Rottnest Island Authority threat to The Quod Project Exhibition.

She discussed this proposal with Paolo Amaranti - CEO of Rottnest Island Authority (RIA) 12 Nov 2008 and stated - "It appears the support/hosting of this exhibition would bring with it significant legal risks. Loss of revenue could occur as a result of this echibition due to greater public awareness of the history of the Quod. If we take actions that cause any loss of revenue for this private operator they would be in a position to take legal action against state government".

ROTTNEST ISLAND AUTHORITY THREAT TO THE QUOD PROJECT.

A little over two years ago, I had The Quod Project set for exhibition at a major, government run
venue. The Rottnest Island Authority then made a legal threat to the venue ( Text in previous blog )
The venue cancelled the exhibition & it took one year to get another venue to agree to take it, stipulating there would be no mention of the legal threat made during the course of the exhibition at their venue; another government run institution.They support The Quod Project but don't want to be seen to be critical of the RIA, so out of respect to them, I complied. Now that the exhibition period has past, I believe it is my duty to show the collusion that still exists in the protection of Rottnest Island as a happy holiday destination & The Rottnest Lodge brand ( the Quod is now part of the accomadation at The Lodge). Greater public awareness of the history of the Quod building is NOT desirable as it WILL cause loss of revenue to the private operator (which is the Commonwealth Bank!)
The threat, in verbatim text email (Wikirottnest!!), was baseless & stupid but insidiously effective.  I want us to see how we still suppress our history, in our backyard, to protect our good old Rottnest holidays. Go Perth! Keep those skeletons in the closet. When you book into The Lodge next time, sleep well.

Read down for further reviews & articles about The Quod Project.

The Island that Forgot Itself/ The Quod Project Forum/Josephine Wilson

The Island that Forgot Itself

You could think of the Quod Project as the imaginary occupation of the empty space left for the real history of Rottnest Island.  As in a dream, dark inky tones float upon the white walls.  Outlines on the wooden floor ghost the colonial vision of a prison.  The odd word and image hang in the air.   This imaginary space is both personal and political – it is a fleshing-out.  Or a gauging.  I call the Quod Project imaginary not because the history of the Quod is illusory, or disputed, or even unknown, but because the Project’s forceful occupancy of the corridors and small rooms of another former institutional space are an act of powerful projection which highlights both the limits of the real historical Museum the complexities of interpreting the traumatic sites of our colonial legacy.   

Imagine a history museum, or a heritage site with dedicated interpretation spaces.  Think of rows of exhibits arranged in neat chronologies, corridors of gleaming glass cases filled with illuminated objects that pin the place to the past and act as evidence of prior occupancy  - in the absence of live subjects, what can do but turn to objects?  Accompanying these artifacts are carefully edited panels of text and reproductions of typical historical photographs.  Intelligent, procovative,  this type of exhibition does not yet exist at Rottnest.  Once upon a time there was particular defense that could once be mounted to account for the relative invisibility of certain sections of society in our museums and cultural spaces:  simply, their lives and the things they lived with did not last - or were not collected.  Their cultures were ephemeral.  Transient.   The things they had were slight, fragile, made not to withstand the passing of time but to be folded back into the landscape or discarded.  The Quod Project  is a timely reminder that Museums and heritage sites need no longer mourn the absence of things with which to illustrate their stories.  We are no longer beholden to the real (to objects) to stand in for missing subjects in our national/historical narratives.  The imaginary occupancy of the past turns ownership and domination on their heads.  The subjects are here before us, and quite ready to speak.

The Quod Project also reminds us that in occupying these traumatic sites and opening up the process of interpretation, it is no longer possible to proceed as if authorship and ownership were neat modern categories that could be dealt with by the letter of the law and documents of legal tender.  It is not enough to say that it is too hard.

