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Language, Land, Borders

2022/05/09 Views：254

Language, Land, Borders: How Jonathan Jones Rebuilds the Aboriginal Cultural Landscape 

Hsieh Yu-Ting (Assistant Researcher at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts Research & Development Department)

 

“Even if there’s just one tree left, maybe that’s enough to bring everything back.” Australian artist Jonathan Jones once said so in an interview.[1] Jones, who hails from Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations in New South Wales, has continued to create art in attempts to raise awareness of the Aboriginal past; to repair the colonial scars with artworks, and to explore the knowledge system embedded in language and culture to recover the “everything” that has been lost to the Aboriginal people.

 

Jonathan Jones, barrangal dyara (skin and bones), 2016. Kaldor Public Art Project 32.
Gypsum, kangaroo grass (Themeda triandra), 8-channel soundscape of the Sydney Language and Gamilaraay, Gumbaynggirr, Gunditjmara, Ngarrindjeri, Paakantji, Wiradjuri and Woiwurrung languages, dimensions and durations variable;Installation view Royal Botanic Garden Sydney;Photographs Pedro Greig; courtesy the artist.

 

The historical scar of Australia's Aboriginal people, which has been building for more than 200 years, is still sorely felt. The beginning of this scar can be traced back to January 26, 1788. On that day, the First Fleet, filled with British prisoners, landed at Port Jackson, Sydney, opening a chapter in history where the Australian Aboriginal people were repeatedly deprived and invaded on their ancestral lands. All kinds of conflicts between the colonists and the indigenous people continued to erupt. There were countless massacres, big and small, perpetrated against the Aboriginal people. These incidents, known collectively as the Frontier Wars, began in 1788 and did not come to rest until the 1930s. Professor Lyndall Ryan, an Australian scholar who specializes in the series of incidents, collated the information of these historical events into a “massacre map.” The sprawling markers of massacres on the map across Australia represent the bloody footprints of Colonialism.[2]

 

Jonathan Jones, barrangal dyara (skin and bones), 2016. Kaldor Public Art Project 32. Gypsum, kangaroo grass (Themeda triandra), 8-channel soundscape of the Sydney Language and Gamilaraay, Gumbaynggirr, Gunditjmara, Ngarrindjeri, Paakantji, Wiradjuri and Woiwurrung languages, dimensions and durations variable; Installation view Royal Botanic Garden Sydney; Photographs Pedro Greig; courtesy the artist.

 

The Australian government’s oppression did not stop at occupying and restricting land. Seeking to maintain its ancestral and cultural ties to the colonial “mother country” Britain, the Australian government imposed the “White Australia Policy,” which prohibited Asian immigrants, encouraged British immigrants, while forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their families.[3] For more than six decades, from 1905 to 1967, these policies created countless children of the “stolen generations,” who were completely separated from their family and culture as they grew up. It wasn’t until 2008 that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd finally apologized publicly for the government’s actions. Rudd proposed the campaign “Closing the Gap,” the results of which sadly did not prove successful.[4] Against the gloomy social situations and historical baggage, more and more artists in recent years are working on refining Aboriginal culture and knowledge and developing works that embody both depth and aesthetics to pursue a new way of promoting and publicizing the reflection and awareness of history, while strengthening the artistic and cultural heritage of Australian Aboriginal peoples. Jonathan Jones is one of them.
 

 

Jones's creations are closely connected to his identity and background, and he pays great attention to the history of colonization. In 2016, Jones was invited by the Kaldor Public Art Project to create the work barrangal dyara (skin and bones). In 1879, the Garden Palace—present-day Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney—was constructed to house the Sydney International Exhibition. The architecture, built to resemble the Crystal Palace in London, seemed to signal that the British Empire's gleaming lights also shone on the South Pacific “borderlands”; while the refrain of the theme song gleefully exclaims, “how like England we can be!”[5] In addition to flaunting the modernity and progress of Australia, the Exhibit also showcases many Aboriginal artifacts. However, the Palace, along with the artifacts, were all destroyed by sudden fire in 1882. As part of his artwork, Jones placed thousands of white shields in the present-day Botanic Gardens to represent the rubbles of the burnt down Palace and the ravaged Aboriginal culture, and to pay homage to the memory of historic objects and cultures. The piece asks: How do we live with “absence”? What else have we forgotten? On the other hand, it also guides the audience to reflect on whether destruction might give people an opportunity to rethink and build a new consensus.

In 2020, Jones was again commissioned to create a public artwork at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, untitled (maraong manaóuwi). Jones printed symbols on the ground that resemble both the footprint of the emu and the wide arrows used by the British colonists to mark government property (including prisoners), emphasizing the interweaving histories of Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal peoples.[6] In fact, by his appearances alone, Jones’ Aboriginal identity is often not immediately recognized. Jones notes that people are too used to dividing Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal peoples into “them” and “us” and end up pushing each other away. Jones believes that the purpose of learning about the past is not to divide each other; instead, Aboriginal knowledge should be shared with everyone and treated as the heart of all identities. In a society where White colonists and Aboriginal peoples coexist, Jones’ work, while extending from Aboriginal cultural traditions, reaches for a far broader array of issues and concerns.

 

Jonathan Jones, untitled (maraong manaóuwi), crush rock; dimensions and durations variable, 2020. Presented by Sydney Living Museum and Art & About Sydney; photograph Pedro Greig; courtesy the artist. 

