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Recognising TeeRk Roo Ra

THe TeeRk Roo Ra

aRTisTs’ ResiDencies 2011

PaT HoFFie

THE TEErk roo raarTISTS’ rESIDENCIES

2011

PaT HoFFIE

rECogNISINg TEErk roo ra*

(*pronunciation: tuckeroo-a)

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QYAC, The Quandamooka Yoollooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation is the prescribed body corporate for the Native Title Act handed down on July 4th, when the Federal Court recognised the traditional rights to Quandamooka by the Indigenous people of the region that includes the island of Teerk Roo Ra.

The members of QYAC believe that it is important for artists to reflect on the significance of the history and environment of Teerk Roo Ra, a place that retains its importance for Aboriginal people today. QYAC is pleased to support the Teerk Roo Ra Artists’ Residency program, and looks forward to working together to ensure the appropriate recognition of Teerk Roo Ra in future projects.

FoRewoRd

ACKNowLedGeMeNTS

Since early 2008 a number of students, staff and artists associated with the Queensland College of Art have availed of what was established as the Peel Island Artists’ Residency Program set up with the invaluable encouragement and support of members of the department of environment and Resource Management (deRM: Queensland Parks and wildlife Service) of the Queensland Government working in collaboration with members of the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.

For anyone who spends even the shortest time overnighting at the former lazaret, the custodianship and care brought by the rangers from the QPwS is evident in the pride and attention they commit to making sure the island survives as a legacy of the various layers of the past that have been overlaid to produce a place of cultural, social and environmental richness. The level of not only professional but personal pride they bring to this task comes through their work with the land, the huts and other historical material evidence, and on collecting and passing on the many stories that make the island such a rich part of Australia’s history. Their skills within each of these diverse areas is manifest; as their pride in maintaining the structures of buildings is matched by their commitment to supporting the members from the broader community who also take it upon themselves to look after this little island of history and heritage. Foremost among these is the wonderfully acronym-ed FoPIA group. Rhonda Bryce, one of the

these individuals, and to those from the past who have become part of the place itself. This publication, and the artwork that was produced while on Teerk Roo Ra, are offered in the hope that they might also contribute to honoring this place that is part of the heritage of all Australians.

Special thanks to:

Aunty Margaret and the Minjerribah Moorgumpin elders-in-Council, Aboriginal Corporation, North Stradbroke Island; Rhonda Bryce and the Friends of Peel Island Association; members of the department of environment and Resource Management (Queensland Parks and wildlife), Regional Manager Nicola Udy and especially ranger Roland Dowling, rangers Mark Callanan, Jacques Frugte, drew Gulash, Mette Juel, daley donnelly, Trevor Mullin and Brendon Yetman; Ben Byrne, secretary to Research and Postgraduate Studies and Jo diball, director, PoP Gallery, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and to the ancestors and people of the Quandamooka nation of Minjerribah.

Pat Hoffie

Professor, director, SeCAP (Sustainable environment through Culture, Asia-Pacific), Griffith University

members of the Friends of Peel Island Association, was keen that the island’s rich history be experienced, re-interpreted and passed on in ways that were informed and sensitive. This impetus, together with the support of deRM, leveraged the residency into becoming; it has now run successfully for four years.

However this year, 2011, marks a very special year — a time when the federal government formally recognized that the original custodians of the island and surrounding waters; the Aboriginal people of Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) and the Quandamooka lands beyond are the traditional owners of the region.

Today many descendants from the Nunukul, Nughie and Goerunpil tribes still live on Minjerribah, enjoying the rich and deep cultural and environmental resources that make this such a special place. Aunty Margaret, elder from the Minjerribah Moorgumpin elders-In-Council, Aboriginal Corporation at dunwich on Minjerribah, has long supported and contributed to the sharing of knowledge and stories about the region. Her encouragement of this project has been invaluable and she has generously contributed an essay to this publication. It was Aunty Margaret who advised the correct pronunciation of the indigenous name for Peel — Terrk Roo Ra — as ‘tuckeroo-a’ — a lovely word that rolls off the tongue and that means ‘place of many shells.’

each of the artists who have been fortunate enough to spend time in this special place is indebted to

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The following two stories, each recalled and recalled by Aunty Margaret Iselin, describe very different aspects of Teerk Roo Ra.

Story 1: Lovers Island

on the eastern side of Peel Island, a channel ran through the mangroves and it was very deep. on the other side of the channel there was another island. Husbands came to visit their wives who lived on Peel Island and they were able to row across to this island with their wives. The hut was decked out with a bed, blankets and covers and a Primus (stove) to make a cup of tea.

This island was called Lovers Island.

Two SToRieS by AUNTy MARGAReT iSeliN, PReSIdeNT MiNjeRRibAh MooRGUMPiN elDeRS-iN-CoUNCil

Story 2: Peel Island- Teerk-Roo-Ra

This story was related to me by my mother:

dunwich Benevolent Asylum was closed in 1946 and everything was shipped to Sandgate; even the shop was taken. The Aboriginal people had to then travel to Cleveland to shop for supplies.

My mother would do a day’s work washing and ironing for various families living in Cleveland.

At this time, jobs were offered to the Aboriginal people to work at Peel Island.

My mother Louise and her sister Livinia would travel to Peel Island on Mondays. Their job was to wash the nurses’ and matron’s uniforms and bed linen. They would then soak the hospital patients’ linen in carbolic, a disinfectant which was used by the gallons.

My mother and her sister would then return to Peel island on Tuesdays to finish the washing. To do this

10

they had to boil and rinse all the clothes and linen two times. In those days a furnace was used to burn off the soiled materials from the hospital and every Friday all the rubbish would be packed by Aboriginal workers into a trench six foot deep. To kill all the germs, kerosene would then be poured into the trench and set alight and once the fire burnt down the trench would be filled in.