The Quod Project also highlights the limitations of aesthetic categories, and the failure of aesthetic judgment alone to determine value.  The Project is both a provocation and a call for action.  Perhaps it is best that art sometimes forget it is art.  That it invite others in, humble itself by making do with ideas borrowed from historical museums, performance, theatre, film, dance that it not be too hung up on being clean-cut and self-generating, repetitive, recognisable.  That it worry a little bit less about what it looks like and a bit more about why it should be bothered getting dressed up in the first place. 

That it ask for help and acknowledge when it gets it. 

Over twenty years ago there was the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.  As reconciliation and sorry become words that slip into the ether of the already-said and already done, projects like the Quod renew our sense of the urgency of attending to the historical record in the present. It is no longer appropriate to talk of about an absence of evidence.  We all know what happened.  Indigenous and non-indigenous activists, historians, educators, anthropologists, writers and artists have made this history central to their work.  Willful acts of imagination can make a unique contribution to the processes of interpretation in a place like Rottnest, which occupies such a strong symbolic place in the imaginations of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian. 

The Quod project gestures quietly and insistently towards Rottnest’s narrow and paranoid vision of tourism in 2011 and situates this condescending vision as a direct descendent of the kind of Australia that Tania and I grew up in.  I remember well the Grade 6/7 Social Studies book with the two paragraphs about the tragic demise of Aboriginal Australia’s, accompanied by a line drawing of a semi-naked blackfella next to a big rock, like a kind of cheap epitaph.  I remember the imagery of racism very well, its ubiquity in our popular media, and how Aboriginality could be easily conjured up by a stick figure with a spear, to be reproduced on towels and coffee cups, and in cartoons in the Daily News.

In Tania’s talk she makes reference to an object in the Chilean National museum; the broken glasses of former President Allende, whose leftist Government was overthrown in 1973. You could think of these glasses as a traumatic compression of the metaphors of blindness and insight:  of the will to see and the will to remain forever blind.   Allende committed suicide in the final moments of the coup.  The passage of Allende’s glasses into the State Museum was not however an easy one.  It was both traumatic and contentious for an old colonial country with a history of indigenous genocide and rigid class distinctions to acknowledge what had happened, and to allow that story to enter into the public domain, where it now co-exists uneasily with touristic Pinochet coffee cups you can purchase outside on the streets.

Our history is also traumatic and contentious, with an apparent battle not between left-wing presidents and right-wing CIA supported Dictators, but between two characters in a historical drama with sets a Disturbingly Indigenous and Ruinously un-Rotto-Past against and a Timelessly Touristy Financially Viable-Holiday Present.  Things did not come to a head one day in 1973;  we have no pair of broken glasses once worn by the President upon which we might focus our debate.  The Quod Project disrupts this neat and simplistic imaginary battleground and argues that many West Australians who are not of Aboriginal descent stand on the side of the truth and for complexity, and feel patronized by the continued pussyfooting around the complicated, compelling and true history of the Quod and Rottnest!

Finally, the Quod Project reminds of the power of the imaginary image.  Photography here acts as a kind of lens, refracting and returning the traumatic past to those who care to look in.  We see Aboriginal elders looking out.  And we see the everyday collusion of leisure with erasure.  The photograph has a long history of being associated with witnessing and documenting external realities.  It is also closely aligned with both portraiture and tourism.  In the Quod Project photography folds that role into a more complicated one.  Children are staged as unwittingly participate in gross acts of collusion (where were their parents?  Why didn’t they tell them?  How could they have let them?).

It all seems disingenuous.  We know that how many men died in the Quod and on Rottnest.  We know that Rottnest was a prison for Aboriginal men. That many have died and were buried there.  It is a matter of the historical record. In 2011 surely it is less a question of knowledge than of the will to know. 

Other countries do it differently.  In Shanghai, in the tourist centre of Xindiandi there is a very popular attraction  - the site of First National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1921.  This well-preserved Shikumen building would appear to be a miracle of conservation in a sea of reconstruction until you realize that it was (re) built the 1990’s and is a perfect fake.  This does not stop 1.8 million people visiting it every year.  The visitor tracks around the walls looking at the marvelous photos of the founding fathers of the Revolution from 1921.  As the 20^th century marches on one cannot but note that the group thins out alarmingly.  The succinct labels keep us up to date, noting time and time again the inexorable execution of all but a handful of the once-young hopeful men of the revolution, leaving only the odd Chairman and one or two others to soldier on.  

