mudunama kundana wandaraba jarribirri: Judy Watson

the holes in the land #1 and #6 2015 40 pairs of blackfellows' ears, lawn hill station (detail) 2018 the names of places (stills) 2016 the archive | rattling the bones of the museum Historic records preserved within archives, libraries and museums are a treasure trove for Watson's ongoing enquiry with what she refers to 'rattling the bones of the museum'. She also works with historians and historical documents when creating her artworks. This exercise in truth-telling aims to present untold narratives about the true history of this continent, and interrogates museum holdings of Indigenous artefacts, objects and human remains that are waiting to be repatriated to their owners and Country. READERS PLEASE NOTE: THE FOLLOWING WORKS EXPLICITLY REFER TO MASSACRES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE AS RECORDED IN FIRSTHAND ACCOUNTS, AND NOT SHARED THROUGH MAINSTREAM EDUCATION SYSTEMS UNTIL RECENTLY. One of the most overt displays, 40 pairs of blackfellows' ears, lawn hill station 2018, is a haunting wall-based installation of wax ear moulds. Lawn Hill Station's homestead, on Waanyi Country, once housed an horrific warning to Aboriginal people: . . . in the 1880s it was the site of atrocities against the Waanyi, the molesting of their children, the raping of their women, the shooting of their men, and the taking of their body parts as trophies. 15 Like the memories of many atrocities, Waanyi stories are handed down through generations, but are rarely substantiated by Western qualitative data. As a new English immigrant to Australia, Emily Caroline Creaghe recorded colonial interactions in an 1883 diary recently discovered at the Mitchell Library, Sydney, and now published as The Diary of Emily Caroline Creaghe, Explorer (2004). Could these perpetrators be the same ones Watson's great- great-grandmother escaped from? These accounts are invaluable to Aboriginal people for a number of reasons, and assert the credibility of oral histories. The execution of the artwork — a simple rendition of the original horrific display — features 40 pairs of waxy ears hammered to the wall with rusted nails. From a distance, viewers may be intrigued to find out what these small forms are, but on closer inspection the sheer horror and brutality of these human trophies becomes clear. Each ear has been cast from friends and family of the artist, created with the assistance of Kokatha and Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce. Watson's video work the names of places 2016 relies on historical research to expand the mapping of massacres across the continent. It is a powerful document that calls for crowd-sourced information to flesh out the extent of these events. In the series of prints the holes in the land 2015, Watson juxtaposes architectural plans of the British Museum, London, with haunting silhouettes of the Indigenous Australian artefacts held within that institution. 55 54