2006
Traces of After action for 2pm Sunday 6 July 1835: two off-set A1 posters; 30-second looped dvd; Lambda print; and, traces of Action for 7pm Saturday 3 December 1892: stack of Die Tageszeitung newspapers; one page of Die Tageszeitung newspaper pinned to wall with advertisement; pencil wall drawing.
Exh.: Plattform, Berlin, 26-31 October 2006.
The exhibition Traces towards four Coranderrk drawings in a Berlin store-room brought together traces from two related actions, undertaken in Melbourne and Berlin in 2005 and 2006.
The first of these actions, Action for 2pm Sunday 6 July 1835, was undertaken in Melbourne in November 2005. 1,000 pairs of posters were pasted around the streets of Melbourne on a nightly basis for ten nights. The posters show William Buckley, the convict from Macclesfield, England, who in 1802 escaped from the British prison at Sorrento, near where Melbourne stands today. Buckley was received by a local Aboriginal community, the Wathaurung people, and lived with this community for three decades, the most famous and intensive story of European assimilation to an Aboriginal culture in Australian history. The work centers on 6 July 1835, when Buckley rejoined white society, arriving with several Wathaurung men at a camp site at Indented Head established by the entrepreneurial pioneer John Batman, the man generally regarded as the founder of Melbourne. The postering project was conceived as a meditation on this meeting, a moment of peculiar political significance and potential, which was also a popular subject for 19th century image-making. The action was undertaken in a nocturnal space, a space connected to the work’s function as a kind of memorial.
The second action Action for 7pm Saturday 3 December 1892, was undertaken in Berlin. Advertisements were placed in the Tageszeitung, in Berlin, and The Age, Melbourne’s major daily newspaper, and appeared simultaneously on Thursday 26 October. The advertisement centres on the meeting in 1892 between the Berlin collector and ethnographer, Arthur Baessler, and the Aboriginal political leader, activist, and artist William Barak. A Wurundjeri man, Barak grew up in the area now occupied by Melbourne, and as a boy he famously witnessed the arrival of John Batman and Batman’s attempt to expropriate Aboriginal territory. By the 1890s, Barak and his community had been driven off their lands and Barak was living at Coranderrk, an Aboriginal reserve not far from Melbourne. It was here that Baessler met Barak, an event recorded vividly and enthusiastically in Baessler’s diaries. Baessler recorded a fragment of Barak’s autobiography, including repeated references to William Buckley and Buckley’s attempts to counsel indigenous people on European norms after he had rejoined white society. Baessler photographed Barak in several different portraits. He also bought four drawings by Barak, who had become a famous artist, recording Wurundjeri histories and culture in watercolour and pencil. These four drawings are held in the collection of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin-Dahlem, where Nicholson viewed the drawings in one of the Museum’s store-rooms in the period leading up to the project
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Full press release about the exhibition, in English or in German.
Action for 2pm Sunday 6 July 1835 was also exhibited in the exhibition Ghosts of self and state, curated by Geraldine Barlow, at the Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne.
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