In China there are no excuses, no explanations. There is no going back.  Nor is there any impediment to the future expansion.  And complaint is risky indeed.

But we are not that country.    We can revisit the past.  We can look back in shame and anger.  We can admit our grotesque blindness, rewrite the history books, the curriculum, change the labels, question the way we name things, the words we say about places and people and the modes in which we frame the traumatic spaces of colonization so we can both tell the truth and acknowledge the pain for the families of the dead.

At the end of the solemn walls of images is a cell.  History museums like to make realistic simulations of spaces of our past:  1920’s schoolrooms, goldfields canvas house, and a 1940s kitchen.  Here is the space that the Quod has erased.  Here is the real thing, and it is a perfect fake, and we know it to be that, and we willingly imagine the truth. 

©Josephine Wilson

0435 048267

edithead@gmail.com

The Quod Project

Go to   flickr:rottnest quod   to see images.

For some West Australian families the phrase “We spent our holidays at Rottnest” is a short-cut to a common set of shared experiences — the Basin, the bicycles, the bakery, experiences that remain unchanged across our childhood. With its uniform palette and modest décor, Rottnest functions in the childhood imagination as an island of stability mythically excised from history and politics.

Tania Ferrier’s The Quod Project harnesses a furious energy that I equate to that of a child who discovers she has been told a terrible lie. That lie is both personal and political. Tania went to Rottnest as a young child. She and her family would stay at The Quod, now part of the Rottnest Resort, and in doing so she participated in a generational ritual. Tania has photos of her mother as a young woman posing on the Basin rocks with her sisters at the isle of girls.

As a child on holiday Tania did not know that for Aborigines from all over Western Australia, Rottnest Island is both undeniably historical and deeply political, and is experienced primarily as a traumatic site of imprisonment, and a burial ground for around 400 Aboriginal men. The island, which Noongars call Wadjemup, was a place of Aboriginal incarceration from 1839 until the early 1930’s, when the last Aboriginal prisoner was transferred.

Photographs of Tania’s mother at Rottnest are in fact the only ones she has. Her mother, Alice, committed suicide just after Tania’s sixth birthday. When Alice went missing she left a note saying she had gone to Rottnest. Tania was not told the truth about her mother’s death, nor was her mother spoken of as she grew up. Through a child’s eyes, she had disappeared at Rottnest.

When holidaying in The Quod, Tania did not know she was sleeping in a space where people had died, or that under the floors were secreted fragile possessions — glass spearheads, a spoon, a message stick. She, like all of our generation who were not Aboriginal, rode blithefully past or camped upon the unmarked graves of the dead, well before the cemetery was located and sectioned-off in 1997. In the centre of The Quod, where she and many children played, five men were hung by their necks while their compatriots were lined up to watch. The Quod Project stages that original shock of recognition that can be too easily forgotten in the current political climate: “Oh my god, I didn’t know”, “I ought to have known” and “This is my history too. I am a participant and witness”.

In occluding the historical truth, we wound and damage the living. In The Quod Project the visitor travels through a series of spaces in which the artist seeks to find a form adequate to the task of representing the trauma of what we now know about our history. We move from the postcard to the painterly, to the documentary photograph, staged and framed, to the Colonial witness, voiced and amplified into our common space, and finally, in the Quod cell, to a simulacra of the real — albeit a real that makes visible what the Island can not show: a hole in the holiday space of Rottnest.

But this is not catharsis; Aboriginal history is not used here to simply expunge personal ghosts. The project is a carefully researched installation that would not proceed without the commitment and trust of Aboriginal collaborators. It acknowledges the nearly twenty years of Aboriginal protest over failure of the authorities to properly respect one of the few relatively intact and documented sites of Aboriginal oppression and resistance. Cedric Jacobs and Noel Nannup are fully embodied and return the gaze.