The buildings that the Aboriginal people were housed in were away from the main compound and they were made from galvanized iron with a dirt floor and a fireplace for cooking. The Aboriginal people made themselves more comfortable by laying wet bags on the dirt floors to keep the dust down. The Aboriginal men and women loved fishing, crabbing and gardening and this is how they spent most of their time.

My mother and her sister loved working on Peel Island and they were paid well, as the wages were more than the wages offered to Aboriginal people on the mainland. They worked there from 1944 to 1959, along with many other Aboriginal people from Stradbroke Island.

For our Aboriginal people working on Peel Island, even though it was hard work, the job was paid well and the money earned fed and clothed their children. Not one of the thirty people whom worked there would have complained.

Aunty Margaret

1

American essayist, poet and philosopher Henry Thoreau is remembered by many as a hermit saint. while his chosen situation while writing his book Walden (an account of the two years, two months and two days he spent in relative isolation at walden Pond in a small house he built on the fourteen acre forest owned by his friend Ralph waldo emerson), was hardly complete and utter isolation (it was situated 2.4 kilometers from his family home), the tract’s paean to simple living executed with close observation of nature has remained an inspiration for generations to come. Thoreau’s commitment to staying still, moving with the rhythms of the day and the seasons of the year in order to take life in a more considered, less rushed way was not for everyone. The more swashbuckling style of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, for example, advocated a life of ‘dash and freedom’, and deemed Thoreau’s choice of solitude as ‘something unmanly’. Nevertheless, Thoreau’s writing have remained influential to a succession of generations, including leaders Gandhi to Martin Luther King and Kennedy.

iNTRoDUCTioN

You must live in the present,

launch yourself on every wave,

find your eternity in each moment.

Fools stand on their island opportunities

and look toward another land.

There is no other land,

there is no other life but this.

Henry david Thoreau (1817 — 1862)

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Thoreau writes of the reasons why he took on this personal experimental research in solitude:

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.” Henry david Thoreau, Walden, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Thoreau’s life of simplicity was a chosen one; for those sufferers of Hansen’s disease who lived out their lives during the 52 years between 1907 and 1959 on Peel Island, the isolation, however idyllic, was imposed. Most accounts of their lives of long — much longer — bouts of isolation and solitude than that of Thoreau have all but disappeared. Yet traces of their lives remain on the island that was their place of incarceration and sequestration.

The island’s use as a place of imposed seclusion was borne as a result of a number of assumptions, including the belief that the enforced extradition from society of those deemed incapable of being cared for or dealt with by any other means might shelter society from harm. . The original decisions to ‘settle’ Australia were based on a similar set of assumptions So many of the memories associated with Peel are tainted with regret at the oversights of such shortsightedness.

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However, the island’s history is a complex one; one that is overlaid with a range of emotions and experiences, not all of which are tinged with remorse. The indigenous name for Peel, Teerk Roo Ra, means place of many shells — a place of abundance and great beauty.

Prior to its use as a lazaret, between 1874 and the 1890s, the island was home to a quarantine station, and between 1901 and 1916 it was used as a home for ‘inebriates’. There have been other uses for the island — a private school’s camp retreat, a safe anchorage for boats taking refuge from the often unpredictable waters of Moreton Bay, or as a heritage site for Queensland and Australia. (It remains the only intact lazaret in the country)

Today, thanks to the generosity and support of the department of environment and Resource Management of the Queensland Government, it offers artists a place where life can be wound back to a slower pace. where, for brief periods of time, artists can adapt Thoreau’s maxim to ‘live at home like a traveller’; to listen with alertness to the quietness; to take time out to observe the changing light of the day, or to pay heed to the shadows that flit across the planes of peripheral vision at night.

Thoreau’s writing at Walden advocated the fostering of a deeper awareness of presence — the cultivation of being conscious of the quality and beauty of the here and the now. Yet in this place, Teerk Roo Ra, documented experiences of the here and now evident in the work produced by the artist-residents are inevitably permeated or overlaid by translucent layers of the past. It is if the presence of the past is suspended in the air like a pollen — a spore that is ingested and that takes seed in the imagination.

If it is true that artists need time to travel, to test new grounds, to spend time in unfamiliar situations and territories in order to broaden and deepen their understanding and experience of the world, then it may also be true that artists can benefit from the act of standing still — to better take heed of the situation that surrounds. The stillness offered by the landscape and isolation of Teerk Roo Ra offers a means through which to think more clearly about the context of Queensland’s past and present that affects and permeates all that is produced here. It offers material insights into the way our culture has chosen to deal with differences of race and gender and physical being. It offers material evidence of governmental directives

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that sought to render invisible any contradictions and ruptures and frictions within mainstream society, rather than attempting to bring them to the surface as issues to be dealt with openly. The shards of material history on this island are vessels for myths about cruelty and kindness, shortsightedness and ignorance, and also huge wonderful leaps of faith and imagination. And the natural environment of Teerk Too Ra offers not only evidence of long Indigenous custodianship of the land, the presence of a rich range of indigenous species and also bears witness to the succession of introduced species that have come to successfully co-habit within the ‘natural’ landscape of the island over a succession of decades.

The layered, translucent, permeable nature of the island’s history often reveals a rich substrata of contradictory interpretations through which different kinds of spirits flit and whisper. There are those who speak of the island’s haunting; and there are those who describe the more prosaic,practical importance of its role as evidence of the nation’s history. There are those who argue for the importance of maintaining a pristine bushland, and those who argue that this country’s ‘natural’ landscape is in fact a product of over 40,000 years of careful land management and custodial care by the Indigenous owners of the land.

