Bearing Witness
Bearing Witness (left), Imagine Freedom (right)
I began this month making collages with maps, wanting to explore these as both a placemaking activity and a way to map where I stand and what I stand for.
As the events of this week unfolded, these maps have been an important part of documenting world events and my personal responses to them. How do we rewrite history? By bearing witness with our stories.
This week has been extraordinary in a year of other extraordinary events. It started with bushfires, which were then overshadowed by a pandemic and now rolling protests resulting from the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.
The world is waking up to the endemic and systematic racism which has pervaded all walks of society for hundreds and thousands of years. In Australia it has been here since the first English man claimed Aboriginal Australia for the British crown and raised the union jack flag. First Nations peoples around the world tell the same story.
History as they say is written by the conquerers. So if we want to change the present and the future, we must start be telling our own stories. Bearing Witness to what we are feeling and how we can express it.
At the start of the month, I pulled out my maps of New York and Minnesota, having been there seven years ago for a series of art events. However these maps were soon replaced with those of Sydney where I found myself circling the suburb of Redfern and reading about the Redfern Riots and what caused them.
Redfern has a significant Aboriginal population and was the site where the 2004 Redfern riots erupted outside the Redfern railway station. These were sparked by the death of T.J HIckey, an Aboriginal teenager who was riding his bike, when police chased him by car and Hickey was impaled on a fence and died.
A subsequent inquest acquitted the police from any responsibility of his death. The Hickey family is still waiting for justice and an apology from police. A shocking story. No wonder there were riots.
I didn’t know this. But as I map myself into this Australian story, I am learning about the everyday occurrences such as this which have gone largely unreported and unnoticed in the Australian media and consequently, the Australian population.
I am mapping, and as I map I reveal my own personal stories. Like mapping the black lives matter rally in London with an old map my grandfather brought back from his visit there in the 1960s. In a letter to my parents he wrote that he was shocked at the amount of black people on the streets of London. And so the personal stories of casual racist comments are remembered and revealed.
When I was researching my play The Widow of Wappan in the later 1990’s, we had a launch of the project and I am ashamed to say that we hung the Aboriginal flag upside down. When I learned of my mistake, I was shocked and horrified. My excuse was that it had been flown so little in my circle of the world, that I didn’t know the correct way up. As it was pointed out to me - red is always at the bottom and you can remember that because the blood runs down to the ground.
We learn, we make mistakes, we fail and we get up and try to do better the next time. We are undoing generations of stories that insist that white is right. I am trying to rewrite my stories with new maps to guide me forward into a better future.
Redfern (left) Rallying Cry! (right)
