Unveiling Submerged Histories
Image: Peta Clancy, Undercurrent, 2018-19, installation view, The Burning World, Bendigo Art Gallery, 2020. Courtesy the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
Photography: Anthony Webster.
Across this vast continent, many massacre sites lie un-memorialised and forgotten by the broader population of so-called Australia. Bangerang descendent, creative practitioner and senior lecturer at Monash Art, Design and Architecture, Dr Peta Clancy, has been working closely over the years with Aboriginal communities to remember the Frontier Wars and its violent, lasting impacts on people and Country. Her photographic and projection works explore how we as a people memorialise and acknowledge the painful histories of Aboriginal peoples. The way Clancy collaborates with mob and performs with and on Country informs the development of her practice through deep listening and respect.
Clancy’s photographic and projection series, Undercurrent, is an ongoing project which started in 2018. In 2022, a photograph from this series was transformed into a projection that spanned the façade of Carriageworks, as part of Sydney Contemporary’s AMPLIFY. Displaying her work in largescale perspective across a heritage-listed building created a spatial and temporal dialogue, layering image and history from Dja Dja Wurrung Country (Bendigo) over existing history in Gadigal Country (Sydney). When these stories meet, what kinds of narratives unfold about Aboriginal memorialisation, veiled histories and sites of mourning and significance? Undoubtedly, the work unravels the narratives white Australia has constructed and instead uplifts the truth of the resistance occurring within Aboriginal communities for over 250 years. Clancy states: “I find it a powerful gesture to project images of Country onto colonialist architectural structures that have been built on Country.”1 Her work highlights why it is essential for our communities to reclaim control of these historical stories, so that these injustices do not continue to go unnoticed.
Carriageworks in Redfern is a powerful site for Aboriginal mob because it was one of the first places to employ Aboriginal people on an equal basis. I found it empowering depicting photographs created in collaboration with Country on a building that holds deep significance for Aboriginal people. People often think of Country as something that’s in the outback. However, Country is in big cities as it is beneath our feet, beneath the bitumen and buildings. Country is always with us. There are many significant and powerful sites for Aboriginal peoples in the urban environment.
This work has been created in direct conversation with the land and in collaboration with local people. Clancy describes how she connects and works with Country as “being in the place”. By this, she means “a process of being still, quiet, listening and learning from Country… I’ve learnt that Country has the power to heal itself.” Part of this process of being in place means using her 5x4” film camera to capture the light as it hits the land in a specific moment in time. Once she processes and prints the film (to around a metre long), Clancy returns with the print back to the exact spot the image was taken. She then attaches this print to a frame, cuts the photograph at the location and rephotographs the image with an SLR camera. In doing so, she captures the natural elements as they interact with the print to “give a different perspective of Country”. Clancy then cuts the images together, marking a line straight through the belly of the photo, a style she repeats throughout her series. This representation of a scar on the landscape as a wound from long ago remains: present, never fading and never forgotten.
Image: Peta Clancy, Undercurrent no. 5, 2019, inkjet pigment print, 150 x 106 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
Image: Peta Clancy, Undercurrent no. 4, 2019, inkjet pigment print, 150 x 106 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
The photographs are influenced by the wind and light interacting on and with the surface of the photographic print. The light reflects off the surface of the print, and the wind physically moves the paper, pushing and pulling it away from and toward the camera. The photographs reflect on the complexities of photographing Country and the impossibility of the ability of a photograph to record or reveal memory, history and narratives of place or temporality from the past 250 years (since invasion), around 60,000+ years (for Traditional Custodians) or millions of years.
The way that Clancy works performatively with and on Country raises compelling questions surrounding how white Australia interacts with place – or does not interact with it all. From creation to exhibition, Undercurrent presents Aboriginal ways of knowing and doing. Most Aboriginal people are born with the ingrained knowledge that land holds story. As Clancy created this work, she did not break from this connection with place; Country will never forget redirected river systems or cover-ups of massacre sites. Clancy’s work continues to recognise sites of significance or mourning wherever it goes, creates rigour in conversations about the power of art practice as a conduit for mob to assert rightful and continued sovereignty. Undercurrent emphasises the ways Country plays a vital role in all our lives, as witness and collector of memory.
