other[wize]: Jenny Fraser
Catalogue essay, ISEA 2006

There is no denying that past policies and actions continue to impact on Indigenous cultures and art today. In the construction of race relations in this country, Indigenous family histories, with their ties to Native Title and the stolen generation, are overtly politicised. Many Indigenous and postcolonial writers and artists have explored these themes, evoking questions of identity and belonging, displacement and dispossession. It is through our families and kinship that we come to know ourselves and our home – where and how we belong. In her multimedia installation, other[wize], Jenny Fraser recounts and reflects on her family history, and she describes it as ‘celebrating the lives of Mununjali family members that were moved from their traditional homelands in South East Queensland, to work on properties in the Gulf of Carpentaria’. Memory is pivotal and, as Salman Rushdie writes in Imaginary Homelands, ‘the struggle of man against power ... is the struggle of memory against forgetting’. 1

Despite her engagement with family history, Fraser has not produced a family tree or presented her ancestors as objects of anthropological scrutiny. She has, instead, mapped her own sense of place and belonging across language, land and bloodlines. Her work is more subtle and gestural, comprised of small fragments and clues, pieces of mysteries we cannot readily decipher. Other people’s families are like that. We look at them for myriad reasons, sometimes to get another view of our own families. Fraser said that uncertainty and grasping at the unknown ‘reflects how many Aboriginal people experience family histories’. Specialist research units now exist in libraries, universities and other institutional sites to assist Indigenous people piece it together. In other[wize] we sift through these pieces, without benefit of narrative, relying on our own experience to navigate across maps and negotiate the faces of the people, never really formally introduced. Encountering nameless old photographs in albums, we can’t help but wonder, perhaps filling the silence with our own memories. With each photograph, Fraser sparingly shares parts of her story and, with each photograph, more questions are raised than answered. Remembering is motile; it keeps connections alive. Marita Sturken writes

No object is more equated with memory than the camera image, in particular the photograph. Memory appears to reside within the photographic image, to tell its story in response to our gaze ... Yet memory does not reside in a photograph, or in any camera image, so much as it is produced by it. The camera image is a technology of memory, a mechanism through which one can construct the past and situate it in the present. Images have the capacity to create, interfere with, and trouble the memories we hold as individuals and as a nation. They can lend shape to histories and personal stories, often providing the material evidence on which claims of truth are based, yet they also posses the capacity to capture the unattainable.2

When looking at photographs, we sometimes like to touch them. We might brush our fingertips across them as if attempting to reach into them, to make contact with those posed figures and to animate them. Touching the sepia past in this way is an act of remembering, perhaps longing, passionately splitting across absence and presence, distance and proximity. The focus of other[wize] is Fraser’s Grandmother’s Grandmother, Granny Clark as she is known in the family, born on the bank of the Logan River around 1860, about the same time that Queensland was proclaimed an independent state; the border of New South Wales having been traced around the bends of the river which also delineated the Bundjalung tribal boundaries, following the scar trees that marked that border. She is a legend in her own right and shown standing stoically before a corrugated iron wall or fence, wearing Victorian dress with her silvering hair in a bun. Her family was forcibly relocated from their traditional country (around Mount Tamborine) to work on stations in the Gulf country. Such oral record does disrupt white Australia’s history that ‘slavery’ didn’t happen in this country – these movements were not the choices of free people – forced movement, forced labour.

We can’t know this woman or her story simply by looking at a photograph of her – the story isn’t made apparent in other[wize]. We must interrogate this picture and try to make some sense of it by reaching into what we might know about the history of this country. Fraser, having heard the stories from within her extended family, explains that her Granny Clark was a midwife who bore 15 children of her own – ‘She smoked a pipe ... She had a lot of “useful skills” like sewing because she grew up on Tamrookum Station. Then she worked on stations for her whole life and she helped a lot of people cause she was a midwife. She delivered Aboriginal babies and other babies as well.’ 3 The know-how of Aboriginal people in these remote situations kept those stations in operation and kept those white settlers alive. Having moved around from station to station, Granny Clark also never lost sight of her homeland or the fact that she was Yugambeh.

