Resilience in Times of Adversity
Contemporary Responses to WW2 in the Blue Mountains 1939-1950
Curated by Vivienne Dadour
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Resilience in Times of Adversity: Contemporary Responses to WW2 in the Blue Mountains 1939-1950 is a Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Expose Program exhibition curated by Vivienne Dadour. Copyright © 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission from the curator and artists. ISBN: Online 978-0-949327-08-6 Print 978-0-949327-09-3 The Curator Vivienne Dadour wishes to acknowledge and express respect to the Darug and Gundungurra People as the traditional custodians of this land. Web and Catalogue design:
Rochford Press, PO Box 7008 Leura NSW 2780 https://rochfordpress.com/ contact@rochfordpress.com
Photography: Vivienne Dadour Image cover - Katoomba Greets You 1939-1950 – Photographic Collage. Vivienne Dadour 2019. A collage of photo’s represented in the exhibition Resilience in Times of Adversity: Contemporary Responses to WW2 and post WW2 in the Blue Mountains. Photographs form part of an archive represented in the work Snapshots by Vivienne Dadour. (Left to right) Unknown woman, Lily Lynn nee: Walter and Anna Tonkin nee: Ankoodinoff, Katoomba, c1950 (Courtesy Lynn & Tonkin family archives) Ben Chifley c.1943 (Courtesy Blue Mountains local History Library collection) Gunner Harold Gilbert (Digger) Cooper, Australian Army, katoomba, 1942 (Courtesy Aunty Carol Cooper family archives) Small Arms Factory Lithgow c 1940. (Courtesy Small Arms Factory Museum Lithgow) Katoomba Greets You, AIF march from Ingleburn to Bathurst, 1940 (Courtesy Blue Mountains City Library, Local Studies Collection) Australian Women’s Army Service-Ambulance Drivers, Elsa Wentzel (nee: Mayo), friend, Bathurst, 1942 (Courtesy Mayo family archives) Fehme Joseph ( lebanese original name Ghauulaub) Lithgow, c1950. (Courtesy Joseph family collection).
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Contents Curator’s statement – Vivienne Dadour............................................................... 4 Resilience in Times of Adversity - Anthony Bond .............................................. 7 The Artists .......................................................................................................... 14 Anne Graham – Keeping the Wolf From the Door, 2019........................... 15 Chris Tobin – Rivers of Blood #1-2, 2019 ................................................. 16 Fiona Davies – Coughing up Blood, 2019.................................................. 19 Sean O’Keeffe – Hoaxville, 2019 ............................................................... 21 Vivienne Dadour – Snapshots, 2019........................................................... 23
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Curator’s statement – Vivienne Dadour
“I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past has suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring…” (Keeping a Rendezvous, John Berger p9) Australia is often ironically referred to as ‘the lucky country’ and in terms of the calamitous effects of war in other places Australia has indeed been fortunate. However, the loss of young lives in both world wars and the consequent civilian trauma deeply influenced life in Australia. As it is now 80 years since the start of World War 2 only the very old can remember the impact of this war and of its aftermath. John Berger has pointed out that it is timely to consider ‘what the past has suffered’ – and how art can ‘make sense of what life’s brutalities cannot’. (Keeping a Rendezvous, John Berger p9) The 1997 exhibition Sarajevo, which I both curated and contributed to, was a response to the ethnic cleansing and cultural annihilation that was the cause of so much suffering and loss connected to that city and to its population. Curating Sarajevo provided me with a framework for the development of my ideas about the intersections between war, art and life. Joan Kerr in the Sarajevo catalogue wrote:
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Art certainly seems irrelevant when there is not enough food, warmth or water for survival…art alone can capture a specific war-torn moment or place for all time… Militarism, conflict and suffering that seem so universal allows artists to provide personal responses that mingle location, culture and values. It is through such an artist’s reaction that art can provide relevance to us in 2019. This is implicit in this curatorial project Resilience in Times of Adversity: Contemporary Responses to WW 2 in the Blue Mountains. 