Kalimparr - Watery
Benjamin Baxter
Masters of Landscape Architecture University of Technology Sydney
“The new belonging object is not about Home, it represents disconnection from Home and Country. Exploration of this positioning through collecting materiality and storytelling using colonial word structures and the rivers sinuous winding, mapping ancient water trails. Only through this thematic can it map and honour Country by truth telling.”
MATERIALS: timber + rafia
Artist Statement
Inspired by the River Red Gum interconnection to floodplain and the river systems health. My new belonging object incorporates activism mapping of the river, and narration of the 1841 ‘The Murdering Stump’ Massacre on the Bogan river Nyngan. My Aboriginal great grandmother born in Nyngan, her past records washed away by floods, a birth certificate scant of mother and father, she was sent to a catholic school and her bible was handed down to family she is buried in a Catholic church in Nyngan. There are many secrets kept from me, my Prussian and Aboriginal story were whispered in secret through fear.
Left for me to discover a riddle unresolved. I have never known the Nyngan Country but I feel it both pulling and pushing me. A disconnection. A conversation started with the Murrumbidgee song lines connecting Wagga Wagga and Nyngan. Through swimming, being one with water, meditation, flowing, moving, soothing contextualizing reforming through opportunity. They are connected through landscape, through water, through the River Red Gum, the eco systems, and flood plains. Plains affected by the colonial practice of draining the river for irrigation and farming and a need to care for Country.
Synopsis
The Living Belonging project integrates imagery, historical texts, and cartography to creatively visualize information, particularly focusing on stories of resistance, climate change, and flood, lagoons and rivers. It maps rivers as tools that uphold traditional political structures and song lines while simultaneously creating counternarratives that reconstruct colonial property history, revealing issues of dispossession among the landless. As maps are emblematic of imperial imagination, the project challenges neo-colonial visual unconsciousness and subverts Western cartographic practices by using the River Red Gum timber, rejecting paper as an industrialized colonial construct. This work questions the validity of Western cartographic authority and interrogates the notions of nationhood surrounding bushmen and stockmen as imperialist myths. It includes sites of horrific events, such as those documented in the June 1, 1917 publication War on the Bogan Frontier by Edmund Milne, Commissioner for Railways, N.S.W.
The Stories of Home collection, created through material gathering and working with family, culminated in the poem in Ngiyampaa language, marking a step towards connecting with the past. While not knowing all the answers can be unsettling, this process has brought healing and new beginnings. For my mother and I, it has fostered a deeper connection. We are planning our first trip to Nyngan and the Bogan River. The living belonging has been central to my journey of change, involving a process of letting go of perfection and embracing experimentation in co-authoring with Country.
The etchings of the Murrumbidgee River provide a line to renewal, invoking the memory of water. It has given me a deeper insight into the ecological threats to the river and to cultural connection. Once the home exhibition, is completed in Venice, the artwork will be burned in a smoking ceremony. I have coordinated with Dutch and Swedish friends to meet in Venice and participate in this act, breathing in Country. Kalimparr - Watery Kiyala Kunyan - belonging to shame Marrawal - for a long time Manytya muka - blocked Warraaykurri- down hearted Yumpawarra - always crying Kapili - cut off Yuuthi - too much Papila Wakanha - the fog is swirling Parraay- fast, quick Pill thaarriki - towards cross ways Kalki, kam, kalimparr - wild cool watery Thuku, thaarrun - satisfyingly strong Wirrpakali - split pierce Yarrurr - slow, steady Thaayngulu- fresh.
