Jonathan Jones is emerging more as an academic then the artist I first featured in 2005. The Wiradjuri artist’s project – just closed in Sydney at the newly reopened Artspace, but virtually captured in its entirety in the gallery’s splendid 500+ page catalogue – must have taken years of research and preparation before its debut in Paris in 2021, and then its opening here last December.
For it’s all inspired by the Baudin Voyage from Revolutionary France, its massive collection of scientific material, and its close observation of Australia’s First Peoples – which included capturing their images in drawings and collecting 308 plant species, an amount of live Aussie fauna and 30 something ‘ethnographic objects’, all of which were delivered to Josephine Bonaparte at Malmaison. Sadly, all but the plants were scattered on her death, and just one reed necklace is still identified as being from that trove.
After his deep researches, Jones has an unbounded enthusiasm for these rather messy French adventurers:
“For the first time in western history, these visitors to our shores recorded Eora corroborees in drawings with music notation; we see portraits of Aboriginal people that are as unusual as they are profoundly sympathetic; and Baudin himself pens one of the very first land rights statements when he declares that Aboriginal people were not savages and that no European power, including his own, was just in claiming our lands”.
Um…… I wonder whether Jones came across an earlier exhibition on the same topic – Paul Carter’s ‘Terre Napoleon : Australia Through French Eyes 1800-1804’? For Carter reveals that Baudin (who died on his way home and was unable to tell his own story, which fell into the hands of a man who hated him, Francois Peron) shocked his scientific crew on their way to Australia by revealing that their voyage had a political purpose, “a more thoroughly utilitarian aim than the mere gathering of objects of curiosity or passing fancy”!
The mysterious absence of any diary entries by Baudin during his 5 months in Port Jackson – noted by Jones and others – may well be explained by the observations that he and his officers were making at that time in preparation for a French invasion!
Despite this little anomaly, Jones does much to celebrate the positives, bringing what he can back home to locate them in a continuing culture.
All those plants species from the Museum of Natural History in Le Havre were filtered through the expert hands of Auntie Julie Freeman from Wreck Bay and handed on to 11 migrant embroiderers from the Arts & Culture Exchange in Parramatta. 308 displaced plants were then meticulously recorded by displaced women from Lebanon, India, Afghanistan and South Korea. But only in the black cotton that Jones stipulated – rather than the colours they’d have preferred to work in.
A model for this lay in Jones’s earlier portrayal himself of native grasses in black ink on historic colonial farm machinery catalogue pages – the machines that would override the grasses.
No animals join the exhibition, but six of Nicholas-Martin Petit’s sensitive portraits of Sydney People come framed in wreaths of different materials. Bulldog, for instance – described as ‘Native incendiary’ when exiled to Norfolk Island in the late Keith Vincent Smith’s catalogue description – gets a wreath of yellow paper daisies. Smith reveals that Napoleon himself took them to exile his in St Helena – and now they’re a noxious weed on that island.
Displaced is displaced!
Less successful in the exhibition are the 206 ‘ethnographic objects’ reproduced in white ceramic as Jones did with lost SE Aboriginal shields for his ‘Garden Palace’ exhibition in the Botanic Gardens. Along with 206 incised emu eggs, though, the objects lose individuality.
But a hit in the catalogue are three ‘Drawings by the Natives’, which must be the first use of Western materials by Aborigines, and which clearly show the same designs that were employed in rock engravings up and down Sydney. And this same intent to understand the ‘Natives’ was extended to notating a corroboree chant – which is reanimated in the exhibition by Lille Madden. In the catalogue, this is matched by snatches of poetry in ‘the Sydney Aboriginal Language’ – which may or may not be Dharug rather than Gadigal or Eora – from the pioneering linguist, Joel Davison.
The exhibition, called untitled (transcriptions of country) will now tour, I’m told to four further venues. But I don’t know where yet.
BTW, this habit of untitling, which I think began with Daniel Boyd, may be getting out of hand!
