by Alice Anne Psaltis
I recall seeing you from across the room.
There were others close by.
But for some reason, you appealed to me.
Perhaps it was your brilliant blue.
The expansive, endless sky of the rolling Australian bush, with gumtrees and the-like.
You were at once overwhelmingly familiar, and incredibly strange.
Stuck between some kind of before and after.
That makes me think of something I read recently. A passage from the science-fiction author Ursula Guin’s The Word for World is Forest (1976).
Hold on, I took a photo, let me have a look.
“Sometimes a god comes . . . and brings a new way to do a thing, a new thing to be done. A new kind of signing, or a new kind of death. He brings this thing across the bridge between the dreamtime and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream” (p.127).
In some way, you remind me of this “thing.” Something that appeared elsewhere, and
has now crossed over into this place.
The book is about the colonisation of the peaceful planet of the Athsheans by yumens. The colliding of differing knowledges, differing worlds. The extraction of resources, exploitation of bodies. Then a murderous uprising, which cannot end in a reversal, a return to a-time-before.
I see a lot of science-fiction as a way to make sense of invasion, of colonisation. Of the irreversible destruction to people and to land.
I heard you were envisaged whilst watching sci-fi films. Your peculiar structure is reminiscent of an alien spacecraft that has just landed in the Australian outback.
Claire Coleman presents such an encounter in Terra Nullius (2017), offering an eerie reminder, a persuasive confrontation of our nation’s history.
Earth has been invaded by a confederate of planets; Australia is last to fall. At first, I thought we were in the colonial past, so clever her use of language, storytelling. But bit-by-bit, I realised it is a present/future time. Yet, also past.
You are this time as well, I guess.
Ngarigo Country. Disrupted by men with their sheep.
Now a familiar, iconic pastoral scene to many.
If it wasn’t for your odd construction that is, which has both fallen and emerged from outside the frame, as an interruption.
Settlers have long struggled to make sense of the land. Take the paintings by first fleet artists, they are full of gaps, of blockages. Things unknown, things pending. Flattered perspectives. Huge empty spaces. Renderings of nature, of people, that are always missing something. Their existing visual language seemed unable to comprehend their encounters.
We walk where they may have come from.
It’s very different from home, isn’t it? Overwhelmingly green, incredibly picturesque.
I always think the birds are singing too sweetly, too delightfully.
Not like the sounds of Kookaburras cackling at you in the harsh heat.
It makes you think just how unfamiliar, uncomfortable, your world must have been.
This is Dulwich Park. In the late 18th century, the area was largely farmland, surrounded by stately homes with manicured gardens. Nature had long been tamed; the land had long been configured into capitalist systems of public/private.
Around this time, hundreds of distinctive nations existed across “Australia” each with their own systems of living with and cultivating the land. British settlers dismissed these different collective systems, and instead, categorised Indigenous populations as “nomadic-hunter-gatherers” and their lands “Terra Nullius.”
Like your structure, the colonisers are the outsiders.
They appeared on land that was already occupied.
Imposing their ways of life on to its people, on to their lands.
Dominating the picture-plane.
You know Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014)? I like how he questions whether colonial paintings were in fact depicting Aboriginal agriculture? He places doubt in the way we interpret artworks, the way art historians are always bending them to fit within constructed narratives. In a way, he reveals the many possibilities that are always present in images.
Now, when I look at such works, it is impossible to unsee this reading. It is outside the narrative of Australian art I learnt, where over-time European artists tamed the landscape. Painting it how it ought to be (in their eyes). How it was becoming. Indigenous peoples were banished to the outskirts of pictures, as part of nature, and were eventually erased altogether, replaced by scenes of agriculture and industry.
You could fit within this landscape tradition.
Taken not far from the country Tom Roberts et.al painted.
I remember driving down your way on a family road trip.
I was astounded by the country, its vastness, its possibilities.
You feature the farmer with his sheep.
Positioned in an almost religious formation, akin to the shepherd before Christ.
The man who toils in the unforgiving outback to provide for his family and the nation.
That is until cities expanded.
Residential areas encroached on the rural.
Farms were replaced or taken over by international corporations.
Your land is now a climate battleground.
Rises in temperature, the increasing frequency of droughts, the ferociousness of fires.
Rapidly burning through the oily leaves of the gumtrees.
Your timber frame combusting in minutes.
Your name, Aristide, I looked it up, it means ancient Athenian statesman, “the just, the best, and most honorable man in all of Athens.” Who is honorable here? Is it one who defends their country from an alienable attack? From invasion, from development, from fire.
Aristide is also the name of a character in Patrick White’s novel The Twyborn Affair (1979). Like you, the book is set in the Cooma-Monaro region of Australia. It unfolds as a clash of identities, of politics, of contemporary ideas and historical nostalgia. Constant slippages between categories make things appear fragmentary, difficult to define. How can they possibly make sense, when the idea of the Australian nation, of Australian identity doesn’t exist, not really?
You depict a landscape that never was.
An idea, a structure, imported from elsewhere.
You present this strangeness, a haunting presence. Standing in for the violent destruction of people, and ways of life, that existed beforehand and continue to persevere despite ongoing attempts to eradicate/assimilate.
When I first spoke to you all those years ago, I wonder what I had to say
I think our conversation was different from now.
You caught my gaze because you were so familiar, yet so bizarre.
Still I wonder if you are coming or going?
Did you fall from somewhere?
Or are you being constructed or deconstructed by someone?
If you are going, what will you leave behind?
But you have already left your mark.
You leak into this country.
Seeping into present/future time.
Unable to be reversed.
Rosemary Laing Aristide 2010
C-type photograph, edition of 6
110 x 223.2 cm
Courtesy of the artist, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne and Gallerie Lelong & Co, New York
—
In this work, I take a walk with Aristide 2010, a photograph by Australian artist Rosemary Laing.
I came across Aristide at the UQ Art Museum in Brisbane, Australia. I was immediately drawn to the photograph’s familiarity, yet also, to its strangeness, to what was left unknown.
Almost a decade later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I returned to our conversation. I was feeling disconnected from art and art history, and very far away from Australia and what we term “Australian art.” Unable to visit art spaces and struggling to engage with works online, I began looking towards different practices of encounter.
I had been walking every morning and recording my thoughts and observations. Like walking, art can act as a traveling device, transporting us to different places, times, perspectives. I wanted to combine these practices, crafting a kind of walking art history, where, through the act of walking and talking with artworks, they are given legs — (re)given the capacity to lead other lives beyond the gallery, screen, or page.[1]
[1] W.J.T. Mitchell, What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Something Other 