'The Space In Between'
While travelling from Brisbane to Sea Lake in early 2019, we watched the landscape change dramatically over the 2000km inland journey. We watched the landscape move from a crowded cityscape, to the subtropical mountains of the granite belt then as we moved further south and further inland, the landscape flattened and opened up dramatically. Though this journey was not unique to the both of us. Australiaʼs ancient outback always brings us a feeling wholeness. The still and silence we experience when standing in the outback is undeniably grounding. This is the unique feeling that draws many travellers like us far outback each year.
This artwork is a celebration of this special space in rural Australia. The artwork depicts a young girl swinging from a mallee eucalyptus gazing out over the endless vista that is Lake Tyrrell. A powerful Wedge Tail Eagle saws above the girl and emus run off into the night. For millennia this lake has existed, unchanged and untouched. It is a place of wonder and story. In this ever increasing busy day and age, people universally long for space and solitude.
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A painting of a friend we met a few years ago in Thallon. He is one of most gentle lovely people I’ve come across, with an infectious smile that just needed to be painted. Every afternoon after knocking off work, Col sat under the shade of a tree and watched us paint the silos. He’d throw endless encouragement at us.
Collie has lived in Thallon nearly all his life. When I asked him what keeps him there, he said it was the peaceful silence and the friendly people around him. He said he just feels connected to the place. Before designing the artwork for the silos, Col told us about a spot along the Moonie River that had a bunch of scar trees and carvings. He couldn’t tell us much about his cultural heritage or much about the scar trees. He explained that when he was younger, it just wasn’t shared with him. It was something that his family felt they needed to be quiet about. It dawned on me that this was in part because this era was not far from when indigenous children were removed from their families all across the country. So being indigenous was something that a lot of people were afraid of being. I don’t mean to say that this is the case for Col, because he didn’t say that. But this is something I began to realize was a reality for a heap of indigenous people of his and many many more generations. Aside from the fact that I found it sad he couldn’t connect much with his culture. It was really a moment that made me realize how naive my understanding of what it means to be an indigenous person in this country.
I had grown up romanticizing indigenous culture with the ‘Gen Y’ cultural taste of bush tucker, Dreamtime stories and didgeridoos. Not fully understanding how different it might be from person to person, place to place. This realization started me off, on a path to learn more, not just about the rose coloured stories that young kids of my generation got fed in school.. This painting appeared here, may or maybe not by @drapl & I. It sits here, along the dry river bed of the beautiful Moonie, near the scar trees Col told us about. It felt like his smile belonged here. #ruralmural #thallon #moonieriver #artwork #thezookeeper #drapl