 

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Jones’ creative concern’s close connection with the Aboriginal community also means that he often makes his works with the cooperation of the community and in specific sites. When it comes to working with the community, Jones said that each experience was different, but what was important was to “respect” the community. He cites the word “yindyamarra” meaning “respect” in Wiradjuri to explain his creative purpose, meaning “take it slow, be patient, think before speaking, and think before acting," as well as true and deep listening. So instead of walking into the tribe with a creative plan that he has drawn up by himself, asking, "Can I do this?" Jones often starts with asking his community partners “Can we work together?” and “Is there anything you’d like to do?” [7] Because their cooperation is based on trust and respect, Jones's relationships with the community are close and long-lasting, often leading to a new project as soon as one project ends. For example, since his 2016 work barrangal dyara (skin and bones), Jones has continued to collaborate with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM, including in untitled (Dharramalin), a work presented in this exhibition. 

Grant was the driving force behind the contemporary revival of the Wiradjuri language. According to Jones, “Grant has almost singlehandedly dragged the language back from the brink of extinction.”[8] Wiradjuri language, like many other Aboriginal languages, used to be banned in Australian schools and missions. Grant’s grandfather was arrested and jailed for using Wiradjuri in public, causing him to stop using his mother tongue in public for the rest of his life. It was due to the collaborative hard work of Grant and scholars in building the Wiradjuri dictionary that this once nearly extinct language now can be passed on to the next generations.

 

The new work on view in this exhibition, untitled (Dharramalin), is an extension of the mythological story told in several tribes. The protagonist of the story, Dharramalin, who was in charge of putting boys through initiation ceremonies, however, has slowly become corrupted and started devoured boys.[9] As punishment, Dharramalin’s spirit was trapped in a tree until this day and his voice can be heard in the sound of thunder.[10]

In the exhibition room, the visitor is surrounded by the rubbings of eight long tree trunks hanging from four walls. In the middle of the square room, hand-carved wooden sticks and shields which has been painted with white ochre are stacked into bonfires, and the voice of Uncle Grant can be heard telling the story of Dharramalin in Wiradjuri, with sounds of thunder, people knocking, and stepping into the forest, and the sound of mudhiga or bull-roarer (the symbolic presence of Dharramalin produced with wooden instruments) in the background.

Jonathan Jones with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM, guguma guriin (black stump), 2015. Burradhaa (white cypress, Callitris glaucophylla), oxide paint, sourced with the assistance of the Forestry Corporation of New South Wales; dimensions variable; installation view Performance Space, Sydney; commissioned by Performance Space for Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, 2015; photograph Zan Wimberley; courtesy the artist. 

This piece echoes the issues of land, logging, and borders explored in Jones’ previous work, guguma gurin (black stump). In Australia, “black stump” is used to represent the borderline between reclaimed and “unexploited” wasteland, or a fence that blocks off communications between the colonizers and Aboriginal people.[11] Nowadays, environmental conservation and other laws put restrictions on the Aboriginal people, preventing them from entering the forest to collect materials for crafting traditional cultural objects. Jones’ arrangement of wood-carved objects into a bonfire hints at the relationship between forest and fire. Australia's recent outbreaks of bushfires have turned the forests into a fearsome undetonated bomb. However, in a news report, a family survived by using the Wiradjuri method of “cultural burning” to stop the fire from spreading, prompting us to rethink whether the wisdom of traditional Aboriginal people could present another way out for contemporary scientific and technological civilization.[12]

Uncle Grant’s son, journalist and writer Stan Grant wrote the book Australia Day, which commented on Jones's works, noting that “Jones's work gives land and the past a poetic view.” In the contemporary age, when the Aboriginal consciousness is gradually reawakened, people need stories to reconnect with the land, in addition to the need to fight for rights through movement, Through his creative works, Jones revitalizes his mother tongue and traditional philosophy, which, perhaps to some extents, is repairing the humanistic and natural landscape and highlights the possibility of connection and coexistence.

 

[1] Tan, Monica, 2015. Artist Jonathan Jones on Wiradjuri country: 'Everything is chained up'. The Guardian Website. Posted on Oct 19, 2015. Link: https://reurl.cc/jqNjK1
[2] 殖民者的殺戮史：澳洲「原住民屠殺紀錄地圖」計劃。轉角24小時。轉角國際。網址：https://global.udn.com/global_vision/story/8662/2567753
[3] 蔡榮峰，2015。如何用十英鎊換一顆希望的種子──澳洲版的「大江大海」。轉角國際。網址：https://global.udn.com/global_vision/story/8664/1072107
[4] 改善原住民生活 澳洲數項指標進度落後。中央廣播電台。2018年2月12日。https://www.rti.org.tw/news/view/id/395296
[5] Grant, Stan, 2019. Australia Day. HarperCollins Publishers Australia.
[6] Galvin, Nick, 2019. For Jonathan Jones, arrow symbol points to a shared history. The Sydney Morning Herald Website. Posted on Dec 20, 2019. Link: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/for-jonathan-jones-arrow-symbol-points-to-a-shared-history-20191220-p53lwb.html
[7] The interview conducted by the writer on Apr 12, 2021.
[8] Tan, 2015.
[9] 達拉馬林（Dharramalin）的字根dharra在維拉度里語，就意指「吃、吞食」。引用自Wafer, Jim, 2017, “Ghost-writing for Wulatji: incubation and ‘re-dreaming’ as song revitalization practices” in Wafer and Turpin (eds), 2017, Recirculating songs: revitalising the singing practices of Indigenous Australia. Hunter Press, Hamilton.
[10] Grant, Stan and John Rudder (comps), 2010, A new Wiradjuri dictionary. O’Connor, ACT: Restoration House.
[11] Tan, 2015.
[12] 丘德真，2020。野火過境房屋卻完好 澳洲屋主歸功原住民傳統知識。2020年1月10日，中央社網站。網址：https://www.cna.com.tw/news/firstnews/202001080358.aspx。
 

 

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