2008-2009
Artist's book, design: Brad Haylock, published by Schwartz City, Melbourne, 2009.
Monument for the flooding of Royal Park is a proposed monument in the form of an artist's book which focuses on nardoo, the plant which the 19th-century Australian explorers Burke and Wills furiously consumed during their final days around Cooper’s Creek. The Yantruwanta people had introduced the explorers to the habit of making cakes from nardoo sporocarp, who failed to observe the correct preparation of the seed, mainly due to Burke’s antipathy towards Aboriginal culture and his hostility towards any reliance upon it. Without roasting, the sporocarp contains high levels of thiaminase, which disables human digestion by destroying Thiamine, ultimately resulting in apoptosis, the self-programmed death of cells in the body. Burke and Wills both starved even as they spent most of their final days preparing and consuming copious quantities of nardoo cakes.
Monument for the flooding of Royal Park is a proposition for the scattering of nardoo sporocarp throughout Royal Park, a vast Park in Melbourne's inner north where the explorers' departure point is commemorated by a small cairn. In the event of flooding, these sporocarp become fields of nardoo fern. As the flood waters recede and the plant dries out, they become vast fields of intense red, a carpet which temporarily covers the expanses of the Park. This drying out again disseminates the sporocarp, which can survive for up to 30 years in the ground before their growth is activated again by floodwaters. In this work, the proposed Monument is described in parallel to a sequence of archival photographs of different Burke and Wills monuments in and around Melbourne (including images of the famous Summers’ monument in its various locations around Melbourne).
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The artist's book Monument for the flooding of Royal Park was elaborated into the form of a frieze for the exhibtion Animism, curated Anselm Franke at Extra City and MUHKA in Antwerp in 2010, and for the 4th Auckland Triennial, curated by Natasha Conland, also in 2010. It was first shown in this form as a bilingual work in the exhibition Still vast reserves, at Magazzino di Arte Moderna, Rome, in 2009.
The artist's book is an elaboration of a video of the same title, which was shown in 2008 as part of the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture. The work originally evolved during a Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria.
Click here for the entire text of the video Monument for the flooding of Royal Park.
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