* Gammage, Bill, 2011, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, Allen and Unwin)

SLICe: Alan Tulloch, Court

THe ARTISTS’ woRKS

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The ARTiSTS’ woRkS — ‘To knoW IT BY ExpErIEnCE’

court. He laid this cipher out on the ramp where the jetty once stood. The resultant image hovers with a poignancy that evokes the loneliness and personal despair that must have often erupted as a result of such incarceration.

Yet the image also records the activity of the artist’s own labor — an act of thinking and working in the present - that is hauntingly overlaid by the activities and longings of the past. It is as if the past is still able to manifest material traces of its presence from the pieces of flotsam and jetsam, will and intention that still wash ashore.

It has already been noted in the Queensland College of Art’s previous publication, The peel Island Artists’ Residencies ….and every chapter must be so translated, that since its inauguration the Peel Island Artists’ Residency auspiced by the department of environment and Resource Management has generated a series of encounters, experiences, observations, responses and interpretations that are in the process of becoming yet another chapter in the unfolding of this island’s particular and often moving and strange history.

The enforced solitude of the lazaret in the past is now an elected solitude — a place from which to reflect on what place might mean, and a time taken out to consider how time itself transmogrifies into any number of experiences — precious or interminable,

A late afternoon sun sets over a thin horizon line that marks the edges of a mainland. Between that far-off-ness and the shoreline of the foreground stretches a still sea. The sun’s last light runs all the way to that shoreline like a taunt — an impossible path between the ‘here’ of the island’s isolation and the ‘there’ of the mainland. when that light hits the island’s darkening perimeter it fractures amidst the silhouetted spikes of mangrove roots that drive upwards through the muddy sand.

Closer in, reaching from the darkness of the foreground towards the light, the skeleton of a tennis court is m arked out in bleached flotsam. it’s lines falter and stop at the barricade of mangrove spikes. It remains half a court, an outline for an impossible game for one.

in their half-finished form the court markings also recall the poles of a magnet; an instrument seeking the improbable chances of attracting something — anything — from another place. An instrument searching for its other — a pull that is as old as the earth.

Alan Tulloch’s Court is a record of a solitary activity in a solitary place. His response to historical records describing how Peel Island’s inmates suffering from Hansen’s disease were encouraged to participate in sporting activity moved him to carefully assemble salvaged fragments of driftwood to align with the carefully proportioned dimensions of a tennis

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inescapable, time as a treasure or time as a trap; the island as an idyllic refuge or as a place of separation and incarceration.

So many of the artists who have come to the residency have found themselves fossicking among the residue of the past for clues about what happened then, and instead, have found means by which to reflect on their own lives.

one aspect of artist Andrew Peachey’s previous research interests has focused on practices of spiritual cleansing. during his residency on Teerk Roo Ra he chose to focus on the graveyard, where he took rubbings of the grave plates. In these somber, minimal works the artist reflects on how the banishment of the sufferers of Hansen’s disease to an isolated existence was imposed throughout their life and into their death: the metallic grave plates do not record individual names; only numerals mark their remains.

In order to produce these simple, sensitive images the artist engaged in a slow process of frottage. His initial more traditional choice of pencil as a medium was abandoned in favor of using earth from the island. The artist describes how this decision brought an olfactory aspect to the work — how the beautiful earthy smell from the rubbings was evident for months after. It is in this sense that the artist has transformed the work of making a visual response to his experiences into a kind of personal ritual; one

SLICe: Andrew peachey, Without a Trace

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the physicist everett is suggested in the obscure, light saturated abstraction of the imagery. As with the work of so many artists who have participated in the Teerk Roo Ra residency, the presence of the past is here interpreted as part of the contemporary experience of the island; as an experience that has overlaid the ways in which the artists have been able to engage with the spaces and objects and relationships in which they have, for a short time, become enmeshed.

The island’s identity as an isolated and isolating outpost is, however, gently challenged in the work of Columbian born Antonia Posada, whose other role as a trained botanist has contributed to her research on the range of species from countries all over the world that have come to ‘reside’ and flourish on the island for some time. She describes how her growing awareness of the Teerk Roo Ra landscape as a cultural construct (rather than as an uncritically ‘natural’ terrain) has enabled her to reflect on the botanical hybridity of the place (she includes biological specimens from exotic destinations as far flung as South America, Madagascar and India). In turn, there is a celebration of diversity and cross-cultural participation in this work; it is as if the utterly acculturated nature of the island as a place has made it possible to bring together experiences both botanical and, by implication, cultural, in ways that are both fascinating and enriching. In turn, the material she has collected during her residency has been used as a

where the very sod of things past has been used to breathe life and remembering into the obscurity of death. It is as if the performative nature of the work has taken the most simple and elemental material and, through a process of repetitive rubbing, given that material new form through the processes of transmogrification that are part and parcel of some approaches to art making.

Lynden Stone’s videos shot during her residency on Teerk Roo Ra continued to develop aspects of the central research theme of her Phd candidature. Her initial quandary about whether time spent on the island might inform her thesis’ focus on how physical, material reality can by used by artists to represent the kind of reality proposed by quantum physics was settled when she decided on taking a video camera and an apparatus known as a ‘mirror box’ — a therapeutic device used in the treatment of the imaginary pain resulting from ‘phantom limb’ experiences. In objective reality, she used the slower time and intimate settings of the island residency to focus on her fellow artist-residents as they unselfconsciously mused on subject matter that included discussions about the nature of reality.