1939-1950. Through my research into other aspects of Blue Mountains cultural history cumulating in the exhibitions Correspondence: The War Illustrated. Woodford Academy, Woodford 2018; Illustrated: Women, Work and War WW 2. Explorers- Narratives of Site:Woodford Academy, Woodford 2017, I become aware of this time and the impact the war had on people living in the mountains. Consequently, the projects conceptual and curatorial framework was further developed to invite Blue Mountain artists, writers, historians and local community groups were invited to collaborate and participate in a contemporary art exhibition that focused on the personal, historical and political landscape of the Blue Mountains during, and post, World War2. Local artists were asked to submit proposals which shows that they had a working methodology that incorporated archival material in the production of their work and incorporated social and political issues through an understanding of contemporary research based art projects. Their proposals could document, record and/or visually interpret any aspects of the period in the Blue Mountains. The five artists featured in the exhibition work with a variety of media and have similar political and poetic intentions in stressing the lives and resilience of individuals and communities. The selected artists, and their field of interest are – • Anne Graham, an installation artist, who pays homage to the many women who worked at The Lithgow Small Arms Factory. • Chris Tobin, a Darug visual artist, acknowledges the struggles of Aboriginal soldiers who were an occupied people yet asked to be part of imperialistic war. • Fiona Davies, an installation artist, responds to the experiences of the returning soldiers with infectious diseases who suffered medical isolation in the Blue Mountains during WWII. • Sean O’Keefe, an installation artist and filmmaker, explores the fortitude of the many soldiers and military personnel who lived at Hoaxville in facilities that housed chemical weapons in tunnels and sidings at Marrangaroo Army Base in Lithgow.
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• Vivienne Dadour, a visual artist, presents snapshots of life through a collection of individual and community photographic archives. These artists are among the relatively few contemporary Australian artists who demonstrate a deep concern for the effects of warfare in their work. This exhibition reflects the many-sided nature of the tragedy of war and the resilience of the human spirit so that the objects and visual material in this exhibition complement and resonate with each other, giving a profound and disturbing testament of the universal effects of war. – Vivienne Dadour, 2019
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Resilience in Times of Adversity - Anthony Bond
Anne Graham – detail from Keeping the Wolf From the Door, 2019
This exhibition is based on the experiences of residents living in the Blue Mountains and the surrounding areas during the World War 2 and the years immediately after the war. All the artists have diligently researched aspects of life under the influence of the conflict however it is by no means a documentary project. Each artist brings their own visual history and personal language to bear on the people affected at that time. Art has ways of representing life that does more than inform. It may use differing creative strategies to bring the reality of events and their effect on everyday people into sharp focus by creating the potential for enhanced affective engagement. In some ways this can be as simple as “showing not telling” as a heuristic strategy. In the process of researching history and the society which lived through it, artists come across objects, places and images that bring us into close contact with what is already a distant and partly occluded reality. Each of the artists in this exhibition engages this kind of artistic expression. Artistic expression that may reveal something of the artists’ personal connection to the stories they unearth but most importantly the value of the art is not inherent in their personal experience. It is primarily about the way a creative person conveys that story to a viewer through a powerful physical exchange
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with the traces (materials and narratives) of history and peoples’ lives. Research may sound academic but when a good artist does the research it becomes a process in which they become enmeshed in the history or the subject. Many artists have spoken about becoming ‘at one’ with the object of their study in order to be able to deliver it through art to the viewer. I think for example of Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, and even ancient Chan Monks who meditated on a bamboo grove or a mountain till they became as one with it before making the decisive stroke of the brush which returns the experience of the thing to the viewer. Traces: in previous centuries, collectors have created assemblages of fascinating traces from the world and those combine natural objects: bones, stones, skins, man-made objects including weapons, ceramics, scientific instruments, love tokens. Some of these collectors arranged such objects in display cases as Wunderkammer or assemblages of wonderful objects. Such displays could at times be shown to guests and stories could be conjured from the things and the relationship between the things. The use of found objects came into mainstream artistic practice in the early twentieth century with experiments by artists including Picasso and Dada artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Surrealists Max Ernst, Roland Penrose, and Joyce Agee. Probably most strategically this was done by Marcel Duchamp, who notably added verbal and visual puns to the repertoire of wonderful found objects.
