CHRISTOPHER PEASE MINANG BOODJAR 2019
Christopher Pease, Reaper, 2015, oil on 42 art boards, 168x294cm (collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia)
Christopher Pease, Souvenir, 2016, oil on canvas, 200x165cm (collection, National Gallery of Australia)
Christopher Pease, Hunting Party 2, 2018, oil on canvas, 170x290cm (private collection, Melbourne)
Christopher Pease, Target 3, 2017, oil on canvas, 155x290cm (collection, National Gallery of Australia)
Christopher Pease, Bidi Karta Werda (Path Across), 2018, oil, resin and ochre on canvas, 170x290cm (collection, National Gallery of Victoria)
Christopher Pease, Handshake, 2017, oil on canvas, 170x290cm (private collection, Brisbane)
Christopher Pease, Kartwarra, 2019, oil and Balga resin on canvas, 150x290cm (private collection, Melbourne)
Robert Havell (engraver) after Robert Dale, Panoramic View of King George’s Sound, part of the Colony of the Swan River, 1834, engraving, colour aquatint, watercolour, 18x275cm collection, National Gallery of Victoria
Minang Boodjar is the ancestral country of the Minang people, a small and biologically diverse area tucked under the south-west corner of Western Australia. In this fertile pocket of land, undulating hills overlook a spectacular sound dotted with rocky islands, and unique native flora and fauna sustained the hunter gatherer custodians for countless generations before first contact. This is Christopher Pease’s ancestral home.
In 1829, a fleet of three ships arrived here from England to establish a new colony. On board the HMS Sulphur was Lieutenant Robert Dale, an explorer and draughtsman sent to document the new land and its people. The culmination of Dale’s endeavor were detailed drawings of the plants, animals and native inhabitants drawings that were later developed into a celebrated linear series of etchings - titled Panoramic View of King George’s Sound, Part of the Colony of Swan River. The ambitious, three-metre-long work deliberately presents a lush landscape ripe with agricultural potential. In the foreground at one end of Dale’s Panorama, a British general and an Aboriginal man shake hands, implying harmonious relations between the natives and new settlers But the real story behind Dale’s peaceful Panorama is not so idyllic. In 1834, Dale returned to England with his drawings, along with the severed head of Aboriginal Nyoongar leader, Yagan, who had been shot dead, skinned and decapitated for offences against the settlers. In London, Dale gave the preserved head to Thomas Pettigrew, a surgeon with a penchant for scientific curiosities. In a contextual discord, Pettigrew publicly displayed Yagan’s severed head in front of a copy of Panorama, a work intended to promote the new colony. Pease’s paintings, collectively titled Minang Boodjar, faithfully replicate key sections of Dale’s Panorama. Epic in scale, each work is intended to focus attention squarely on the magnitude of Dale’s propaganda, challenging the colonial art canon and the story it tells. Pease has overlaid each image with contemporary iconography, visually butchering Dale’s narrative in the process.
Fleshy reds stain the surface of four of the paintings, while the remaining works use the blood-red resin extracted from the Balga tree for similar effect. Works such as Souvenir, Handshake and Kartwarra contain the most recognisable symbol of death, the human skull, which references Pettigrew’s dinner parties where Yagan’s severed head was the main attraction. Pease likens these object to faceted jewels, precious both to those interested in the macabre curiosities of the new world and to the Nyoongar community who, some 150 years later, sought repatriation of Yagan’s skull to its rightful home. Reaper’s tarot-card depiction of a large skeleton casts an ominous gaze over country while Target places the familiar symbol of concentric rings over the land (boodjar) and its people (the Minang) – the objects of the British conquest. In his most potent bid to reframe the narrative, Pease embeds Handshake with poignant markers of dispossession and repossession. Large landscape sections are’ erased’ by the colour of blood though red Minang body markings remain evident. A wire-frame contour (based on a painted image of Yagan’s shrunken head by Englishman George Cruikshank) occupies the stone summit of the work, laying claim to country. Mid-composition of this graphic work is ‘the handshake’ between a British decorated soldier and an Aboriginal man, seen perhaps as the embodiment of Dale’s elaborate fiction. The artist pixelates their hands, obscuring the white, romanticised version of history, perhaps even rendering it obscene. Armed with a combination of colonial imagery, library records and historical documents, Pease confronts the white settler accounts of history. Herein lies the strength of his work; using western frames of reference to lay bare inconsistencies. He invites a deep questioning of the myths propagated by early explorers – and indeed their claim on land which had been home to the Minang/Nyoongar for many thousands of years.
AFTER MORE THAN A DECADE OF LOBBYING BY WUDJUK ELDERS, YAGAN’S HEAD WAS REPATRIATED FROM LIVERPOOL TO PERTH IN 1997 AND REBURIED WITH TRADITIONAL CEREMONY IN 2010, A CEREMONY WHICH CHRISTOPHER PEASE ATTENDED. THE LINES WHICH TRAVERSE BIDI KARTA WERDA TRACE YAGAN’S JOURNEY HOME FROM LIVERPOOL BACK TO PERTH.
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