Floating idea on ‘difficult history’

THE first public art project in the Hobart municipality acknowledging the Tasmanian Aboriginal community has been completed.

The completion of the Two Islands project, which aims to represent the tangible and intangible layers of history and meaning in Franklin Square, was celebrated yesterday.

The artwork comprises three components — a scaled hull of Sir John Franklin’s boat, the HMS Erebus; a fullscale Tasmanian Aboriginal canoe; and a motiontriggered soundscape. The soundscape will play sound files from interviews and archival clips relating to the dual meaning of the work. Participants in the soundscape included Richard Flanagan, Rodney Gibbins, Ruth Langford and Dr Lehman. Two Islands was developed by sculptor and sound artist Nigel Helyer, in collaboration with Tasmanian Aboriginal consultant Tony Brown and Tasmanian Aboriginal writer Greg Lehman. Mr Helyer said he was interested in the “difficult history of settled culture and indigenous culture”.

“I'm using the metaphor of the vessel of the boats as kind of the containers of cultures, if you think of a ship as a kind of ‘floating island’ or a canoe as a ‘floating island’ that kind of contains and transports that culture,” Mr Helyer said.

“In a way, I intended [the art project] as a kind of a twinning of those two cultures, or an intertwining of the two cultures.”