Chris Tobin – Rivers of Blood #1-2, 2019
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In the post war period, one of the most striking exponents of these strategies was Joseph Beuys. I turn to Beuys here not only because of his exemplary use of materials but also because in the same period as this exhibition addresses, he was deeply affected by the events of the time and set out to manage his memories through art. Beuys was traumatised by coming to terms with the Holocaust, not least because as an adolescent he was co-opted into the Hitler Youth and saw some horrible events in that context. He was also shot down five times when he was flying with the Luftwaffe, having a near death experience from which he was famously rescued by nomadic people in Crimea whose culture included strong shamanistic practices. He was smeared with animal fat and wrapped in felt (compacted animal fur) to help him recover from his burns and exposure in the icy wastes where he fell. These Shamanistic practices and specifically these materials became his trademark tools in making art in the early part of his career as an artist. Beuys grew up in the marshy country around Cleves in the far North West of Germany. His experiences of a childhood spent wandering round this wild country had a big impact on the way his art was to evolve. “Then came the interest in plants and botany that has stayed with me all my life. It started as a kind of cataloguing of everything that grew in that area, all noted in exercise books. Our games became more elaborate. We would go off hunting for anything we could find, and then we build tents from rags and bits of material so we could show our collections. There was everything from beetles, mice, rats, frogs, fish and flies to old farmyard machines or anything technical we could get our hands on. Then we had our underground spaces too: dens and caves in a labyrinth we tunnelled under the earth.” An important early work in the collection of the Hessiches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt is Stag Hunt, an accumulation of objects collected by Beuys over the years that continues this childhood practice into his later work including stags’ horns, bones, scientific equipment and chemicals. The bundles of newspapers were thought of by Beuys as ‘batteries of stored cultural matter’. Art is always somewhat subjective, which might seem to dilute accurate communication but the payload is the affective shock it can deliver precisely because of being felt internally. The use of everyday objects to bring on such shocks is a particularly powerful tool. Memory is the key to this effect. One of the artists in this exhibition spent some time working with elderly women in a home. Many of them had dementia, often having little or no recollection of their own stories. However, each of them was allowed to bring some object from home that had some special meaning for them. In the artist’s conversations with the women, the past seemed a remote place and yet when they were given the special object to hold their stories flooded out. However true or accurate these
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stories proved to be they were directly linked to important moments in their lives and loves. From these recollections, the artist was able to assemble the story of their life specifically relating to the objects that prompted them and created portraits using attributes rather than simply likenesses.
