Country and the Home

This conversation between artist Steven Rhall and artist/researcher Jack Mitchell was held inside the home at 43 Anderson Street, Werribee, as part of [AT HOME] Wyndham. Rhall and Mitchell discuss Kait James' work Hang Us Out To Dry, installed nearby in the home's kitchen – as well as their experiences and understandings of the home, Country and belonging within First Nations cultures.

Steven Rhall:

What a unique coming together on Bunurong Country here, just not too far from Wadawarrung Country, acknowledging that we're on the unceded lands of these peoples and also bring a range of all our own connections to places and Country. It’s great to meet Jack in real life after a brief Zoom recently around this conversation that we're having, this yarn today, and obviously within the context of this project, which has been interesting to see from afar. Just acknowledging that, it's not a conflict of interest, but I work for Wyndham City in the arts and culture team. I'm here today as an independent artist, which is refreshing – and probably wouldn't change much of what I'd say anyway. Only just a little bit.

Within our Zoom, Jack and I just sort of had a bit of an intro. I will speak about Kait’s work, and that's within the context of having known Kait for a little while as well. But before I do, Jack, if you wanted to say anything, I can ramble a lot and I don't want to take up all the space.

Jack Mitchell:

I'm happy to listen to your rambling. It's good. I don't know much about Kait James' work, I have to admit. I'm sort of encountering it for the first time. But I was excited to meet you. I was fanboying a little bit, as someone who's trying to transition from architecture to art-making more full-time, and finding that movement a little sticky. But both of those worlds or platforms or environments are opportunities to talk about and think about similar kinds of things. And home is one of the major aspects of that: home, culture, place and belonging.

I would also like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of this unceded Country that we're on, the Bunurong people, and acknowledge my ancestors, the Whadjuk Noongar people, and the other stories and histories and relationships I bring to this place. And recognising that I'm a guest here, as we all are, including the owners of the homes we're in all over the country. [Home ownership] is still a temporary form of belonging that has a different kind of connection and jurisdiction that's afforded to it by systems of colonisation that are, in one way of looking at it, kind of false, shallow modes of belonging to place, I think.

I'm interested in the layers of that belonging and the layers of the ability to belong that we have, and the different depths that I experience coming back and forth, especially from my home on Whadjuk Country to Naarm, Wurundjeri Country, Bunurong Country. I've lived and worked here and each time I’m deepening cultural practice, deepening cultural understanding, deepening my own sense of belonging within myself, within my own being, within my own heart. Just experiencing that kind of pulsing back and forth, deepening, shifting sort of practice. But yeah, if you want to talk about Kait’s work because you're a bit more versed on that than I am.

SR: I think one way of reading Kait’s work is that it’s about the tea towel as much as the work itself, which is maybe a can of worms related to materiality, but perhaps there's an ambiguity around what the work is, what the narrative is. In commonly working with text, placing text onto these tea towels, the idea of the work could be encompassed by the text itself, but it sort of maybe mirrors these layers that you've touched upon already. There are multiple perspectives and potential ways, I guess, to understand place and concerning Kait’s work, it sort of embodies this duality of the found object. These tea towels were mass-produced in the 70s as part of the broader tradition of kitsch Aboriginal art souvenirs, and Kait is sort of playing with their form. Looking at her work, I started to wonder about what maybe led the people who bought them originally to do so, because I've got a couple myself, and all the ones I've found and purchased have come through multiple owners given I'd find them in op shops. There's a couple of these kitsch objects that have found their way into my home, inclusive of maybe the ideas and the stories of the individuals that had them in between myself and their manufacturer.

There's the ideas of the stories that could otherwise be represented by the symbols on these tea towels as well. To think about their content; there are shields and there are bodies and maybe ceremony there. How accurate might those images or stories be? Was this potentially produced by someone expressing their own cultural practice? Or maybe more likely, was it a capitalist opportunist going, 'Oh, this sort of stuff sells. I'll just do my own idea of what Aboriginal culture might be’ – or taking it from secondary sources such as maybe anthropological records. 'I'm just going to rip these images from so-and-so’ – who maybe came as an uninvited guest to parts of this country. If there's appropriation of Aboriginal culture, symbology, art, etcetera in the found material here, Kait, interestingly from my perspective, is also employing, purposely maybe, appropriation with regards to tropes of popular culture. I was saying to Jack, the KLF song 'Justified & Ancient’ – some people might remember that track. One of Kait’s tea towels, not in this work here, says 'Unjustified Nation’. She’s sort of using these slogans that sit across political movements and histories. For this project that we're all part of today, it's interesting to have it presented in the kitchen. I was expecting them, incorrectly, to be hanging off the oven rail. But the house has been appropriated itself as part of the broader project, which speaks to a question of where might the art objects start and finish?

