unentitled @44, April 2024
unentitled
A pair of scruffy-yellow whistling kites high on a branch longing to retrieve a fish carcass from the brackish creek, a flitting firetail finch, curious yellow robins, tree-creepers & whipbirds on the track to the beach … kookaburra & butcherbird assassins, ever-foraging brush turkeys and a gentle troupe of dabbling wood duck … assorted honeyeaters, wattlebirds, fantails, miners, lorikeets, cockatoos, galahs, a falcon, sea eagles, oyster catchers and two sleek brown cuckoo doves in the scraggly lantana appeared, unlike us, unruffled by the result … that week we took refuge with them in the shameful shadow of the referendum, on Worimi Country.
$27/night, unpowered … rudimentary and restful despite 4” of much-needed rain one night. Not glamping by any means, but nevertheless, we kept thinking, what a hide, how incredible that even so-called progressives like ourselves know so little still about the fragile ecosystems of this distinctive coastal ‘country’, about the resurgent culture & language of these multi-storied sites we profess to love.
Fortunately, things are changing. A dictionary now lists more than a thousand local Gathang words + there’s a website with local bird names & pronunciations, e.g. …
dilmun tree-creeper ginduwi bush turkey gukandi kookaburra nawiilan wood duck waring wonga pigeon wayila black cockatoo
A grammar and dictionary of Gathang: the language of the Birrbay, Guringay and Warrimay (2010)
The Gathang people of the mid-north coast are reviving their language & culture & passing it on to their children. Gathang (or Kattang) is a general name for the language also known as Birrbay (Biripi), Guringay (Gringai) & Warrimay (Worimi).
Through the tent flap one is often afforded glimpses of an external event (or problem) beyond one’s nylon chrysalis … a curious wallaby grazing close to one’s car in the moonlight, for example, or the late-night arrival of a potentially disruptive (intoxicated?) group of campers, head-torches flashing widely and wildly … or a milky sunrise silhouetting the billy. Having processed such unexpectedly memorable place-based experiences - historians call it ‘ground-truthing’ - one emerges from an ‘in-tent residency’ with enhanced clarity, itching to work with imagery gleaned on site, wondering how it might be massaged (perhaps via its presentation?) to do more.
When we arrived back in Sydney the modest brick house next door had just been sold for an obscene figure. The stylists had been in (I checked it out online) and it looked very antiseptic, very white. Not a toy or a book to be seen. Marg’s bold ‘Vote Yes!’ corflute (on the balcony next door) had been air-brushed out of the estate agent’s pristine street-view ‘money shot’, and a back-lit solar-powered sign attached to the property’s brick fence announced pre-auction viewing dates/times under the bizarre entreaty ‘Welcome’. Somewhat disconcertingly, the sign kept lighting up each evening for several weeks after the sale.
So I decided to make a work - at once through the tent flap and the seductive banner-wrapped-vinyl prism of contemporary real estate. Crossing my fingers, I had a pair of signs produced virtually overnight by the high-volume signage industry itself.
25 years’ ago the sociologist Zygmund Bauman likened the disconnected lives of many in the ‘advanced’ world to those of transient caravan-park dwellers, who pay for a site, plug in to the power, but have little interest in either their fellow residents or the park’s day-to-day operation, and bear no responsibility for the site once they have departed.
How difficult it remains for us privileged westerners, so used to slicing, dicing, digging and ‘flipping’ everything in pursuit of a buck, to discern what is truly precious.
Two 6’ x 4’ wrapped [550 gsm] vinyl signs, 20 m power-supply cables, solar panels, 30 x 64 cm … $4500 the pair
The two sign boards featured in unentitled @44 in Rozelle, April 2024.
The show included five photo-works by my partner Denise Corrigan, and three by me, as well as a 1970s shadow board painted by my father Ken Watson (1917-2009).
See also @44_rozelle