ABSTRACT
Colonists began arriving in 1803 to the island Trowunna or Lutruwita. Referring to themselves as ‘settlers’, they imposed European traditions on what they referred to as Van Diemen’s Land. In 1853 these new residents, determined to expunge the island’s sordid notoriety as a colony built from a penal system of convict transportation, renamed it Tasmania. In so doing, the leaders of this antipodean site of Empire also conveniently obscured campaigns of intentional genocide, over two generations, against its Indigenous people, then residents on the island for more than 45,000 years. The archives, newspapers, and colonial art of those times retain clues about how the war was waged and about the aftermath of unsettled silence. As a Tasmanian Aboriginal artist, writer and researcher, Julie Gough questions and reworks historical narratives by reconnecting places with stories, objects and people to activate a new space of reflection and reassessment of what has been long buried by the mainstream population. Structured as artworks, these investigations into often dark and debilitating events create zones of cross-cultural contact for reconsideration of our haunted past. This chapter focuses on the genesis and progression of several projects and argues for a multidisciplinary, inter-relational and mobile approach to history. Art offers an alternative to fixed written accounts. By making evident the process of identity making, how each unfolding event (and artwork) informs the next, it can make transparent the means by which we become entangled in particular histories, as they are told and retold.
