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 20th 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
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