A white sheep in the family was Granny Clark’s father, Englishman Lieutenant Frederick Wheeler, of the Native Police who, according to historians, was renowned for his brutality. Bill Rosser notes that he was described as 'cruel and merciless', 'the most callous and brutal officer', and a 'sadist’. 4 It’s worth noting that in talking about Wheeler, Fraser doesn’t refer to him as family but as an ancestor. He occupies another kind of place in the memory and recollection of bloodline and, with references such as ‘the father of my Grandmother’s Grandmother’, Fraser stops short of relating this patri-linearity. Through her research, Fraser made new discoveries about her ancestry, such as Wheeler’s mother having been a Sicilian noblewoman. With his career in the Native Police spanning nearly 20 years, commencing in 1857, The Rockhampton News reported, upon his retirement, that he ‘inspired the aborigines with such a wholesome dread’ that the mention of his name sent them ‘yelling pell-mell into the bush’. A year later Wheeler was recommissioned to a Native Police camp near Clermont where be fatally beat a young Aboriginal man. He was subsequently dismissed and charged with murder. Having been responsible for the massacre of Indigenous people, there’s a peculiar twist of fate in Wheeler being charged for this one particular murder after a career built on mass executions. The irredeemable officer did a runner and several differing stories of his whereabouts circulated. He apparently died in Java in 1882: some claimed that Aboriginal people killed him or that he had returned to London or fled to America.

No mention is made in various accounts of Wheeler’s life that he had Aboriginal children and Fraser doesn’t foreground him as particularly relevant in her way of knowing and recalling her family. Like the ghostly white man who is pictured arrogantly presiding over a troop of Native Police with his sword crossing his chest, his presence in the family is spectral and unnatural. No, we can’t choose our relatives and for Fraser the Native Police are a colonial aberration through which tribal rivalries and racial violence were acted out. 5 In other[wize] Fraser also takes a swipe at the ‘history wars’ and the accusations, by the likes of Keith Windschuttle, of fabricated evidence in relation to massacres. In accounts of white settlement, the Queensland frontier is repeatedly regarded as the longest and bloodiest war between blacks and whites in Australia. For the duration of this conflict in the 19th century, the Native Police were integral in ‘dispersing’ Aboriginal people. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Henry Reynolds explained the role of the Native Police in the period 1840 to 1907, describing them as a paramilitary force:

For most of that time their instructions were to "disperse" large gatherings and punish any attack on Europeans or their property. In 1861 the Attorney-General told the local parliament that it was foolish to hide the fact that ‘disperse’ meant to shoot at … As far as I can judge they never made any arrests, never brought in a prisoner, never initiated proceedings resulting in a trial.6

In searching for the truth in the archive and by dismissing the oral record, Windschuttle uncritically exhorts the history of a white virtuous nation. He believes that the facts are as they are represented in those documents. Yet the oral record persists, perhaps fragmented, and Aileen Moreton-Robinson is one historian who provides a corrective: ‘we must surely accept the fact that everything that happened in history was not written down … Not all massacres were recorded by whites nor were all bodies retrieved and accounted for. Aboriginal people know this because we know where the bodies are.’ 7

There is an ‘other’ world of knowledge and knowing place and time. There are other stories here too and in other[wize] Fraser is putting some of the fragments together as reinterpretation, rewriting and retelling. The story is much longer and more enduring than a mere one and a half centuries. Her Granny Clark kept it all alive and the first incarnation of Fraser’s work will document nine stories focused on family. She will continue to develop nine stories at a time. Produced during her Arts Queensland Creative Fellowship in 2005 and using Linker, software developed by UK artists’ collective Mongrel, the work has a dynamic interface through which rollovers and clicking uncover the fragments. As Mongrel explain, ‘Linker takes nine images and creates a layout or ‘map’ with them. From this initial layout, the software enables you to create links to sounds, images, text, video clips and also to other parts of the map and different scale views of the map.’ 8 The work manifests as an ‘artefact of digital culture’, featuring an interactive field of images, sound and non-linear connecting. It is reminiscent of a digital quilt, another image of familial continuity and passing on, comprised of photographs and other images, a patchwork of community and family life.