Anne Graham – Keeping the Wolf From the Door (foreground) and Vivienne Dadour s
Vivienne Dadour has long been researching and documenting lives in the Blue Mountains and the effects of warfare here and elsewhere in the world. The ideas for this installation were prompted by her friendship with Lilly Lynn who migrated to the Mountains in 1950 after growing up in Shanghai and living in Germany during the war. Dadour is also the descendant of migrants and has begun seeking out archives, personal and public, of families who have settled here, both from that time immediately after the war. The families have been enthusiastic and contributed generously to the archive and exhibition. Dadour assembled the imagery in albums that allow the viewer to engage with these material objects and literal traces of the past and come to identify with the history they reveal. In earlier work that she showed at the Woodford Academy, she assembled documentary evidence using original images from journals and archives held at the Academy including letters sent to locals from soldiers and relatives overseas thereby making a tangible connection between Blue Mountain families and events across the globe. Sean O’Keefe worked for several years in Lithgow teaching art and has involved his students in projects including film and audio records. While researching the fascinating local story of Hoaxville in Marangaroo, his students introduced him to another layer of history that has been veiled in secrecy since the war. Although known to some in local communities it has remained a dark and hidden part of the legacy of the war and those who knew tend to put it out
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of sight and out of mind. Hoaxville was a military base and research facility during and after the war. To protect it during the war it was disguised as a village complete with shops and even fake cows and chickens to fool potential Japanese bombers. Part of O’Keefe’s research was into chemical weapons, including mustard gas and even more damaging chemicals. At the end of the hostilities these lethal materials were stored in Marangaroo and it was not until relatively recently that some attempt was made to remove or bury them. The initial storage in mines and bunkers involved young soldiers, often unprotected, moving the materials from the base to nearby storage. As a result there were significant health outcomes for these soldiers who had little or no understanding of what they were exposed to. It remained secret as far as the wider community has been concerned till the present. One local has told us that people did not believe that if it was that dangerous the government would have allowed it to continue. However, a release of very large quantities of deadly phosgene gas would have had devastating effects on the Blue Mountains community. O’Keefe has made a transparent structure to house objects that relate to this story and the affect will be enhanced by the lingering aroma of mustard, lilac, and fresh cut grass.
Darug artist Chris Tobin tells us about a traditional creation story that brought the Waratah into existence. In the distant past two neighbouring clans in the district became involved in a conflict that turned very destructive so that the valley known as The Gully in Katoomba ran with rivers of blood. The spirit creator was dismayed by this destruction and as a memorial to human folly created the waratah flower symbolising the blood of the victims. Chris uses this
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as a base for the narrative of Indigenous men being induced to serve in the European wars offering their lives for the country that had been taken from them by colonial powers. On their return as we know many of these warriors were ignored and left to find their own way unsupported by the systems being put in place to support returned soldiers. The photo-works presented in this exhibition layer contemporary imagery of The Gully with Indigenous images of the original catastrophe.
Fiona Davies Coughing up Blood, 2019
Fiona Davies has been making a series of works dealing with the liminal spaces between life and death, illness and suffering and the isolation this can bring. During the war servicemen who had contracted contagious diseases such as Tuberculosis were brought to the mountains for treatment and to be isolated from the wider community. There is something particularly tragic about this quarantining of returned soldiers. After the horrors of war returning home must have been in their imagination about return to community and family not to exclusion from society. In this installation, Davies recreates the scenario of isolation but also the lack of privacy experienced by these soldiers. Her use of translucent materials invokes ephemerality possibly also of disappearance while an ex-ray of a tubercular chest also has that translucent other worldliness between life and death.
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Anne Graham has been researching the history of the Small Arms Factory in Lithgow. During the war as the men were dispatched to the front, their work was handed over to the women left behind. In the beginning the women worked creating weapons for the war effort. They came to Lithgow often with their children but there was insufficient accommodation for them in the town and they were compelled to camp out in the bush. After the hostilities the women continued to work in the factory but now their output was a more creative peacetime product, Pinnock sewing machines. The installation has been framed by a pyramidal structure in memory of these tents in the forest. Graham has previously worked with tent structures in a series of street installations that popped up in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane. In