Renowned writer and activist Mary Gilmore grew up in Wiradjuri Country, upriver from Narrandera, in the 1860s and 1870s. Decades later, she detailed a conversation overheard as a child, standing beside her father and a senior Wiradjuri man. The two friends talked about the different types of ships known to land on Australian shores. [2] When boats with brown and single ‘mat-sails’ appeared, the Wiradjuri man told her father, Aboriginal clans welcomed the sailors from Macassar, an island across the Arafura Sea. But when a ship approached with tall masts and many white sails, women and children fled inland. Europeans, unlike Macassans, brought disease, violence and dispossession. Down in Wiradjuri Country, so far south from the warm seas of northern Australia, Wiradjuri knew in detail the differences between European and Macassan ships and their cargoes.

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North American scholars Heather Davis and Zoe Todd argue that ‘the Anthropocene is not a new event, but is rather the continuation of practices of dispossession and genocide, coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, that have been at work for the last five hundred years’, since the inception of European colonisation. Underlying the Anthropocene is ‘a logic of the universal which is structured to sever the relations between mind, body, and land.’ Across the Americas and throughout the world, ‘the logic of the Anthropocene’ has imposed ‘a severing of relations between humans and the soil, between plants and animals, between minerals and our bones.’ Davis and Todd issue a powerful call ‘to tend to the ruptures and cleavages between land and flesh, story and law, human and more-than-human’. They plead ‘for a tending once again to relations, to kin, to life, longing, and care’.[3]

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Several artworks in Shadows and Consequences feature historic sites at Portsmouth and the River Thames associated with the First Fleet and its cargo of western scientific and industrial concepts, devices and practices. To create these works, Vic projected images of a paw severed from the body of a koala, and an embryo extracted from a kangaroo, onto the ancient maritime structures. In these images, brutalised legacies of imported Anthropocene logics of abstraction and severance return to haunt the locales from which such cultures emanated. Here is a tending, as encouraged by Davis and Todd, to relations, a mournful attempt to reckon with a past and present characterised by atrocity and rupture, by a refusal to enter into kinship and reciprocity, a refusal to respond to wounded country.  

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In early January this year, as endless fires consumed forests desiccated by years of drought and rising temperatures, as smoke smothered our cities, towns and farmlands, Vic stepped outside his home to project images of specimens into the suffocating night air. The ‘Specimen in Smoke’ artworks in Shadows and Consequences are especially powerful. They succinctly capture, within the airborne materiality of the burned forests and its terrified, incinerated creatures, the savage dynamic of culture, time and country that has delivered our Anthropocene catastrophes. Exposing the mechanics and consequences of a shadowed history, revealing past actions within present outcomes, enabling the truth of now to be felt, the photographic and video artworks in this exhibition empowers those who seek regeneration and justice. 

Dr George Main
Senior Curator, National Museum of Australia

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[1] Stan Grant (senior) and John Rudder, A New Wiradjuri Dictionary, Restoration House, Wagga Wagga, 2010, p. 485. 

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[2] Mary Gilmore, Old Days: Old Ways, A Book of Recollections, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1963 [1934], p. 145.

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[3] Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, ‘On the Importance of a Date, Or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, vol. 16, no. 4, 2017, pp. 761-80.