Window installation by Patrick Nagle
Saturday 4 July 4pm: launch + conversation with the artist
5 July – 18 July
On display in the window of The Little Machine
Monday–Thursday 9am – 6pm
Friday 9am – 9pm
Saturday 9am – 5pm
Sunday 11am – 5pm
‘You think the ghosts are laid to rest’ is an installation in the front windows of The Little Machine. The work offers a critical confrontation with the traditional Australian pictorial landscape.
The title is drawn from the poem ‘Gordon Bennett’s paintings — Tandanya 1993’ by Erica Jolly.
You think the ghosts are laid. Well think again!
It’s not enough to print a pretty stamp
and on Australia Day of nineteen ninety three acknowledge Namatjira’s art this way –
His ghost gums are replaced by later work
which has the power to open up the earth
and give the dead a voice. New paintings
show where bounty hunters danced and families
crinolined, picnicked while skulls boiled free
of flesh. While in the wheatfields to scare
the crows a victim strangled with hands tied fast
hung, with live rat shoved in mouth
below a branch. That was not all –
To blood their dogs they caught a man alone
and let them tear at throat and legs and crotch
while they linked arms and laughed –
all this beneath the symbol of the Cross
erected by the pious of the town –
Neat crosses filled the sky. Blood red they matched
the soil beneath the lawn so soft, so green
so smoothly meant to hide the bitter past.
And those of us who stood and faced the rage know this stamp can not obliterate that page.
From Pomegranates (Lythrum Press: 2003)