HUNTING GROUND Incorporating Barbecue Area
Julie Gough (tebrikunna)
GASP (Glenorchy Art & Sculpture Park), nipaluna (Hobart), lutruwita (Tasmania). 2018.
Curated by Jonathan Kimberley
HUNTING GROUND incorporating Barbecue Area, is an outdoor installation consisting of two simulated billboards that draw attention to what are generally unquestioned structures and sites across the country. Julie Gough shares her ongoing interest in Barbecue Areas as loaded zones. These places, intermittently utilised today, were often, prior to British colonisation, the living grounds Tasmanian Aboriginal people, Gough’s maternal family. These places often provided, over thousands of generations, resources, shelter, and were vital sites of communication, celebration, ceremony and trade.
These two new works at GASP expand Gough’s original series (2014) by acknowledging BBQ areas located in two places of high significance for Tasmanian Aboriginal people. One oriented to the north-east, represents Gough’s family Country at the Bay of Fires in far north-eastern Tasmania. The other draws our gaze towards Risdon Cove, across the Derwent River.
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“These signs extend the project, HUNTING GROUND incorporating Barbecue Area, commenced in 2014. Today, these BBQ area sites with their simulated colonial hut structures, often deserted and disconnected from everyday life, represent, to me, the deliberate, senseless removal of Aboriginal people from their Country, the near annihilation of my ancestors. These places operate as resounding, inadvertent memorials of the intended absence of the original people of this island, amplified by the purposeful elimination of the evidence of our occupation. Many tens of thousands of Tasmanian Aboriginal stone artefacts are held internationally in museum collections – exiled from Country, as were my ancestors. These billboards at the relatively new GASP BBQ area highlight patterns and processes of colonisation and question how land is tellingly inhabited, what came before and what has always been here. These works are reminders of our continuing occupation of this island, against historic odds. We register and remember our missing and dead at ‘Risdon’ across the river, and honour the ‘Bay of Fires’, the home Country of many Tasmanian Aboriginal people.”
Julie Gough, Artist Statement, 2018.
