5 minute read
Shaped by the Sea
Dual perspectives of deep time Australia
The museum will soon unveil a new permanent exhibition, Shaped by the Sea – The story of deep time Australia. The exhibition heralds a new chapter in the museum’s life and vision and transforms the way it interprets the National Maritime Collection. By Senior Curator Dr Stephen Gapps and Indigenous Programs Manager Matt Poll.
Shaped by the Sea has three key themes: Land, Water and Sky. Production still from Dhaŋaŋ Dhukarr © the Mulka Project
01 An installation in Shaped by the Sea featuring fossilised teeth from giant sharks that lived between 2 and 30 million years ago. They were collected in the 1980s in Victoria’s Portland region – land that, long ago, was under water. National Maritime Collection 0004981–00050450 Image Jasmine Poole/ANMM 02 Preparing the centrepiece Larrakitj as part of the multi-screen immersive installation Dhaŋaŋ Dhukarr. Image © Buku-Larrnggay the Mulka Project 03 The Yidinji Dancers performing ‘Birriniy’ on Bramston Beach, Queensland, 2022. Image Matt Poll
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WAY BACK IN 2014, the museum embarked on a rejuvenation of our core exhibitions and stories. In a series of workshops, one of the key elements of the national maritime story was identified as our relationships with seas, rivers and waterways from the deep past. From 2018, under the co-curation of Stephen Gapps and the former Head of Indigenous Programs Beau James, the exhibition Shaped by the Sea was born. Shaped by the Sea is the first stage of a major redevelopment of the museum’s core exhibitions and will tell the story of maritime Australia from the formation of the continent and oceans to the present day. In many ways, our seas, rivers and other waterways are a living presence that frames our understanding of, and relationship with, the environment. For millennia, water has shaped the land, plants and animals and sustained ways of life, belief and culture. Importantly, Shaped by the Sea tells this story of deep time through dual perspectives – historical, scientific and archaeological, as well as the histories, science and knowledge of Australia’s First Peoples. As historian Billy Griffiths has noted, ‘In many societies seas are “sentient”, imbued with social and spiritual connections. They are places of culture, language and history, as well as science and law.’1 Shaped by the Sea challenges what we might traditionally think of as maritime history. Even the gallery space itself is designed with a structure of eddies and flows that create unique visitor journeys. It will be an immersive experience of water and time, with three key themes: Land, Water and Sky. These three elements will converge in the central space called, in Yolŋu Dhuwaya language, Dhaŋaŋ Dhukarr (Many Pathways). The stunning installation by the Mulka Project is a cyclic reflection on deep time in Australia. As the creators describe it:
Dhaŋaŋ Dhukarr is symbolic of the collective clans represented within the work and the journeys of their song lines performed throughout its cycle. The land, sea, and sky of the Yolŋu world are expressed through the song lines of the various Yirritja and Dhuwa clans. The elemental forms they represent are depicted by the Mulka Project, working with traditional media, contemporary senior artists and Yolŋu new media digital artists.
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01 This dhungala biganga (possum skin cloak) can be read as a map of the Moorundie (Murray) River and the surrounding landscape. Artists Treahna Hamm with Lee Darroch and Vicki Couzens (Yorta Yorta), 2006. National Maritime Collection 00039880
02 A ‘theoretical geography’ of the globe, drawn in 1757 by French cartographer Philippe Buache, shows early efforts by Europeans to understand connections between land masses and oceans. National Maritime Collection 00029305
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Hundreds of objects from the National Maritime Collection will be on display for the first time, including more than 20 artworks and cultural pieces from 19 different language groups across Australia and the Torres Strait. Last year, Matt Poll joined the curatorial team as Indigenous Programs Manager and has been actively commissioning several other works for the exhibition, including shell fish-hooks by Sharon Mason, a Yuin artist from Narooma on the New South Wales south coast, and Sheldon Thomas, a canoe-maker from the Bunurong people, Southport, Tasmania. Our modern understanding of the appearance of the Australian land mass is quite different from how the ancestors of the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island nations have seen continental Australia in the past. Where once were wetlands, today there are arid deserts; mountain tops have become islands and vast stretches of our coastlines that sustained generations of families are today buried deep beneath the oceans. Incorporating the presence of living cultural knowledge – not only that derived from archaeological or anthropological disciplines – is crucial in rectifying past museum practices of representing Indigenous knowledge without the input of those who bear the responsibility of maintaining it. The exhibition includes several areas where science and traditional knowledge connect, such as when the Yidinji Dancers perform ‘Birriniy’, an ancient dance that describes the rising seas of the north Queensland coastline that occurred thousands of years ago. Alongside this, a ‘coral forest’ display shows a series of coral core samples from Hummocky Island in northern Queensland and Coral Bay in Western Australia. As corals can grow slowly for thousands of years, core samples show marine scientists how these growth layers correlate to sea levels and the impact of river systems in the ocean. In an ecological context, it is important for museums to respectfully exhibit the vast Australian Indigenous memories of the world. In Shaped by the Sea, memories that describe the rising of the seas around Australia’s coastlines will sit alongside scientific explanations of coastal inundation and sea-level rise after the last ice age. Two different systems of knowledge will be woven through one incredible story of deep time Australia.
1 Billy Griffiths, Shaped by the Sea, 2022.
Shaped by the Sea – the story of deep time Australia will open to visitors in July. Admission is free.