Clancy’s Undercurrent series began with a 12-month residency at the Koorie Heritage Trust in 2018. The series evolved from experiencing Dja Dja Wurrung Country with Dja Dja Wurrung Traditional Custodians Amos Atkinson and Mick Bourke. This connection then led to the series of photographic projection works responding to massacre sites around the region. After one such massacre, as Arlie Alizzi writes, waterways were disrupted and made to flow unnaturally due to the construction of the weir in the Loddon River.2 The site was purposely flooded and is now hidden from view. Clancy’s photographs of lapping water and shadowed trees, outlined against the blurred soft-pink skies, evoke a visual disparity between the arresting beauty of Dja Dja Wurrung Country and the dark history of continuing colonial violence inflicted upon these lands. She states that working on this series “is all about listening and conversations with mob and Country.” Undercurrent also signifies the deep trust that Traditional Custodians held in allowing the artist to tell this story and the ways that Clancy’s practice, and contemporary art as a whole, can be a tool for truth-telling.
Image: Peta Clancy, Undercurrent, 2018 – 19, installation view, AMPLIFY at Sydney Contemporary 2022. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
Clancy continued her Undercurrent series through 2020, engaging with the Baluk willam of the Woi wurrung and the Nguruk willam of the Boon wurrung to capture sites of significance along the Dandenong Creek that have been disturbed due to Invasion. These images were photographed while the bushfires were raging across the southeast. According to the artist, the carbon blackened the water and transformed the creek into a mirror.3 Accompanying the photographs is a map from Dr Gary Presland’s 1985 book The land of the Kulin, included to highlight the stark disruption of Invasion. Clancy’s collaboration with Traditional Custodians to honour these sites by tracing the waterways emphasises the disparity between how Aboriginal and white people understand the importance of land and water. Additionally, the creek’s haunting black waters, framed by the skeletal-like branches of the trees, reflect how harm against Aboriginal people has denied Country proper cultural care.
Western perceptions of land or landscape are extractive, they are based on ownership and control, whereas for Aboriginal peoples Country is respected and cared for, it is places that hold stories, knowledges and identities.
Undercurrent has transformed over the years. As Clancy expresses, “the conversations have deepened and got richer over time and I am becoming more conscious of the agency of Country.” Clancy’s continuation of this ongoing series, and the way it can fit into existing conversations around local memorialisation, reflects how Aboriginal histories of Frontier Wars and Aboriginal stories about disturbance of places of significance remain similar no matter where you travel across this continent. This body of work adapts and converses with local records of massacre sites, buildings where mob were employed equally, and the importance of walking waterways and lands. In capturing these moments and threading them together in her practice, Clancy, as an Aboriginal woman, unveils the atrocities of the past and upholds Country as a witness. Her practice demonstrates that creative reflections of being in place can act as a powerful weapon against the erasure of our stories.
1 Sydney Contemporary (7–10 September 2022) ‘Peta Clancy: First Nations Voices’ [video], Sydney Contemporary, Vimeo, https://sydneycontemporary.com.au/peta-clancy/.
2 Alizzi, A (2019) Artist Text: Peta Clancy, The National 4: Australian Art Now [website], https://www.the-national.com.au/artists/peta-clancy/undercurrent/.
3 Dominick Mersch Gallery. (17 April 2020). Undercurrent, Dominick Mersch Gallery [website], https://dominikmerschgallery.com/exhibition/undercurrent/peta-clancy-undercurrent-1/.
Peta Clancy is a descendent of the Bangerang Nation from the Murray Goulburn area, in south eastern Australia. She is currently Associate Dean, Indigenous and Senior Lecturer, Fine Art at Monash Art, Design and Architecture, where she completed a PhD in 2009. Maya Hodge is a Lardil and Yangkaal emerging writer and curator based on Wurundjeri Country. She completed a Bachelor of Art History and Curating at Monash Art, Design and Architecture in 2021.