In Everett’s parallel, another of the simple, at times amusing short films that resulted from Stone’s residency, the possibility of the simultaneous existence of parallel universes as first proposed by

SLICe: Lynden Stone, Everett’s parallel

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herbarium case study of non-native plants introduced to Australia, as a means of alluding to wider processes of adaptation to new environments.

dacchi dang and Janelle evans worked collaboratively to produce an artists’ book that shares Antonia’s interest in the species that have been introduced to Teerk Roo Ra from other lands. Janelle’s Indigenous heritage, and dacchi’s experience as a ‘boat person’ arriving in Australia from Vietnam makes this collaboration particularly poignant. Their decision to produce an artists’ book arose from their wish to make something that could hold some of their memories gathered on trips spent together on Teerk Roo Ra. They decided to focus their attention on the flower-beds that still seed annually from the gardens that were created by the original residents at the lazaret, and to include photographs and drawings of these with diary notations, much in the manner that explorers might have worked. They were touched by the capacity of the fragile flower-beds to remain as evidence of the fact that the denizens of the lazaret never gave up the spirit to make the best of their situation.

The haunting photographic images of Merri Randell seem to hover on the edge of depicting something that has just disappeared before that ‘shutter instant’. Randell avoids playing the role of documentary photographer, instead taking pains to produce imagery that might sit uneasily beside

SLICe: Janelle Evans , Floribundus

1918

once intimately connected to the former inmates’ lives. These include studies of wrought iron beds, enamel pitchers and the skins of surviving buildings. The current state of such objects bear the scars of burning, abrasion, weathering, peeling, cracking, flaking and crumbling. yet in the images she has produced the processes of wear and tear have bestowed a particularity to each object’s presence; as if the individuality of each object, and its capacity to function as a metaphor for the tribulations of existence have been increased through the evidence of such scarring. The implications of this focus reflect in turn on the capacity the bruised emotional lives of the inmates may yet offer us as ways to reflect on the hidden aspects that continue to affect our contemporary society.

After the slow, meditative process of selecting and collecting driftwood and branches from Teerk Roo Ra’s Horseshoe Bay, animator Chris denaro has re-assembled these pieces of flotsam and jetsam into new configurations. he then uses stop motion animation and time-lapse photography to set these things moving into a new form of life. However, unlike the scientific observations of nature photography, the life of these recreations cycle endlessly, with no beginning and no end, and by so doing both mimic and failing to mimic the organic, regenerative biological processes of propagation. A poignant humor emerges from the at times anthropomorphic insistence of

any assumptions that could be made through more direct attempts to portray issues of ‘reality’. Randell is particularly interested in those interpretations of the abject or monstrous that perennially haunt society’s ideas about what can be included within the perimeters of that which is acceptable, and that which must extruded and banished. Traditionally held notions of beauty, gender, health and race intercept with frameworks that support concepts of civilization and control — these intersections are used by Randell as the sites from which to reflect back the limitations and mutations of the systems of governance that impose them.. At the entrances to doorways presences seem to hover and flit; the edges of forms appear deliberately blurry and smudged, as if porous and permeable, as if the occurrences and relationships that may have inhabited these places have left uncertain traces that the photographer can only allude to.

Kay Lawrence writes about her Teerk Roo Ra Island residency as a time that prompted new ways for her to think about how historical spaces can be used to explore possible relationships between materiality from the past and contemporary experiences of reality. Her ongoing investigations into the fragile and ephemeral nature of life and time have formed a core to the practical research of her doctoral candidature, and during her residency on the island she was able to continue this into a focus on the objects that were

SLICe: Merri randell, outsiders 15

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the work to characterize the futile enterprises of endless re-creation. Yet, backed by funereal black, these elegantly quizzical assemblages also evoke the bones of memories — a kind of lustmord that animates even the most playful fascination with the skeletons of the past.

eric Rossi’s photographic contribution to the exhibition has not come from work produced on Teerk Roo Ra. Instead, the artist holds a hand written sign, ‘I Love Peel’ as he stands within the inner sacred space of Ubud’s famous monkey forest in bali. Dressed in an airline captain’s cap, a black monotard and a frangipani-decorated sarong, the character looks solemnly at the camera. A monkey, equally solemn, perches on his shoulder. Tourists, more normally dressed, wander in the background beyond the sacred pool, seemingly unfazed by the strangeness of this apparition. There is an overwhelming sense of confusion to the image. It is as if the tropes of travel and ideas of the exotic have become completely muddled in the protagonist’s understanding. He is at once an ersatz part of the tourism industry (suggested by the flight captain’s cap), part of the tourist hordes who seek out exotica amidst an ‘island paradise’ (the sarong) and part performer (the monotard). This attempt to commune with nature, with tiny little ladyfinger bananas tucked into strategic places, appears simultaneously tragic and hilarious. But by far the most quizzical aspect of the image comes from the question about why he has orchestrated his depiction here holding a placard reading ‘I Love Peel’. It is as if the attraction of regular, highly prized and over-determined holiday destinations emblazoned on t-shirts with statements like ‘I Love New York’, ‘I Love

SLICe: Chris Denaro, Structure 31 and 9

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the island was simultaneously a barrier and a conduit to the rest of the world. These paradoxical aspects of the island made their way into the subject of the work she produced there.

Much of Masters candidate Amalia Kidd’s research has focused around the image and role of the crocheted or knitted rug — composed of squares of bright colour, familiar as part of our childhood, or perhaps of another generation, or as remnants of the past remaindered in thrift shop bins. These blankets resonate on a number of levels — they are hand-worked artifacts, almost always produced in the home. Their production is slow, usually the work of one person, typically a woman, frequently a woman who knows how to take time to make things without rushing. They are, therefore, often made as gifts for loved ones. There is a sense of contemplation about them — there is a repetitiveness to their making, a process that affords the possibility of doing other things at the same time — talking, thinking, watching. Passing time.