each manifestation the tent forms related to different stories. In Sydney the structure was an enclosure created by calico under the railway overpass in Woolloomooloo. In Brisbane and Melbourne the tents were standalone tents based on the refugee accommodation we all saw on television from the war in Bosnia and Iraq. In Canberra and Adelaide the form of the installation was based on military tents and also the makeshift tents used by early railway workers. This simple linear structure reflects the various forms of adversity and resilience referred to by this exhibition. Within this tent, sewing machines are raised on stacked stools that are covered in brass shell casings from 303 bullets like those used in the war. On the wall are photographs of the women camping in the woods and working in the factory making shell casings and later Pinnock machines. – Anthony Bond
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The Artists
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Anne Graham – Keeping the Wolf From the Door, 2019
The Small Arms Factory in Lithgow first opened in 1912 and many people came to Lithgow looking for work but there was nowhere for their families to live. As in WW1 families suffered, especially wives… In 1942 the Government moved less skilled men from the Small Arms Factory into the Services or food production replacing them with women. At work in the factory the women engineered a range of weaponry for use in the war effort taking on the work previously undertaken by the men who were now at the front… (Lithgow Small Arms Factory, A History in Photographs, a publication by the Lithgow Small Arms Factory, 2012) Many of these women, whose husbands were at war, had no proper housing and some had to make do with tents in the forest. I pay homage to these women and their capacity to cope resiliently. The triangular structure references their forest village of tents where they raised children, cooked, laundered and formed a brave community. After the war ended many of the women continued at the Small Arms Factory and were employed in the manufacture of sewing
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machines. My installation is a memorial to the many resilient, heroic men and women who carried on in times of difficulty in acknowledgement of their bravery and courage in keeping the wolf from the door. Anne Graham has worked with communities in Australia, Poland, Japan, Sweden and America to produce community responses to their environment and to enhance the community’s sense of ownership of a place or history. Her research interests focus on an investigation of identity and space. Graham is particularly concerned with creativity and its role in the formation of identityher definition of creativity includes cooking, gardening, walking and many forms of social and constructive activity as well as more conventional notions of art and craft. Graham is interested in the notion of memory and the mnemonic function of objects and materials as constructors of identity. Represented by Kronenberg Mais Wright Gallery - annegraham.com.au
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Chris Tobin – Rivers of Blood #1-2, 2019
Making an artwork that comments on the involvement of Aboriginal people in Australia’s war effort is contentious. This area of inquiry has for a long time been a very problematic one for me. In pursuing this line of thinking I found myself coming back again and again to one of the important cultural stories from my people that speak of the senselessness of killing and the far reaching impact to everything around us when we allow our conflicts to spill out into violence. In Aboriginal culture we are taught that the country holds our stories, Rivers of Blood is a story that narrates an indigenous perspective about the tragedy and loss that bitter fighting brings to us. It is one of the stories of the creation of the Waratah and has key elements of sacrifice and the good that can come through even great tragedy. This story continues to be relevant today and speaks volumes about the resilience of culture, country and community.
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Waratah story There was once a great fight down by the river when many mobs fought and so much blood was spilt that the river ran red with the blood. Many of the brother and sister creatures were unable to drink from the creeks and waterholes as they too were filled with blood and a number of the birds and animals left us, having to move away to look for cleaner water. The stories tell of the Sky Father Biami arriving shortly after the killings. They say he was so upset and moved by the senseless slaughter among his people that he wept. And where his tears landed in the blood of the slain warriors it was transformed to become the first waratah. The waratah reminds us that even after such tragic events something beautiful can come. ** Chris Tobin is a Darug man from Western Sydney who presently lives in the Blue Mountains. He works as an Aboriginal cultural presenter, artist and public speaker offering an insight into local Aboriginal history and heritage to all ages that wish to learn. Chris has served on a number of advisory boards, councils and committees over the years and was one of seven elected Darug representatives to meet with the State government in 2006 to try and work out an ILUA (Indigenous Land Use Agreement) as part of the Native Title process. In 2017 Chris helped establish the Aboriginal room at the historic Woodford Academy and has made himself available to be there for people at the Academy’s monthly open days. He also hosts an art camp in the bush at Bell in the upper Blue Mountains each Saturday for people who wish to connect better with the country and learn more about local Aboriginal issues.
