Ashley Hay, Sophie Cunningham, Jazz Money + Tony Birch, SWF 2022

Seeing ourselves in trees: Eucalypts in literature

This SWF conversation took place at the Powerhouse Museum as part of its fascinating exhibition Eucalyptusdom, which traces the museum’s origins in Sydney’s ‘Garden Palace’. It runs until 28 August - and features Ashley Hay’s writing and Jazz Money’s art among many other things.

Here are some brief notes I took from this wide ranging conversation about gum trees, their knowledge and wisdom, and our ever-changing relationship with trees over thousands of years. Below that I’ve added an overview of Eucalyptusdom, including images of Jazz Money’s video projection Garrandarang and Damien Wright’s wood sculpture that Tony Birch refers to.

Ashley opened by asking Jazz Money what inspired her kinetic light poem Garrandarang.

Jazz said the first book she read to prepare for her installation was Ashley’s Gum … and here she was in conversation with Ashley, meeting her for the first time. [First published in 2002, Gum was reissued in 2021 for this exhibition.]

Her work was partly inspired by the question: Do our kin planted elsewhere yearn for this land? Country remembers all that has happened here – so what knowledge do trees retain when they travel? What knowledge do they contain? And what knowledge do trees planted here from elsewhere, like the cypress, contain of other places, even though they’re pests here?

Ashley then asked Sophie Cunningham what drew her to trees, what makes them interesting to her?

Sophie said she first articulated her relationship with trees when she came upon eucalypts in San Francisco. It made her feel sad, homesick. She was surprised. So she began to think about that. At the same time there was also a movement to get rid of eucalypts in California – but they’re home to monarch butterflies, so they’re also necessary. So these questions about trees and belonging become complex.

It was a time of grief for her and so she turned to trees. 

Tony Birch said he’s been inspired by the furniture of Damien Wright, who has a beautiful work in the Powerhouse exhibition. The memory of trees is contained in the old timbers Wright works with. 

Wright built the magnificent round table for the Koori Court, which shows the remarkable qualities of timber. Because of its ancient timber, this table has 10,000 years of history stored inside it.

Ashley then took up this thread of stories in objects – the fact that stories exist not just in books and paper, as words on the page, but exist all over the place. The Powerhouse exhibition holds this tension, this complexity, really well.

The conversation then meandered to the ‘Separation tree’ in Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens, so named because the Separation Treaty between New South Wales and Victoria was signed beneath it. Before that it had been a Wurundjeri meeting site on the Yarra River.

But horrendously, in 2010 and 2013 this tree was vandalised, including being ringbarked, and in 2015 it was confirmed dead. The tree had lived for some 400 years. Now only its trunk and part of three limbs remain.

There are stories in trees. They make time disappear.

Concluding the conversation, Sophie said trees encapsulate story. Trees have seen a lot. They exist in a different time.

Tony said it’s really important to talk about our love for the trees, about our love for the river. Writing about the river is really just writing about love. He writes about trees to pay respect and love to them, to express love in a real, experiential sense.

Jazz said Blackfellas didn’t need western science to tell them what they already know: that forests are entangled rhizomic systems. First Nations knowledges, globally, are not valued until science validates them. This pisses Jazz off.

Sophie Cunningham, Tony Birch and Jazz Money

EUCALYPTUSDOM. 11 October 2021 to 28 August 2022

Eucalyptusdom was initiated by the Powerhouse’s embedded artist Agatha Gothe-Snape and developed with curators Nina Earl, Emily McDaniel and Sarah Rees.

It paints a fascinating, little known story of the Powerhouse itself through its relationship with eucalypts. And to begin to decolonise this history, colonial artefacts are placed alongside First Nations’ art works that express their ancient relationships with these trees and with Country.

The story begins with the Garden Palace in Sydney’s Domain, the site of the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879. Three years later, on 22 September 1882, the palace burnt down in five hours. The building was reduced to rubble. Its collection of natural history and First Nations’ artefacts was destroyed.

The next day, the Sydney Technological Industrial and Sanitary Museum Committee resolved to rebuild the collection in what became the precursor to the Powerhouse: the Sydney Technological Industrial and Sanitary Museum, renamed the Technological Museum.

The Technological Museum became the haunt of ‘eucalytusographers’, a new breed of scientist set on cataloguing and classifying the ubiquitous gum tree. With them came a new lexicon, coined by Baron ‘Blue Gum’ Ferdinand von Mueller: ‘Eucalyptographer’, ‘Eucalyptography’ and ‘Eucalyptographia’.

Baron ‘Blue Gum’ Ferdinand von Mueller was Victoria’s government botanist from 1853 and later director of Melbourne Gardens. He compiled endless volumes on eucalypts – and barely scratched the surface. As Nature reported in 1880:

Still the subject was so large and the perplexities surrounding it so many that even now he offers his observations in these decades as only fragments toward a some-day complete monograph.

Other eucalpytographers at the museum included Joseph Henry Maiden (director 1880-96), Richard Thomas Baker (director 1896-1922) and Charles Francis Laseron (collector and curator, 1906-29). These men were in the business of ‘economic botany’, the study of plants for their use in industry. They saw gum trees as materials for human production and consumption – wood panels, bark samples, kinos, gumnuts, oils – not as as living beings in their own right, not as they’d been for millennia: kin, keepers of story and knowledge, sources of food and healing, and so much more.

‘Eucalyptusdom’ was the name Edward Harold Fulcher Swain, NSW commissioner for forests (1935-1948), gave this new industrious realm. The hundreds of objects from the Powerhouse Collection displayed in this exhibition represent a small part of the efforts of these men.

At the end of the 19th century, eucalyptus motifs began to appear in art, design and culture: stained glass, teacups and saucers. They became symbols of national identity and pride: May Gibbs’ gumnut baby postcards were used to cheer the troops fighting far from home in the First World War. Their seeds were sent around the world and colonised other continents.

The museum’s scientific research into eucalupts ceased in 1978 – but decades of artefacts remain, which in this exhibition have been brought to light and reinterpreted alongside specially commissioned works of art. Among them are Jazz Money’s Garrandarang and Damien Wright’s collaboration with Bonhula Yunupingu, Gumatj clan, Yolnu, Bala Ga Lili (Two Ways Learning), both pictured below.

Garrandarang ‘There is an ancient landscape beneath our feet. One full of care, of knowledge, of love and song. No colonial intervention can alter the truth of Country. This work is not a eulogy to the forests that should stand here, it is a reminder they still stand. As Australian forests dwindle, our eucalypts spread unwelcome offshore. Do our ancestors follow them, to continue a relationship older than time? In the face of climate disaster, how can we return to listening to our trees, caring for Country?’

Wanhakali (Other Side) – Garrnjan Djarratawun Wanga (Black Lighthouse); Matjala (Driftwood); Djambatj Mala ga Garungu (Great Hunter and Gatherer): ‘This set of three sculptures is part of an ongoing, circular, cross-cultural collaborative project. Our task is to find a sculptural and poetic language, through a combination of traditional European joinery andYolnu craft skills, to understand and impart our bond. Here we tell a disruptive narrative, ours is a disruptive relationship. What should look like a contradiction is a promise. What should keep us apart, draws us together.’

Made from approximately 10,000 year-old petrified timber remnant (red gum), Gadayka (stringy bark), copper wire, epoxy resin, found glass, tung oil finish.