In her work produced at Teerk Roo Ra Amalia projected a video of hands knitting above a solitary bed in the women’s quarters. The repetitive, meditative action plays on a loop; knitting away the time, spinning stitch on stitch onto the needles, whiling away the hours and the days and the years of a life. It works as a paean to the lives of the women who lived in those little huts for the term of their days.

Paris’ or ‘I Love Bali’ has been supplanted by that of a little-known island, the appeal of which may lie closely tied to inaccessibility and obscurity.

Luke Kidd’s practice involves painting, drawing, video, music and performance, and focuses on the critically compromised ways in which non-indigenous artists have attempted to deal with the task of representing landscape throughout the history of Australian art. In his approaches he utilizes a transparency of process that makes his own awkwardness and hesitancy apparent. He portrays the landscape as a series of barely penetrable screens – vertical fields of obscurity that offer few possibilities through which to enter or understand. His work produced on Teerk Roo Ra generates a sense of alienation – one where the cool impassivity of the detention huts seem preferable to the estrangement of the landscape beyond.

julie Pfitzner speaks of the strong presence of absence that she felt on her first visit to Teerk Roo Ra; she writes of her hyper-sensitivity during that time to sounds, and describes how her awareness of those individual sounds were evocative of particularities — of singular presences — rather than of a cohesive sense of ‘the past’. She also writes of the kinds of conundrums presented by her experience of the island — how she was aware of the fact that different aspects of the place could be at one time in the past as well as part of the present; of how the sea surrounding

SLICe: Eric rossi, Bali performance for peel

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LIST oF ARTISTS

1. dacchi dang and Janelle evans

2. Chris denaro

3. Amalia Kidd

4. Luke Kidd

5. Kay Lawrence

6. Andrew Peachey

7. julie Pfitzner

8. Antonia Posada

9. Lynden Stone

10. Merri Randell

11. eric Rossi

12. Alan Tulloch

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THe ARTISTS

26

The Friends of peel Island Association have managed to preserve a grape vine that had been planted by a former patient on the island. In the compound area they also tended two rose bushes, a rosemary bush and various fruit trees that had once been planted by the inhabitants of the colony. Increasingly we found, on successive visits to the island, small, untamed flowers that sprang up in the overgrown landscape at the verge of the patients’ huts, and in the ‘wild’ areas down by the disused jetty. where once there had been formal garden beds laid out in regimented lines, now a few singular flowers appeared clinging tenaciously to life. They seem to serve as a testimony to the history and memories of the people who once lived here and cultivated a home environment on this island prison.

This provided a new inspiration for our art practice through the conservation program. As artists we have very different approaches to our art practice, but through this collaboration we have created a new series of artworks focusing on tracing the history of the former inhabitants through the horticultural plants from their gardens.

These plants provide vital evidence of the history and memories of the patients, just like many other artefacts still standing on the island. The flowers and gardens have often been overlooked by artists or daily visitors. Many plants were introduced on

this island to create a familiar home environment for the patients or staff members. These plants brought a sense of comfort and memory of the home and families they had left behind when forcibly removed to the island.

our aim is to capture these memories of familiar botanical plants and landscapes through a series of drawings, watercolours, and prints that collectively form an Artist Book of the memories of quietness and solitude we experienced on Teerk Roo Ra.

dACCHI dANG JANeLLe eVANS

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Janelle Evans is of Bundjalung heritage, and is a recent graduate of the Queensland College of Art where she was awarded a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art. In 2008 she attended a residency at Tokyo Geidai University of Fine Arts and exhibited at the Ueno Town Art Museum, Tokyo in the same year. Janelle’s art practice has incorporated printmaking, painting and video performance pieces, as well as writing and directing for theatre, film, television and radio in Australia and Europe. Her short films have screened in cinemas and festivals in Australia. She has completed several master classes at the Australian Film Television radio School and was selected in 2006 to be a recipient of the Macquarie Bank’s Indigenous Professional Development Program at the school. She has participated in a number of group and solo exhibitions in Australia and produced a short film titled ‘phoenix’ for Dacchi Dang, which screened at the Sydney Festival, 2011.

Dacchi Dang was born in 1966 in Saigon, Vietnam, and currently lives and works in Brisbane and Sydney. His personal experience as a refugee generates difference and informs how he sees the multiple geographical and social landscapes of Australia and Vietnam. Dang has a Graduate Certificate of Applied Science in Cultural Heritage Studies, University of Canberra (2003); an MA and BFA, College of Fine Arts, University of nSW (1996, 1991); and is currently a confirmed candidate for a Doctor of philosophy at the Queensland College of Arts, Griffith University.

Dang has exhibited his work since the early 1990s. He has held a number of critically well received solo exhibitions in Australia and overseas. Dang has received numerous awards including Artist in residency at Metro Arts (2009) a Skills & Arts Development Grant, paris Studio residency, from the Australia Council for the Arts, Sydney (2003); Commendation — Multicultural Heritage, The Boat project, Energy Australia, The national Trust Australia nSW Heritage Awards (2002); and has participated in a number of residency programs in Australia, France and Japan.

dacchi dang , Shoreline, drawing on Paper Janelle evans , Floribundus, MedIA

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Chris Denaro has fifteen years experience in animation production, both nationally and internationally, working across a variety of formats, including 3D Animation, Visual Effects, Motion Graphics and 3D Console Games. In 2005 he was the recipient of a postgraduate Scholarship at the Australian Centre for Interaction Design (ACID) while completing his Master of Arts in Communication Design.

