The ways in which cultures make the abstract and ideological contextual and immediate through their totem objects is discussed. The key features and unique aspects of such a totem 'Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay1770', painted in 1902 by E. Phillips Fox are highlighted.

This paper takes its title from the oil painting by George Pitt Morison held in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, called ‘12 August 1829. The Foundation of Perth. Mrs Dance strikes the first cut to mark the founding of Perth’. As a young girl in rural Western Australia I transformed Mrs Dance, the boat captain's wife, into the first West Australian feminist. My unsophisticated mind inexplicably linked the image of Mrs Dance with the feminist sticker my father had put on our refrigerator in the mid–1970s. This painting provides an example of how visual representations of historic moments work to both open out and close down thinking about history in a process that Martine Joly describes as ‘the force of the image’. In discussing my girlhood response to this image, this article will explore how visual representations impact upon the storytelling of history and on both individual and national identities.

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Captain Cook's Eye-patch

Mrs Dance strikes the first cut: visual storytelling and girlhood

Declared objects of colonialism are strange things. They confirm colonialism but also repudiate it, resist it and persist beyond it. This paper is called by and follows one strange thing, the Bark Shield of Botany Bay, while exploring the idea of material remembering. The remembered colonial object does not always stand apart from consciousness or the embodied subject but helps to produce both. It both confirms and rearranges. When we remember materially we are reorganizing (for the remembered is never as it was before) that metaphysical arrangement in the present. This reorganization enables the shield to emerge as a particular kind of disruption to a colonial culture that has used material artefacts to mark strict divides between the Indigenous and the modern, past and present and between Indigenous ownership and white possession. The multiple ways in which this shield has been silenced, contained and hidden through multiple representations suggest the ongoing effectivity of this particular ‘thing’ and ...

One strange colonial thing: material remembering and the Bark Shield of Botany Bay

The research is a study of a curatorial development, process and practice over ten years and three exhibitions that culminated in the exhibition Lines in the Sand: Botany Bay Stories from 1770, in 2008. The accompanying written text charts the evolution from a 1998 exhibition Flesh & Blood: A Story of Sydney, 1788-1998 where for the first time I synthesised various strands in my life: my career as a curator in Aboriginal art and relationships with several of the artists, an exploration of my own colonial family history, and a growing interest and expertise in colonial material. Flesh & Blood has been described as a new form of curatorship (see Lawrenson): an exhibition that was both traditional and innovative, in which the past was brought into the present by the juxtaposition of appropriated images, and the weaving of Aboriginal and personal settler narratives for the first time. The inclusion of artworks by Aboriginal artists disrupted a linear European telling of history. The concept I developed for the second exhibition in 2006, EORA: Mapping Aboriginal Sydney, 1770-1850 was to identify and examine where possible the Aborigines dispossessed in those first years of settlement. This was a counterbalance to my family history and provided the opportunity to bring into the public arena the extraordinary scholarship of Keith Vincent Smith, the biographer of King Bungaree and Bennelong. The exhibition demonstrated how much information is now known about the Eora people and provided an opportunity for the Mitchell Library to showcase for the first time their colonial Indigenous material. While curatorially conservative, it was the most comprehensive exhibition of the subject matter ever assembled. In 2006 I also commenced my Masters of Arts by Research at the University of

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Captain Cook's Eye-patch

Citations

Mrs Dance strikes the first cut: visual storytelling and girlhood

One strange colonial thing: material remembering and the Bark Shield of Botany Bay

Family footprints: tracing the past in the present through curatorial autobiographical practice

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