Art is a risky business. Unlike advertising or propaganda, the effects of art are wilfully unpredictable and hence politically insecure. The artist cannot know how her work will be received. She cannot control the feelings to which it gives rise. We do not all feel and see the world from the same perspective. But we bring our histories with us when we come. Our responses are personal, but the effect of those collective responses is what makes change. We are not children. No one can make us hold our tongues. We are beyond collusion.

Josephine Wilson

Tania wishes to explore the notion that her holiday and childhood experiences were based on a lie. She is exploring her own sense of self, through her own story — one which happens to coincide with that of many of our Aboriginal people here in WA, myself included. Tania has sought to connect with local Aboriginal people associated with those who remain buried on Rottnest, which is a clear sign to me that this exploration of our joint past and telling of this story, regardless of the point of view taken, is an important one for all who share their own personal history on Rottnest Island.

Ron Bradfield (Jnr)

Artsource Manager - Regional & Indigenous

Development Program

The Quod Project: Tania Ferrier

Heathcote Museum and Art Gallery 21 January - 27 February 2011

I t is an occasional exhibition that dares provoke the status quo, realigning what we thought we knew of the world, indeed shaking us out of our malaise. Tania Ferrier’s

The Quod Project is one such show. Based on the brutal treatment and internment of Aboriginal people on Rottnest Island (or Wadjemup as it is referred to by Noongar people) and equally importantly in this case, the subsequent convenient ignoring of such a history, The Quod Project brings to light the continuing “problem” Australia seemingly has of dealing with its colonial past.

So often, perhaps due to a contemporary culture of over-museumification, there is a contemporary idealisation of sites that for one reason or another have a sordid attachment to our past. Rottnest Island, directly off the coast of Fremantle, has long been a favorite local holiday jaunt for locals, and it has deliberately kept a low key, minimal impact aesthetic to its accommodation and tourism- based activity. However at times this attachment to previous heritage has leaned toward a congenial atmosphere of place at the expense of cultural history.

The old camping grounds, now a marked burial ground and The Quod are two such examples. Now a comfortable

resort, those who stay at the former prison are not told the history of The Quod where an estimated 373 Aboriginal men died during the island’s years as a “colonial concentration camp” (1838 to 1931). Ferrier’s prosecutorial tone does not hold back in this damning exhibition which I think importantly utilises the aesthetic of both gallery and museum display, intelligently configuring a layout that pays homage to the history of the museum and its power to own narrative while also acknowledging that visual

art still holds a powerful position in broaching politics. Indeed the exhibition can be read in line with the recent resurgence of the body politic and the role of open information in the commons as positioned by Jacques Rancière, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri but that would be oversimplifying what is the outcome of a long and personal journey by the artist.

Co-telling the intertwining story of her own deeply affecting family story with that of the Aboriginal community imparts a responsibility onto all those who view this exhibition. As Ferrier examines her own attachment to the island so too are we drawn along on a tour of our own memory and failure to acknowledge,

to avoid the truth and to partake in a peculiar homage to our own comfort at the cost of understanding. It’s crucial stuff and reminds us of the constant role history plays in our own sometimes alarmingly passive view of the present. Quid pro quo – if it has happened, we will react to it; Ferrier’s hope is that the balance of things is at least based on the truth.

Encompassing only slightly tongue-in- cheek reassemblages of past Rottnest Island imagery, hard-hitting and shamanic video with narrative from Aboriginal elders Noel Nannup and Cedric Jacobs, photographic portraiture in collaboration with James Kerr, family photos, a floor map and a dark and beautifully made life-size model of the cells used, The Quod Project is not for the faint-hearted. Indeed at times it is almost apologetic due to the nature of its subject matter. Working respectfully with and alongside local representatives of the Aboriginal community adds research quality and depth to a show that, although by no means the first to broach the subject, picks up the history of Rottnest Island at a crucial time. At times perhaps too literal, Ferrier’s The Quod Project is nonetheless a reminder to those considering the future development of the island that “history is alive in the walls of The Quod”. We can only hope that this installation finds a permanent home on the island so those enjoying the wonderful breezy ambience of Rottnest can also acknowledge and appreciate

the cruelty of its past in the hope of a better future. The past is not just built on pleasant memories - a world built on the acceptance of preferred memories is, as we know from the literature of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, a depthless existence if not a lie.

