Jonathan Jones| barrangal dyara (skin and bones)

From a site of cultural loss and destruction rises an exhibition that celebrates community, place and a language renaissance.

The Garden Palace represents a lot of things for different people, for early Australian settlers it was a symbol of nation building, commissioned by Sir Henry Parkes. Inspired by the Crystal Palace in London and Palais du Trocadero in Paris, the international exhibition held within its epic space the agricultural and cultural objects that defined Australia’s national culture. Among them was an extensive collection of indigenous objects. Tragedy struck in September 1882, when a fire destroyed the entire wooden building and its contents. Today for Jonathan Jones and many indigenous Australians, the building’s destruction represents a significant vacuum in Indigenous Australian history.

In response to his own experience of this cultural loss, Jonathan Jones has created with Kaldor Public Art Projects, an installation titled barrangal dyara (skin and bones). Epic in scale and sound, a footprint out of the original building is made up of 15,000 shields, as well as eight soundscapes situated throughout the gardens, and planted at the heart of the building – native grasses taking the place of the usual english roses. Without the benefit of having a bird’s eye view of the epic footprint, the shields are not what emotively draw you into the installation. Rather it is Jones’ insightful collaboration with eight indigenous communities to create evocative and ethereal language soundscapes, which heighten the senses as you walk through the garden. Chanting kindergarten children, men whispering through the crackling grasses and young women learning their native language coalesce in an emotive shared experience that far outreaches the physical boundaries of the gardens.  barrangal dyara (skin and bones) unites the viewer in a celebration of the continuation of indigenous culture through language.

We spoke with Jonathan Jones about the inspiration for his language soundscape collaborations with elders and south east Australian aboriginal communities in barrangal dyara (skin and bones).

What is the significance of using language in the installation?
I have been really lucky, over the years I have worked with Uncle Stan Grant from my community – Wiradjuri – he has been one of the key proponents of language. He is one of those from that generation that reminds us that nothing is really lost and all those bits of cultural information can be retrieved and pulled back out of the community’s archive of knowledge. He has led that concept of language as a tool of cultural revival that is embedded within you, and defines the way you think.

We chose to look at languages, as it is one of the cultural practices that have really seen an enormous renaissance. In the past 10 years communities across the country, particularly in the south east are waking up their old languages. They are learning how to speak them again, teaching them in schools, universities and TAFEs, it is really coming back.

How did you go about getting communities involved?
We went back to eight different communities and talked them through the story of the garden palace, which is quite a difficult story to tell of your cultural material being burnt. The communities then went away with that and responded with language – some communities wrote songs about objects, some communities knew old songs about the loss of language and culture, other communities have researched objects in their language and learnt how to say them for the first time in generations. We have composed them into eight soundscapes that will sit throughout the site.

What is your intention behind the soundscapes?
In some ways it is really supposed to trigger people’s imagination, it is almost a massacre site all those bones littering the land, they’ll hear those contemporary voices reminding us that you know even though we don’t have these objects we have never forgotten them, we have never stopped thinking about them and we can still speak to them.

You have planted native grasslands in the centre of the botanic gardens, what do they signify for you?
We are challenging the mega narrative of the garden palace, which was really designed around the idea of promoting terra nullius, and that the Aboriginal people weren’t doing anything with the land. More research brings awareness to the fact that Aboriginal people were engaged with sophisticated farming practices – they found a grindstone that is 32,000 years old, which makes aboriginal Australians in NSW the world’s oldest breadmakers by 17,000 years – it is another forgotten part of Australian Aboriginal history.

The heart of the project is that Aboriginal history has been skipped over or forgotten, what this exposes that we are so bad at history that it is not just aboriginal history that we are losing. We lost this massive, titanic building that totally defined Sydney conceptually, physically and politically, and we have lost it. It is a really interesting moment that we can say to the public, this is not all you are missing in Australia’s narrative, this is just one thing.

In one way the Garden Palace becomes a Trojan horse, it is this opportunity to bring in all these other histories that have become forgotten about.

Whilst this only installed for 17 days, what do you hope the long term effect of this project to be?
The next time a young aboriginal goes to the museum and wants to find their heritage, they don’t feel crap, they have a new platform to move forward with and start rethinking about community, culture and languages. That would be my ultimate dream.

EXHIBITION
Jonathan Jones| barrangal dyara (skin and bones)
Kaldor Public Art Projects
Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney
kaldor.org

Open from 10am until sunset, the exhibition runs until 3 October 2017 at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.

There is no formal starting point, helpful guides are scattered throughout and their are daily lunchtime talks available. For a full experience of the barrangal dyara (skin and bones) the free Project 32 app can be downloaded. It provides insights from cultural leaders, historians and cultural practitioners on the project and it’s history.

Courtesy the artist, Kaldor Public Art Projects, and Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney.