Contemporary Australia: Women

153 Judy Watson Australia b.1959 Waanyi people salt in the wound (detail) 2008 Installation view, ‘Shards’, South Australia School of Art Gallery, Adelaide, 2008 Photograph: Michal Kluvanek Courtesy: The artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane I listen and hear those words a hundred years away that is my Grandmother’s Mother’s Country it seeps down through blood and memory and soaks into the ground. 1 Family history — or ‘herstory’ as Judy puts it — plays a huge role in the art of Judy Watson. Her matrilineal line, which goes back to Waanyi country in north‑western Queensland, has been a constant source of inspiration. Watson takes pride in the stories and experiences of generations of strong Waanyi women: her great‑great‑grandmother, Rosie; great-grandmother, Mabel Daly; grandmother, Grace Isaacson; mother, Joyce Watson; and Judy herself. Watson’s female forebears survived brutal times on Australia’s colonial frontier and her installation, in our skin 2012, is Judy Watson’s own retelling of two harrowing and powerful stories — a reminder of Australia’s colonial past and a celebration of the courage and survival of her female ancestors. The work forces viewers to re-examine and experience this past from an Indigenous perspective — looking back from within the skin of these survivors. The first of these stories is of a massacre of Waanyi people on their traditional lands near Lawn Hill in the early 1880s. Watson’s great-great-grandmother, Rosie, was one of a few reported survivors, which is the inspiration for much of in our skin . The story was retold by one of Rosie’s grandchildren 2 : They [Waanyi people] were tired — they’d been on the run for weeks. [The police] caught up with them one morning when they were sound asleep, and she reckoned all she could hear were shots, and people screaming and moaning. They wouldn’t shoot the pregnant women — they bayoneted them and saved the bullets. The dogs and pregnant women and kids — they just whacked into them with the bayonet . . . God, I don’t know how they missed her: they just cut her [on the shoulder]. 3 Included in Judy Watson’s installation is a sculptural form that references the windbreak that her great‑great‑grandmother used to escape the gunshots and bayonets of the Native Police ambush. If not for the quick thinking of the young girl, and the shelter of this ephemeral structure, Rosie’s wounds would have been much more serious than a stabbing to the arm, and her descendants — Judy Watson included — would not exist today. Rosie and her young girlfriend then used rocks to weigh themselves under water — with the rocks on their bellies — and water reeds as straws to breathe through. These survival tools helped them to escape the surveillance of the Native Police trackers, who would have killed them or used them as their personal sex slaves. 4 On one wall of in our skin , Watson has attached 40 pairs of wax ears, in response to a journal entry from 1883 that described many pairs of ears nailed to the walls of Lawn Hill Station — boasting the number of Aboriginal people, mostly Waanyi, who had recently been killed there. The original journal entry, dated 8 February 1883, was written by Emily Caroline Creaghe, on the advice of Bob Shadforth of neighbouring Lilydale Station. It read: ‘Mr Watson has 40 prs blacks’ ears nailed round the walls, collected during raiding parties after the loss of many cattle speared by the blacks.’ 5 The owner of Lawn Hill Station, Frank Hann, had himself commented that on his station alone, ‘police have shot . . . over 100 blacks in three years’. 6 Central to the installation is the blood‑red stain of ochre on the floor, filled with salt. Watson has previously used this and other elements of in our skin in her installation salt in the wound 2008. The iconography here of her great-great-grandmother’s bayonet wound filled with salt evokes the suffering of the survivors of dispossession, disease, abuse and massacre, indicating that each wave of colonialism rubbed salt into the wounds of survivors Judy Watson Judy Watson In our skin