In 2008 Chris was selected as the Artist in Residence at Metro Arts Brisbane, and has also been the Artist in residence at the International Digital Arts projects (iDAp) in Brisbane, as well as contributing to travelling iDAp show ‘Vernacular Terrain’ in Beijing, China in 2007. He is currently a full time lecturer in animation and motion graphics at the Queensland University of Technology, and is completing a Doctorate of Visual Arts (DVA) at Queensland College of Art, focusing on Ambient Motion Design.

Chris and his wife live on a small farm south of Brisbane, sharing with black sheep, turkeys and a three legged goat.

I am a Brisbane-based animator, and my work consists of 2.5d digital animation, where acquired images are combined into fragile, temporal constructions.

These spatial constructions demonstrate a unique, looping style of motion based on time-lapse photography. The work cycles forever, with no beginning and no end, only a slightly familiar hypnotic rhythm. These constructions also describe a continual process of adaptation and renewal, mimicking an organic, generative mode of propagation. The works have been characterized as iconic assemblies obscuring a fatalistic obsolescence, while struggling for an absurd identity.

The current series of work is influenced by the discovery of the startling upended driftwood trees on Horseshoe Bay, about a half an hour walk from the Teerk Roo Ra settlement. each root structure is half submerged in the sand, leaving masses of eerie, but beautiful tendrils reaching to the sky.

I spent many hours wondering barefoot amongst these rhizome-like formations, trying to understand the underlying motivation for movement and interconnectedness.

CHRIS deNARo

Chris denaro, Structure 16 and 7, Still frame from Animation

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Amalia kidd is currently studying in a Master of Visual Art program at Queensland College of Art. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Wollongong, and has worked as an art educator for the past nine years in Brisbane. She has been involved in a number of public art projects in Wollongong and Brisbane, and is currently working in video and photography. The motif of crotchet and knitted rugs in her work is a metaphor for the complexity and interconnectedness of human relationships that is currently at the core of her research.

what struck me about the lazaret was the idea of being exiled from the community and passing time — simply waiting to die, with little hope for recovery. The white womens’ quarters are constructed with more generous proportions to their male counterparts: a small kitchen with stove, and a tiny sunroom only a few feet wide provided space to indulge in simple tasks such as cooking, sewing and knitting. Although austere, these women’s huts, when compared to the quarters of other residents represent a privileged position within this community, afforded by gender and the recognition, by authorities, of the benefits domestic activities had on passing time.

The other inescapable feature of the lazaret is that it reinforced segregation in an already segregated and exiled community. Carved up by a grid separating gender and race, the remains of the lazaret articulate the values of a bygone era. The rudimentary inhumane structures erected to shelter non-whites remain standing as defiant accusations about a past we cannot forget, and through our continuing construction of refugee detention centres that reinforce isolation and segregation, a present that we cannot escape.

AMALIA KIdd

Amalia Kidd , pass Time, Looping Video

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Luke kidd is a Brisbane-based emerging artist who is currently studying in the Bachelor of Fine Art, Honours, at the Queensland College of Art. He exhibits regularly in the Brisbane area, including the 2011 Brisbane powerhouse Too High Festival and the 2010 Churchie Emerging Art Award. With an interest in painting as well as music, kidd’s work stems from a need to re-evaluate the ideologies of a non-indigenous Australian identity. His practice incorporates a multi-disciplinary approach including performance, sound and video media that extends from a foundation in drawing and painting. By working in a manner that synthesises traditional image making methods and temporal forms, kidd seeks to critically distance himself from the Australian landscape tradition. By using the processes of painting as gestures, kidd alludes to colonialism’s influence on how the landscape is seen and how it has been represented.

I was drawn to the opposing qualities I experienced on the lazaret and in the surrounding bushland. Teerk Roo Ra’s various topographies have strong psychological effects on the visitor. during the bright of day, the landscape opens up under the dappled light of the canopy; it invites you in. Night time and the grey stillness after heavy rainfall can cause the visitor to feel rejected, to feel careful to tread lightly and to be startled by the slightest sound. By circumnavigating the island and documenting its bushland, you can return to the lazaret with grateful eyes as it offers a refuge from the unfamiliar bushland. This shelter from the elements has at the same time the coldness of a detention centre. Its location on a quiet coastal headland evokes a calming sensation; however it offers a stillness which reminds one of their isolation.

lUke kiDD

Luke Kidd, prime, Looping Video

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I see art in all its forms as a means of communication, with the ability to connect people and places and lead to greater cultural understanding. My interdisciplinary art practice critically engages with anthropological, physical and spiritual aspects of my surroundings through interweaving image, metaphor and abstraction. I use textiles and digital imagery to explore fractures and dislocations of time/space continua and the fragile and ephemeral nature of both life and time.

My current research seeks understanding of how the combination of digital media and fibre-based work can be used in metaphoric or symbolic ways to highlight significant connections between the human body and our environment. My works are created in response to observations of my surroundings and are frequently site-specific. i have chosen to work with fiber based media; fibre functions symbolically and metaphorically for the fragility and ephemerality of life and time while dislocations in the time/space continuum are suggested by fragments of digital imagery. This recontextualising brings new and shifting layers of content, perception and meaning to my art practice; exploring the very nature of human presence in its physical and spiritual states.

K AY LAwReNCe

Kay Lawrence, Just Another Day...(Peel Is performance video still), digital image on photo rag

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Andrew peachey is currently studying within the Masters of Visual Art program at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. He has worked as an art teacher for many years and is currently art coordinator at redlands College. He has continued to produce art throughout his working life and has held a number of solo exhibitions in Queensland. His work is included in a number of public and private collections.