The first screen of other[wize] features nine glyphs coupled with Yugambeh words. Fraser completed a language course at Yugambeh Museum in Beenleigh. The glyphs each represent some aspect of life, such as a handsome man (bue’laguan), bunya (bua’ni), fighting (na’bulela), kill (bum’a) and land (bug’geri). Each glyph leads the viewer/user to a series of images that comprise the story. Historical and family photographs appear with more recent shots such as the photographs of a small timber church in Beaudesert under a stormy sky, a bunya nut dropped to the ground to be gathered as sustenance and the burning sunset over the Mununjali homelands. According to Fraser, the story titled bum’a focuses on ‘the last crocodile that was killed near Yatala. So it’s a story about the Bunyip. All these settlers went to kill the Bunyip because it was killing other animals like dogs and cows and that. So they killed it and found out it was a crocodile but it was really old, over 100 years old. And that was about 100 years ago.’9 Highlighting the frontier mindset and ignorance of white settlers, the story depicts the destruction and lack of understanding of the environment together with the creatures that inhabit it.

The man represented by nar’dhung is Fraser’s Great Grandfather who is pictured with his austere Irish wife. Yet he also had an Aboriginal family in the bush. As a stockman who drove cattle from Cairns to Boorooloola, he ‘had some money to throw around’. He took an interest in photography and set up a dark room, thus instigating the family’s critical relationship with the photographic image. A suitcase of photographs is also one of the family legacies; now in keeping with her Aunty Sue Featherstone, Fraser’s Grandmother passed on the photographs. There’s also a picture of her Great Uncle, one of the family eccentrics and hermits, holding an accordion. He owned a tin mine. Another uncle worked with the Afghans and rode a camel. Fraser’s stories are quite humourous - gentle and warm anecdotes that might ease the sting of a cruel history. The stories are life affirming and redolent with the teachings of previous generations. To know your history is to know yourself. As Fraser says, ‘my grandma’s generation… she was always positive about things even though it was not all good … There's nothing really pleasant about it. But people still had to live after that anyway. And through that. It’s good for me to document and articulate it anyway because in Queensland a lot of people ignore stories like that, especially artistically.’10

Fraser draws on the strongest and oldest traditions of her culture – storytelling and visual storytelling – and works with them in a technological space to achieve dislocating and disorienting effects. While she generously shares her stories, she stops short of making it too available and too readable to those whose primary means of representation is the written word. Clearly, the work of history is yet to be completed. We all have some responsibility in reconstructing the history of this country, to be mindful of the silences and to listen for the unrecorded. For Fraser, Other[wize] is an act of recovery, meaning both healing and reclamation. She has been recovering – learning her language, reconnecting with her homeland and extending readings of her family history to reflect on historical events. As in her earlier work, Murri All Stars, Fraser is keen to explore the nexus of fact and myth through the legendary and the epic. She seeks to re-establish the continuity, so devastatingly disrupted, through acts of remembering and recovery. The stories are told through photographs – but not appropriated photographs of the anthropologised nameless plucked from the archive – so as to tell deeply personal and inspiring stories that are inextricably bound to, perhaps contradicting or undoing, the lies of history.

Notes
1 Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books. 1991
2 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The Aids Epidemic, and The Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997
3 Jenny Fraser interviewed by Mark A. Peart. Emailed 13 October 2005
4 Bill Rosser, Up Rode The Troopers. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. 1990. 93
5 See National Report Volume 2 – The Role of the Native Police. Reconciliation and Social Justice Library. Accessed 17 October. 2005. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/rsjproject/rsjlibrary/rciadic/national/vol2/10.html
6 Henry Reynolds, ‘The perils of political reinterpretation’, Sydney Morning Herald. 25 September 2000.
7 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘The Whiteness of Windschuttle’s Worries: Aboriginal history and the national character’. The Ideas Book. Ed. Linda Carroli. Brisbane: UQP. 2005. 66-67
8 Mongrel Linker website. Accessed 18 October 2005. http://www.linker.org.uk
9 Mark A. Peart. op.cit.
10 ibid.