating theme-park. The paperbark humpy tied together
with bailing wire and the discarded seashells next to its
hearth just dont sit right. The
Gardens red sightseeing choo-choo train
still motors past the Palm House every fifteen minutes,
squawking its potted history, and nostalgic exhibitions
like State of the Waratah still draw the crowds.
As well they might.
But I do feel, that projects like Ground Zero
and Swelter, despite their disapproving or
indifferent reception, have in some small way managed to
respectfully nudge things on a little. Apart
from the Scottish Martyr, Joseph Gerrard that is
hes still there, somewhere under the Banksias.
Michael Goldberg
2000
© The artists and
Photo: Jaime Plaza &
Michael Goldberg.
|