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Fiona Davies – Coughing up Blood, 2019
During most of World War 2 tuberculosis was treated by isolation, rest, nutrition and clean air. Sanatoriums to provide treatment including isolation had been established in the Blue Mountains for many years and infected soldiers were often treated here. Coughing up Blood is concerned with an individual patient infected with tuberculosis, not the statistics on the total number of deaths or the frequency of infection, nor on the public health programs designed to reduce the numbers of infected. This work focuses on the sick returned soldier, alone, frightened and uneasy. It is the landscape of the liminal space of the patient in isolation, both physically and emotionally. They exist between the well, well enough and the dead, the soldier and the civilian, those “over there” in immediate danger and those in limbo at home. This is not a visually complicated work. The elements are stripped back to the minimum. You can see the hospital curtain, the inner isolation room, the empty bed and the back-lit image of the infected lungs. The beautiful but ineffective hospital curtain is made of silk paper hanging high above our heads unable to provide what is expected. It can’t be washed. It doesn’t give the patient any privacy, sight, sound or smell. Bad news given to the patient behind the curtain can be overheard by others on the ward. The bed is empty, the patient is elsewhere. Their absence is felt with unease by the visitor. They may have died.
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There isn’t a new patient in the bed yet. It must have only just happened. **
In her work Fiona Davies focuses on the liminal and temporal nature of death as it is framed by illness and disease within a hospital. Her solo exhibitions this year include Woven at the State Silk Museum in Tbilisi, Georgia and Cast a Cold Eye on Life and Death[1]: The Remake: Medicalised Death in ICU at SCA Galleries Rozelle. Earlier was Gore at the Joan Sutherland Theatre Penrith, and the first Turbine Hall commission at Casula Powerhouse, Blood on Silk: Last Seen curated by Lizzy Marshall. Her group exhibitions include three Kiosk exhibitions for MAPBM and Blood Attract and Repel at the Science Gallery, Melbourne curated by Dr. Ryan Jefferies. Previously she was awarded a 2016 residency by the Bavarian State, Germany for a collaborative project with Das KloHäuschen, Munich. www.fionadavies.com.au
www.bloodonsilk.com
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Sean O’Keeffe – Hoaxville, 2019
Exhibition view featuring Sean O’Keef - Hoaxville (left) and Anne Graham - Keeping the wolf from the door (right).
Hoaxville is about secrets. It speaks of the arcane amorality of war and the dark opprobrious compromises made during times of conflict. It whispers of the recondite and the shameful and reaffirms the adages that truth is a casualty. And that although the victor may not always write history, it may take some time before truths tenuously are revealed, like a gentle balm of lilac in the breeze. In 1941 the military base, Marrangaroo, Lithgow, was not only a base for chemical weapons it was disguised to look from the air like a small country village to prevent attack from Japanese air raids. Dubbed Hoaxville, the elaborate subterfuge was highly detailed with shop fronts, houses, schools, a church and grazing animals. Soldiers and military personnel dressed as townsfolk hiding the complex and secretive military work behind its floral curtains.
