Colony: Australia 1770–1861 & Frontier Wars

NGV Australia, Melbourne

“Our landscape is overwritten by its history. Its scarification is only visible if one looks hard, listens closely and is prepared to not look away,” writes Nat Williams, a curator at the National Library of Australia, in the magnificently produced catalogue of the two-part Colony exhibition. The book is as much about political history and the clash of civilisations as it is about art history, and makes as powerful a statement as the exhibition itself. Colony is a close examination of the growth of European settlement across Australia: it celebrates the milestones and achievements, but counterpoints this with the experiences of Aboriginal dispossession, death and erasure. On arrival at the Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square, one passes an honour guard of decorated Indigenous shields from across south-east Australia, each a personal statement of its maker and his culture. From there, explorers’ maps of our coastline lead to rooms of art and artefacts, documents, journals, portraits, landscapes, furniture, photographs and wunderkammern. All of these elements chart the growth of European settlement and the interaction with traditional owners of the land. This is part one, Colony: Australia 1770–1861 (until July 15), which takes us up to the year the NGV itself was established. The exhibition’s contents – encompassing the engagement with natural history, the scientific interest in the “natives” (which seemed to fade as Europeans began to see themselves as native), and the landscape painting bound by European tropes – are engrossing and illuminating. This is a curatorial feat, with objects collected from state museums and private collections to fill out the story. Never absent, however, is its political subtext. With few exceptions, Aboriginal people are objectified: either romanticised as the “noble savage” or demeaned almost to the rank of fauna. Little is evident of their social or spiritual lives, or their daily activities. Colony: Frontier Wars (until September 2), the smaller of the two linked exhibitions, is upstairs via two escalators. On the way, at the first landing, is a forest of burial poles from different regions. Dignified, beautiful and sombre, they remind us that our crossover in points of view is saturated with what artist Jonathan Jones calls in his catalogue essay “an eternal mourning”. On the second landing is Jones’s installation Blue Poles, a composite play on many themes: the burial poles, the Jackson Pollock masterpiece, the colours of Michael Riley’s ineffable Cloud series and more, all addressed in a group of Jones’s trademark light poles in pastel blue. The body of the show begins with Julie Gough’s memorial, Chase, a dense group of 315 hanging sticks. Beyond that, Gough, Gordon Bennett, Brook Andrew, Vernon Ah Kee and others memorialise massacres, the loss of homelands and the weakening of culture. There is more sadness than anger in this collection. “Our age-old philosophies of death and grief will continue to inform our artistic practices,” writes Jones, “until Australia comes to terms with the immeasurable loss of life that we have experienced in the founding of this nation.” M