I grew up in Manly and still live there. I can see Peel Island from my house. Generations of my family have lived in the local area and have known a little of Peel Island’s history. I used to go to Straddie with one of my mates from school. His folks owned their own beach house at Amity Point. I’ve been to Horseshoe Bay many times but had never really known about the lazaret on the other side of the island. when I mentioned to my father that I was going to Peel Island to stay at the lazaret he said, “what do you want to go there for?” even now I teach art at Redlands College which is right on the bay. I also know Tom Blake who had written about the island but I had never spoken to him about it. It wasn’t until we were about to go that it hit me that this was a sacred place; an historic place. For some reason I was attracted to the graveyard, a symbol of sacredness. I spent a number of hours among the grave plates tormented by the mosquitoes. I am interested in spiritual cleansing which is a form of death for new life to start. Here on the island people were sent to live a life without purpose. The only real escape was to die. I became interested in the nameless graves that ensured that these people were not only objectified in life but also in death.

ANdRew PeACHeY

Andrew Peachey, no Trace, Frottage of grave plates onto journal pages with soil of gravesites

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I wasn’t sure what to expect from Teerk Roo Ra — but walking around the island, and in particular, the lazaret, I felt a disconnection between the present and the stories I had read about the history of the island. walking around the huts, the cemetery, and the hospital, there was a strong sense of absence. For a short period I was aware of single, solitary sounds — firstly the rustling of the wind, then a pure, melodious call from a local bird, followed by the crack of a branch as it fell from a tree. To me, these sounds were representative of the individual — not the collective group of individuals — who had lived or worked on the island. There was strength in this solitariness.

on Teerk Roo Ra, there is a disconnection; decay and deterioration set among the peaceful present. The water surrounding the island has no beginning or end; it seeks to contain and yet provides a link to the outside. Julie Pfitzner is currently undertaking a Doctorate

in Visual Arts at Queensland College of Art, having recently completed a Master of Arts with Honours in Visual Arts. Pfitzner’s professional background is in the areas of arts education and administration, and various creative fields including design, advertising, and television. During the last five years, her practice has shifted from painting and installation to include time-based media. Her current video research explores the notions of time and scale within the narrative while creating new connections and new meaning between the original source and the new, symbolically constructed work.

jUlie PfiTzNeR

julie Pfitzner, Disconnect, digital Print

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Antonia posada is currently a candidate for a phD at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Originally from Colombia, her original studies were undertaken in fine arts and botany. Intersections between the sciences and the visual arts continue to inform her work; as part of her honours project in botany, she was looking at cells from the immune system trying to grasp how they harm our own bodies. During her Masters degree she explored the origins of biodiversity by looking at the genetic history of Heliconia plants. She moved to Australia in october 2007, and the following year started a PhD at the Queensland College of Arts. For posada printmaking, collected objects and pressed plants converge in a hybrid place that is half laboratory part art studio.

native plants that have been introduced to Australia. I’m using this herbarium as a metaphor for cultural hybridity, as a means to understand processes of human adaptation to new environments, and as a personal memory device that enables me to reflect upon my own construction of a sense of place.As a migrant I’m always in the process of building a

sense of ownership and belonging to the place that I’m new to. My artwork provides the language with which i reflect upon my own geographical dislocation and with which I explore the emotional connections we draw with the landscape that surrounds us. Part of the adaptation process to a new place entails bringing part of our known world into the new one: we plant a tree that is native to our home country, we hang a picture that brings happy memories, we cook with the ingredients that bring about nostalgic smells. And as we do this, the shared place gets transformed into a rich hybrid habitat defined by personal urges to recreate ideas of home. In my work, science and art converge to explore this hybrid landscape and to render the Australian landscape my home.

The garden around the lazaret on Peel Island is utterly artificial: the royal Poinciana that adorns the entrance to the nurses’ cabin is native to Madagascar; the mango trees that surround the patients’ huts are native to India; the creeping lantana that hides within the grass close to the shore is native to South America. The hybridity of the landscape evidences human dwelling and becomes a footprint of history. My time on Teerk Roo Ra allowed me to become more aware of the landscape as a cultural construct, and to articulate that idea into my own development of a sense of place. Material collected during the residency is becoming part of a reinterpreted herbarium of non-

ANToNIA PoSAdA

Antonia Posada, Hybrid Landscape , collected plants and pebbles in microscope-slides wooden box

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Lynden Stone is a phD candidate in Fine Art at the Queensland College of art. She completed her undergraduate degree with Honours at the College in 2009. Her current research project investigates how visual artists can explore and represent the enigmas that quantum physics presents to our perceived reality. Her primary studio practice is in painting but she also makes videos and installation work. She has participated in a number of exhibitions in Queensland.

My research project explores how visual artists, using the stuff of physical, material reality can represent an altogether different reality proposed by quantum physics. Accordingly, I was unsure how a weekend on Teerk Roo Ra staying at the old lazaret would inspire my work. But of course quantum physics is not just a theoretical idea; it is currently the best fundamental explanation of the physical world. Quanta is the stuff of the macroscopic world we experience and is with us everywhere, all the time, even on Teerk Roo Ra.

For the weekend, apart from a couple of bottles of my favourite red, I took a video camera and my ‘mirror box’ — a therapeutical device used in the treatment of phantom limb pain. without any specific concept in mind, i filmed my fellow islanders interacting, however they liked, with the mirror box. In one of the resulting short films, objective reality, dacchi introduces the idea to Chris that the objective world we experience may be of our own making. one of my other films, Everett’s parallel, refers to the possibility of multiple, parallel universes first proposed by john everett and since then taken seriously by a number of prominent physicists.

