Bloodlines - Sth Africa and Australia

My wonderful cousin Anne Stanwix who has lived in Sth Africa since she was 16, provides a Sth African perspective on notions of Truth and Reconciliation in Australia as we consider a First Nations voice to parliament, in this beautifully written essay for my current exhibition at Annandale Galleries in Sydney. Anne is an amazing doctor and a muse and critical contributor to the wonderful artist, her husband William Kentridge. She is also an incredible curator of poetry, always providing exactly the right poem, sent in an envelope, or nowadays via email, to tend to all and every of life's wounds. She is my 'sister/cousin' and very special person and inspiration in my life.

A long thread of red blood, not yet broken - Margaret Atwood??A Red Shirt (for Ruth)

‘The shirt we make is stained with our words, our stories’

‘A secret river of blood runs through Australian history’ ?W.H. Stanner??(1968)?

megan’s affinity for red is a constant.?

A torrent of blood falls from a chandelier; red beads substitute for the salt in the still-life; bleeding gloves; knives plunge into the red-cushioned chairs; a bleeding flag; the shape of Victoria threaded onto the back of a chaise longue with red dots to mark the 50 sites of indiscriminate killings of Aboriginal people from the 1830s until the 1850s.?

megan and I share a bloodline. Her mother and my father were siblings and share a Scottish-Irish heritage of settlers who euphemistically ‘took up land’ and became Australian pastoralists on what was good grazing land for sheep and at the same time good kangaroo hunting ground for local Indigenous people.

We were properly introduced as first cousins at the ages of 10 and 12. We couldn’t have been more different.?

But we shared a passion for the Billabong books. These were a series of books written by Mary Grant Bruce between 1910-1942.??Their depiction of the Linton family and bush life championed the Australian landscape and celebrated values such as independence, hard work and hospitality.

Much later a re-reading calls out the racial stereotyping of Indigenous people and of Chinese and Irish immigrants in keeping with the Social Darwinism that was a theory of those times.?

The Billabong station was described as being in Gippsland.?Gippsland was one of the two largest clusters of massacres in Victoria which underlies the controversial and contested aspect of white settlement in Victoria.

megan was a good stand-in for Norah Linton. She rode; she had masses of curly hair wrangled into a plait; she loved camping and exploring the bush. Her letters to me were illustrated with ink drawings of decorative eucalyptus leaves. She wrote that she was trying to learn some Aboriginal words.?

In 1967 I went with megan and her mother (my aunt) to visit the family sheep station called Booroomugga in western NSW. It was a much harsher countryside than that of the lyrical Billabong. Temperatures were above 40 degrees C for 10 days.?A lot of mutton was on offer at mealtimes. But megan and I vowed that we would grow up and make our fortunes and preserve this heritage for the family.?

I left Sydney in 1969 and didn’t truly re-encounter Megan until she visited us in South Africa 30 years?later.?By then she had been and continues to be many things – an artist; an activist; a teacher; a curator and a mentor to many. I never met her late husband Gunditjmarra artist and activist Les Griggs who?I know influenced her life and work in many?ways. Their marriage led to a deep and enduring connection with the Aboriginal community/families and their struggles.?

She has taken the eucalyptus leaves first inked on her childhood letters and pinned them on family photos; painted them on pages of The Illustrated London News and on the curious Cartes Visites. She has taken other environmentally fragile objects like feathers to appose the texts and tracts and wills of a new Victoria.?

In 1901 Melbourne was the largest city in Australia and was its federal capital until 1927.?megan focused first on family ephemera; then on (in no particular order) faces; frontiers; fortunes; fatalities; failures of feeling; fictions; finery; furniture; the fussiness and follies of Victoriana. The bones that act as relics of the internal wars of Australia are there to be seen embroidered on lace handkerchiefs and doilies.?

She has seen the aesthetic and political potential in found objects to create installations (the?Parlour?room); sculpture (the?UNstable?blackened EPNS rococo objects); paintings and photography??-?Isabella’s helmet?(herself dressed in a replica of our great-grandmother’s black dress with an EPNS cloche, the dome-shaped food cover over her head to act as a blind against seeing or as a protective helmet against an unspecified threat.)

There is shock value and cleverness in exhibits like?Edge of Empire?where the legs of the furniture are poised on sharp knives that pierce the floor.?There is the sheer beauty of the painted objects that can unsettle nevertheless.?

How does megan’s art practice relate to the personal and the political??

The great Australian silence on its past is lifting.?

As in the Truth and Reconciliation process of South Africa (my adopted country) from 1996 onwards the starting basis is knowledge and acknowledgement.?

More recently at the?Recognition; Reparation and Reconciliation?–?the Light and Shadow of Historical Trauma?conference held at Stellenbosch University December 2018, Wilhelm Verwoed the grandson of the architect of apartheid Hendrik Verwoed) stated that the overriding question is what whites are willing to do by way of white work and that the focus should be on the ‘doing of sorry’ rather than saying sorry.

More broadly, Claudia Rankine stresses how whiteness must be made visible before its power can be dismantled.? I think megan’s art practice is an act of faith in both these concepts.?

Anne Stanwix?????Johannesburg???May 2022?