The Unquiet Landscape
or
"Pssst, we're having a really interesting conversation here. Wanna listen in?"

I came across The Unquiet Landscape over a year ago at the time of writing this Reflection. I was spending a day feeling for the artistic lay of the land in this region. COVID-19 was in full rage, and there were loud whisperings of an eminent national lockdown. My life was in a period of change, and while my visual memory of the exhibition is patchy, its impact has remained with me. I think the exhibition mesmerised me. It was totally unexpected. I stood and studied the work along one wall in the Whitchell Gallery for so long that it stayed very clearly in my mind - as if I’d taken a picture of my experience.

When it comes to 18th and 19th Century portraits, I rely heavily on the curator’s notes to tell me why I should care. I don’t like the formal poses, the stylised settings, the subjects’ bland expressions. I usually dismiss these paintings and walk away.

But this wall and its Colonialist era portraits are my main recollection of The Unquiet Landscape. Jenny Long’s treatment of this section of CAM’s collection held me for a very long time. Her interjection of curious texts forced me to look and look again. On first glance, I gathered these paintings were to do with Castlemaine’s goldfields history. This history represents for me one of the most devastating examples of colonialist interjection on this land and its people, and a part of Australia's history that should be left in the past. We have to come to terms with the past, no question, but I worry that we still hark back to it through the tinted lens of nostalgia. We overlook the devastation wrought on the land and the First Nations.

I was about to walk away, but something held me in front of that wall and I’m pretty sure it was large piece of text on the bottom half. Thinking it was going to tell me something about the portraits, I stepped closer and began to read. It was actually a beautiful piece of text a kind of meditation on the Australian landscape. There was a line in there about the white gaze and its inability to comprehend the land’s true beauty. Oh. That was interesting. But what was it doing here? I stepped back to look at the portraits again. Someone was trying to tell me something. What was it? The text had a gentleness, a sympathy I wouldn’t expect from the portraits. They were self-assured, dressed to the nines with a pride that comes with wealth and position. It dawned on me that I wasn’t in full possession of this exhibition’s background. I had entered the room the wrong way round, so I walked to the entrance and retraced my clunky steps, reading and wondering.

Jenny Long had painstakingly chosen text from the book Kangaroo by D. H. Lawrence. She had made her decisions very carefully and very consciously to open a conversation between that work of fiction, and the real-life portraits of pillars of Castlemaine’s pioneer society. So, these disparate pieces of Art, that were never meant to be together, were placed in proximity with each other, provoking a new conversation where none had existed before. For the most part, the text was placed next to each of the paintings, a clever twist away from the traditional “accompanying details” we’re so familiar with. So, I had to move in to read it, inviting an ever closer and, dare I say, intimate, interaction with the artwork.

Long, it seemed to me, had purposely chosen the words of a writer whose sympathies lay with the working classes, who was all too aware of the problems with Empire as he had been witness to its hegemony most of his life. The texts I began to understand were interjections that at times highlighted and at times contradicted the genteel brushstrokes of the accepted history of Castlemaine and its surrounds. They were a polite tap on the shoulders of Castlemaine’s genteel forebears, an “Ahem, sir, madame, may we have a word?”

The Kangaroo wood carving, on its plinth, within the protection of its perspex cover stood in front of the paintings, in what I could only interpret as a place of honour. She stood separate; present but not attentive to the conversation among the Whitefellas. She was a gracious hostess, even when, for her own safety and due to the neglect of said Whitefellas she was forced to live under protection.

I left the Gallery aware of a physical sensation I couldn’t put words to. Something on a very cellular level, had been touched by the exhibition. I guess the take-home for me was, maybe it was time I allowed room for all the different realities or histories of this country to co-exist. Because as a migrant settler that’s my inheritance and I had to accept it in order to help redress the wrongs.

Wahibe Moussa
March 2021