We Australians are often disparaging about Canberra – the large federal buildings “like white tombstones in the sun”, someone recently suggested to me. But I like visiting there, and whenever we go to the NSW South Coast we always take the inland route – as we did on our recent Christmas trip.
Canberra bakes silently at Christmas – everyone flees to the coast – and it’s a good time to look at the city as a project of mark and form making in the land, of surgical incisions (the Griffin land axis) that leave no doubt about our occupation. I wrote about it last May (Occupied territory of another sort), recounting New Years Eve there in 2007.
So going back again, here’s a picture I took at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, on 2 Jan of this year. Dead quiet – I don’t know where the inhabitants were, and a jumbled mess that’s still, after 37 years, an embarrassment to the Federal Government, amongst others. (Behind is old Parliament House, where we had a “civilised” afternoon coffee and cake.)
Then wandering around, with the nearby rose garden ablaze with red roses, I was struck again by the incongruity of the elements of the scene. Here are the roses (with Tent Embassy behind).
There’s some mix here that effects me in way I haven’t yet quite nailed -
Walter and Marion Griffin from the US planning the model city, the blooming roses, the First Australians who doggedly camp on the Griffins’ axis, old Parliament House blazing away in the sun, and a dream or collective memory I get about a figure poised on this or some parallel axis, a figure that knows of both land and water axes, one I wanted to depict in the linocut to the left (figure on a land/ water axis).
I spoke about him at the time I originally posted him as:
a figure in touch with some kinds of ceremonial or “knowledge-based” markings in the land and/or water.
He’s wandering around again, and he saw the meteors that passed overhead and fell, fell on the land, fell on the sea…
Ron Dowd
figure on a land/water axis
linocut, collage 2008, 30cm x 5cm