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** Sean O’Keeffe is a practicing artist, filmmaker, teacher and writer. He works in a variety of mediums ranging from video, painting drawing and site specific sculpture. Sean’s art practice has generally been a response to the environment he lives in and since 2005 has largely been a response to the environment of The Blue Mountains. www.seanokeeffe00.wordpress.com
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Vivienne Dadour – Snapshots, 2019
Vivienne Dadour – Snapshots, 2019
Snapshots attempts to articulate the conditions that existed for life and the forces that confronted individual and common realities in a time of great adversity. Consisting of an archive of approximately 200 photographs from a combination of historical society archival collections and contributions from the local community, this project is a commentary on ordinary people living extraordinary lives. Through these images the complexities of identity and place in the Blue Mountains Region during, and after, World War 2 are revealed. Inspired by an amazing story described 20 years ago by a very close friend Lily Lynn nee Walter about her journey growing up in Shanghai, living in Germany with her family during WW2 and then migrating to Katoomba in 1950 to meet with members of her family who, through the intervention of the International Red Cross had already migrated to the Blue Mountains. Lily often shared a family album of photos, which included snapshots of self, family and places conveying the details and emotions of her journey. As I also come from a migrant family, Lily’s story resonated with me providing the motivation for this project. After moving to Katoomba in 2014, I found myself drawn to finding traces of her experiences. Consequently, I became
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passionate about investigating personal, historical and political landscapes in public and private archives and collecting documents and contextual material that refer to this period. From 2015-2019 I met with individuals and communities in the Blue Mountains and regional areas and asked them to select photographs that represented for them memories from 1939-1950 they would like included in an exhibition that reflected this dramatic war period. The photographs they contributed- snapshots of migrants, servicemen and women, war workers, volunteers and civilians elicit a remarkable wealth of information about survival and resilience and provide a strong sense of time and place. Events are also displayed such as the first public radio transmission from inside the Katoomba mine c.1940; the opening of the Katoomba Boys and Girls Library and Craft Club in1942; the march of 4,000 soldiers from the A.I.F through the Blue Mountains in 1940. In this exhibition some of the pictures are accompanied with a story and have been enlarged, cropped and /or interpreted in such away as to reveal and emphasize the story behind the picture. I have re-presented the pictures in the form of photograph albums where each album reveals snapshots of lived experience. Each album has been displayed in the gallery space in such a way as to suggest the idea of a meeting place of memories. Thus creating a meditative art space that allows viewers to contemplate the impact of the war on the lives and experiences of these people and consider the resonance of their time on the present. Viewers collaborate by finding stories that might be lost and/or recognise and become themselves an element in the archive. Thus, the material in the archive itself is extended to have a sense of ‘living’ and relevance. A complete list of Snapshots acknowledgements can be found at https://resilienceintimesofadversity.com/vivienne-dadour-snapshots-2019/ ** Vivienne Dadour’s curatorial and artistic practice is deeply committed to the social relevance of art. Since 1992, her interests have included political and social issues concerning racism, cultural difference and the complexities of identity. This has led her to seek interpretive strategies that challenge aspects of mainstream political discourse while encouraging dialogue and fostering understanding and tolerance of diversity. These interests have conceptualized Dadour’s past and current research based contemporary art exhibition projects that involve ethnographic and archival research-combining images, contextual materials and text, while focusing on working collaboratively with specific communities.
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Dadour has exhibited her work nationally and internationally being included in many public and private collections including Australian War Memorial Museum, Campbelltown Arts Centre, New England Regional Art Gallery, Maitland Regional Art Gallery and NSW University Art Collection. www.viviennedadour.com
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The curator wishes to thank the following people and organisations for their assistance with this exhibition: Many thanks to the exhibiting artists and their galleries for their wholehearted participation in this project. Thank you to Anthony Bond OAM for his advice and constant support. Thanks to Mark Roberts and Linda Adair from Rochford Press. A special thanks to Emeritus Professor Liz Ashburn OAM for her expertise and time. Many thanks to the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Staff for their ongoing support and guidance - especially Sabrina Roesner, Exhibitions Manager at the Gallery. Thank you to the many contributors for their memories in the form of photo’s and storiesVictoria Lynn Danielle Smith nee: Poulos Len Norman Louis Dean Jill Dark John Low Ian Rufus
Margo Shiels Peter Poulos Vince Budwee Marilla North Ken Goodlet Marilyn Nuttall Aunty Carol Cooper Family
Jane Roderick Tony Joseph Freda Coorey Fiona Scott Betty Lenham Ralph Bennett
Lithgow High School, Small Arms Factory Museum Lithgow, Stitches Women’s Clothing Shop Lithgow, Mt Victoria & District Heritage Museum, Katoomba RSL, Local Studies Collection, Blue Mountains City Libraries, Blue Mountains Historical Society, Leuralla Toy and Railway Museum, Evatt Family, Woodford Academy, Everglades, National Trust Copyright © 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission from the curator and artists.
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