Detail images, Australia Felix, 2024, RMIT.
Australia Felix
Surveyor’s level and tripod, rocks, native grasses, paper, foam core, pin spot lights, fan.
Australia Felix is a work that explores the “exploration” of the Australian landscape.
It is based on my knowledge of Major Thomas Mitchell’s exploration of southwestern Victoria. The work is a tabletop landscape installation intended to be explored by the viewer. A “mountain range” of rock is in the foreground, fields of grass in the centre, and a volcano in the distance. The work is created to be viewed through a surveyor’s level. The various layers of the installation are able to be viewed by changing the focus of the level.
Most of this work was created and presented on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong / Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. The Rocks and the grasses and the Bird skull come from Gulidjan and Gadubanud land. I pay respect to their Elders past and present. I acknowledge and honour the unbroken spiritual, cultural and political connection they have maintained to this unique place for more than 2000 generations.
Detail and Installation images, Australia Felix, 2024, RMIT.
Over the summer of 2023/2024 I reread Australian writer Paul Carter’s Road to Botany Bay and was introduced to writer Paul Genoni’s The Mythology of Exploration. Both books discuss the myth-making involved in the writing of Australia’s history. Genoni critiques the value of explorers’ journals as historical records: “Later analyses of the journals have looked beyond their role as “descriptive prose” and examined them as texts that perform many of the functions common to more imaginative forms of writing, giving them a value distinct from their merit as historical documents.”