RIC SPENCER> ARTLINK> MARCH 2011

Unveiling a sorry past

DONAL FITZPATRICK, The West Australian

February 11, 2011, 10:53 am

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The Quod Project exhibition is essential viewing for anyone interested in understanding the role of art in addressing our relations to the past.

This is not history painting but an attempt to use the language of visual culture to evoke a colonial legacy many would prefer to leave unknown.

Tania Ferrier's exhibition at Heathcote Art Gallery and Museum engages the viewer through various media. The main gallery is used to place a series of photographic portraits that function as a hall of witnesses.

At the end of the main gallery there is a reconstruction of a cell which challenges the viewer's expectations through a powerful audio monologue. Along the corridor leading to the main gallery there is a series of rooms that function as reconstructions of accommodation and images from the past, and a powerful video work.

The key to the exhibition is the history of abuse and incarceration of Aboriginal people on Rottnest Island between 1838 and 1931.

The exhibition seeks to engage in a critical manner with both the silent history of the Quod building on Rottnest - which has seen more indigenous deaths in custody than any other WA site - and the silenced presence of indigenous cultural history within our national conscience. As a visual and aural manifestation it reasserts Aboriginal history as a permanent hidden within our lived experience and in so doing raises the question of the ability of art to deal with these issues.

Ferrier seeks to reposition our familiarity with Rottnest as a playground within an historical context and in so doing makes problematic our contemporary cultural amnesia. The Quod building is now part of a resort and after listening to the audio narrative and experiencing the reconstruction of one of the cells you may wonder at the idea of anyone staying overnight in such a facility.

The transformation of this site functions as one of the means by which we actively forget a past we do not wish to remember. It acts as a constructed material form of erasure, both as a misrepresentation and a misreading of ourselves and history within the mirage of a fabricated present.

This is a challenging exhibition on many levels, not only troubling because it reminds us of our collective forgetting but it is also problematic in using art as a means of reappropriating indigenous history and suffering as a museum commodity. It is as though having exploited everything that indigenous people have we now turn our desire towards a perverse jealousy of their status as paradigms of suffering. Their plight can be positioned to fill some perceived moral void in our own sense of cultural identity.

However, in this case Ferrier has been ruthlessly honest in placing her own history (however embarrassing) of childhood memories alongside that of the various incarnations of the island within popular culture. Like her, we enjoy the wonders of Rottnest Island inside a curious innocence and we are shocked to find that this place has another shameful history, but ignorance of history is not a defence, it is just ignorance.

Ferrier has worked on this project with representatives of the local indigenous community and the labours of her collaborators, James Kerr, Noel Nannup and Cedric Jacobs, collectively position this work in such a way as to pointedly address the lack of any "real" museum of these events at the site itself.

They have used the space of the Heathcote Gallery very effectively. By placing their imaginary museum to the Quod within this former hospital that once cared for the mentally ill, they create a fictional entity that asks the viewer to see all of these existences and entities simultaneously, a former hospital, a gallery and now a non-existent museum.

This stratification lingers as a metaphor long after your viewing of the exhibition has finished. The evocation of presence stays with you and continues to resonate. The exhibition provides that rare experience, a moment of disruption, what Jacques Ranciere calls "dissensus", the taken not the given as the hallmark of true political action. This show achieves its political purpose by principally addressing the lack of recognition afforded by any museum or memorial at the site of the Quod on Rottnest Island.

The Quod Project is at Heathcote Art Gallery and Museum, Applecross, until February 27.