Gorman House
The Great Dividing Range
Tony Albert The Anti-Monument Coalition Helen Johnson
Waratah Lahy Luis Martinez Scott Morrison Joan Ross
curated by Lisa Byrne
3 February - 4 March, 2006
Canberra Contemporary Art Space presents The Great Dividing Range, an exhibition curated by Lisa Byrne featuring artists from Queensland, Victoria, NSW and the ACT. The artists each deal with issues relating national identity.
Scott Morrison and the Anti-Monument Coalition each use the recent Cronulla riots in Sydney as a subject to investigate how our ideas of identity are constructed. In Morrison’s case, TV footage of the riots and media interviews are manipulated to a re-present the media’s seamless commentary and create a new narrative of the events. The Anti-Monument Coalition focuses on the contradictions inherent in social and political ideologies that lead to conflict and revolution. They sight the recent race riots in Cronulla, and the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon as indicators of such contradictions within cultures.
Artists Helen Johnson,Waratah Lahy, Luiz Martinez, Joan Ross and Tony Albert interrogate the cultural, historical and social conventions to give their own interpretation to dominant community beliefs systems relating to suburbia, rural and historical identities, and indigenous cultural representation.
In his catalogue essay ‘Our Beach’ for the exhibition The Great Dividing Range, Mark Hislop puts forward the notion that it is the specifics of language used by the media and government in issues such as immigration and foreign policy that leads to an intolerant and fearful community.
The recent Cronulla riots in Sydney shows how our sense of ownership and national identity is intrinsically linked to our colonised history and cultural belief systems. Our intent and capacity to colonise, to make the environment our own through language is crucial to our sense of right of ownership.
In "Our Beach" Hislop writes
The title of this exhibition ‘The Great Dividing Range’ is used metaphorically to refer to the breadth of opinions and experiences that inform notions of our national identity. Whereas governments may seem to have a mandate to speak for the majority, it is the nature of a democratic society to allow all voices to be heard and to have access to be heard. The Great Dividing Range – the geographic landform - stretches down the eastern states. It is a physical barrier that separates the coastal region of the east coast of Australia from the inland. In doing so, it is a barrier that not only defines different geographic conditions, but it could be argued that it sets up dialectic in social, political and ideological terms. For it is at the boundary fence, the barrier, that we tell our stories, form opinions, and invest in the culture. It is this cultural framework that determines how we debate issues such as national identity. But even geographic structures such as the Great Dividing Range are not in stasis when considered form an ecological viewpoint. As Paul Carter suggests in A Road to Botany Bay an alternate view of imperial history lies in the idea of ‘spatial history’ in which we exist within a continuum where specific cultural definitions have little relevance. It is not based on ownership but intention and provides a much broader vision analogous to a universality of our existence and the planet itself. Similarly, the misguided perception of rites of ownership that spurred the racism at Cronulla Beach was determined by our continuing cultural concerns with imperial history and a limited understanding of our place within a spatial history of place.