LYNdeN SToNe

Lynden Stone, Everett’s parallel, Video Lynden Stone, objective reality, Video

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Merri has worked as a visual practitioner for almost 20 years in London, Milan, Melbourne, Amsterdam and Brisbane. She is currently undertaking a Doctorate in Visual Arts at the Queensland College of Arts, Griffith University, has a Master of Arts from the London University of the Arts and a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the University of South Australia.

During her career Merri has worked as a lecturer, graphic designer, photogapher, freelance writer, screenwriter and in all aspects of video production. Companies Merri has worked for include Qantm, publicis Mojo, QUT, Lost Boys Games, Open Channel, Channel 4 and MTV Europe.

Merri has exhibited in Darwin, Adelaide, Melbourne, London and Brisbane.

Merri and husband share a small farm south of Brisbane, with Barbar, Claude and Trippy the three legged goat.

My research explores the tension that exists on the boundary-line of attraction and repulsion, inside and outside, clean and unclean or kindness and cruelty. However I explore these representations from the perspective of the ‘abject’ (Kristeva, 1980) — or those who have been ‘cast off’ (Merriam-webster, 2008a).

The Peel Island lazaret was a colonial community established to house or incarcerate that society’s ‘cast-offs’. Peel Island lazaret’s aspirations and architecture are also deeply entwined with my own notion of Australian identity. Today Teerk Roo Ra is a rich mix of discrete natural habitats ranging from pristine white beaches, fetid inland swamps and alien mangrove shorelines. These natural habitats have their own ways of dealing with ‘cast-offs’.

I am not trying to convince you that my artwork attempts to capture reality; indeed the aim of my work is to challenge notions around colonial human constructions such as reality, beauty, race, gender, civilisation and control.

I am fascinated by representations that have traditionally been perceived as abject or monstrous. My work seeks to redirect traditional readings of these images into a far more disturbing realm.

MeRRI R ANdeLL

Merri Randell, outsiders 5, digital Print

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Eric rossi is a visual artist living in Brisbane who works in painting, performance, installation and video. Currently Eric is undertaking a phD in visual art at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Eric also holds a Bachelor of Fine Art with First Class Honours from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, and also holds a Bachelor of Information Technology degree from Griffith University. Rossi regularly exhibits in Australia. Recent awards include the Griffith University Fine Art Medal, the Godfrey rivers Medal and being a Finalist in the 2011 Churchie national Emerging Artists Prize.

This work has been inspired and informed by four residency trips to Teerk Roo Ra.

The performance took place in Ubud, the cultural centre of Bali.

This work is an attempt to explore aspects of tourism. I used my experiences at Teerk Roo Ra to draw comparisons between the past and the current world.

The disparity between the classes and particularly between the indigenous and non-indigenous inhabitants is evident in the standard of accommodation on the island. Such disparities still exist, including in many of our neighboring countries in the Asia-Pacific region, where local workers are often exploited or live in poverty while a select few profit as a result of tourism, and industry that depicts the pleasant side of life and disregards other aspects of life and reality. Sending patients to Teerk Roo Ra was also an attempt by mainstream society to hide the sick and ‘needy’.

eRIC RoSSI

eric Rossi, Bali performance for peel, digital Print

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In many life situations where hope is somewhat limited, humans still demonstrate a capacity to engage in recreation and play. on Peel Island, in spite of the inmates’ suffering from Hansen’s disease, there is evidence that participation in particular sports was encouraged and that facilities were developed to replicate aspects of normal life on the mainland. one sport to be engaged in was tennis, a game that characteristically keeps opposing players safely in their allocated playing place.

Stigmatized by a then incurable disease, cut off from previous family and friends and spooked by fears of sharks in the forever guarding waters, inmates were also ‘plagued’ by many of their un-maimed human attributes — some being the needs to play and interact with fellow humans. Tennis is not the penultimate human contact sport, but the rules of the game have potential to suggest some of the refined and cultured characteristics of life without sickness.

The title ‘Court’ originates from the reference to sport but is also complicit with expanding the meaning of the work. The stillness of the bay, the beauty of the sunset and the neatness of convention symbolized by the tennis half-court would be far removed from the unanswered desires and disappointments of inmates on the island.

AlAN TUlloCh

Alan Tulloch, Court, digital Print

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The artists dacchi dangJanelle evans Chris denaroAmalia KiddLuke KiddKay LawrenceAndrew Peacheyjulie PfitznerAntonia PosadaLynden StoneMerri Randelleric RossiAlan Tulloch

Written & Edited byPat hoffie

Published byGriffith UniversityISBN 978-1-921760-60-0

Front cover image & Designed byMerri RandellThe Furnacedigital Photograph

Texture imagesChris denaro & Merri Randell

This publication marks an historical moment in the history of Teerk Roo Ra.

In 2011 the Federal Court recognised the traditional rights to the Quandamooka region by the Indigenous people of this beautiful part of South-East Queensland.

The Teerk Roo Ra Artists’ Residency Program was established in early 2008, and has continued over four years with a range of artists visiting the island on a regular basis. Begun as a collaborative venture between the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, the Environmental Protection Agency of the Queensland Government, the Residency has now received the support of QYAC - the Quandamooka Yoollooburrabee Aboriginal Corporation, the prescribed body corporate for the Native Title Act.

The publication traces the work and ideas of the artists who have recently spent time there at Teerk Roo Ra, the ‘place of many shells’ that is the home for so many significant aspects of this country’s history. The program continues the work undertaken within QCA’s SECAP* Research Initiative. (*Sustainable Environment through Culture, Asia-Pacific)

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