JM: Yeah, it makes me think of the balance between the sacred and the mundane in that sense, of the object of Indigenous culture, whether that's an image – say, a reproduced image of a shield, not the shield itself – but then even if it's the shield itself, it's not the shield being used within the cultural practice; culture being what we do, how we belong. And so there's this kind of reproduction of this thing that's then used in this other format of belonging in the kitchen of drying hands and doing dishes and this mundane kind of thing and this balance. The original cultural pattern that defines that way of being, way of belonging, has been kind of transferred and that can feel people wiping their dirty hands on it or throwing it in the dirty washing. But I've often wondered – you talk about that capitalist opportunist who may have thought this sells – but I often wonder is it a malevolent or a cynical opportunistic kind of approach, or is someone genuinely thinking that that's a way you might celebrate that, if that is your culture of belonging, if you operate within this kind of capitalist framework and the market that you're kind of a part of.

SR: Yeah, I guess that's interesting with regards to how, if it was not malevolent, if it was a benevolent sort of action –

JM: Or not even, just; that culture of capitalism operates through people. When you belong to that culture, the cultural practices that you are within and belonging to, you end up kind of inhabiting without necessarily seeing that. I mean not always, there's also just straight up cynical exploitative kind of practices. But I dunno, there's something sort of innocent about the tea towel too, and especially the way that it is then within a culture; there is something sacred about the mundane in that capacity too. In that simple way of cooking, home; that's an attempt to belong, an attempt to operate within the sacred within a sort of cultural framework of family and belonging – but it's within the house context, which is private property on stolen land. So there's these kind of jurisdictional cultural boundaries or borders, that create cultural patterns that people belong to within these wider things that are not fully understood.

It's like 'Oh, this is my kitchen, this is how I operate and feed my family and do the dishes.' And in terms of that idea of capitalism acting through people, there is a sense of 'I've got a right to this house, I bought it.' But there is a lack of understanding that there's a wider framework, in a deeper time and deeper cultural sense, operating on this country. So I'm not framing actions as malevolent or benevolent, but just highlighting a lack of understanding or a lack of somatic felt knowing of what belonging is.

SR: I enjoyed listening to your essay that you wrote for a previous Ian Strange project on the way in the pouring rain. I couldn't read it, I was looking at the road, but I just had my phone sort of speak it to me in a very mundane robotic voice, which sounds quite different to yours. It speaks to similar considerations as to ideas of cultural practice, let's say in a temporal or historical sense, having been carried out and continued in particular ways, and that were and in ways still are carried out in unique ways to our many different cultures. But thinking about maybe cultural practice in a contemporary sense in the current day: I live in a home, I've got one of these tea towels and it sparks a conversation with my dad, non-indigenous side of the family. I thought we might we consider home and country with regards to moving around to different places and living in different places; how it relates to our own relationship to our ancestral ancestral country and I guess ideas of community.

I work in an identified role at Wyndham, First Nations creative arts officer. I think it's partly the premise of this project that we're doing something at Wyndham due to its massive expansion and growth. I still easily get lost in the maze of endless streets and houses that sort of look the same here. Working with the local community, many of us have been displaced through the practices of colonisation. My role in the job, or just as a First Nations person anyway, is just to listen. And what I'm hearing is about this cultural practice occurring in different ways that are maybe tied to deep historical practices, but also the things we do every day inevitably within suburban spaces such as this. I'm interested in how the home and the built environment as we see it now, how there's a merge of this built imposed layer on country with what is still a living, practicing culture that occurs geographically, locally within the walls of place, but with respect to the community that also holds culture as well. I'm curious as to your thoughts around that.

JM: I've been thinking a lot recently about language and where language comes from, and obviously culture and language are intrinsically linked and the language contains within it implications of cultural relationship, philosophies, cosmologies, worldviews; and carries with it so much more meaning than direct translations of the lexicon. There's lots of theories of language development and a lot of that comes from archeological or anthropological studies, which are inherently colonial in how they operate. And I think Aboriginal people understand – Aboriginal culture often talks about the idea of language coming from place. It's a kind of vibratory emergent relationship with place; it's country speaking to you, the languages that are place-based.

And so in terms of that sense of home or belonging, it's like the language that we speak to each other, which is English for the most part with other languages as well, obviously in different pockets and areas and orders of preference for speakers and things like that, but generally we speak English. But the country that we're on, no matter where we are, no country here speaks English. And our culture is also a language in a sense, in terms of movements and patterns and what we do and culture carrying with it cultural values that what we do shares to country; how we think about it, how we feel about it, how we respond. It communicates; it can communicate humility, it can communicate love... and we obviously do that linguistically, but we do that culturally by what we do, backing up the language that we speak.

And I think there's this thing that's happening at this point in the history of mass migration that has happened over the past millennia or few centuries, but especially in Australia, which has only been a few hundred years, that we're all collectively trying to learn how to belong here and doing that in suburbs. But I think we're building and developing and urban sprawling and in-filling and we're trying to work out how to keep up with this migration, population growth, while we still don't actually know how to belong here, we don't how to communicate to country. So it feels like a very slow process of trying to harmonise and work out how to belong in each of these places. And so people coming to different places, especially here in the west, there's a lot of migration from other countries – not just settler-colonial histories, later waves of migration – and lots of different cultures bringing their own culture here, trying to work out how to fit that in. And often that can be supported or not supported. I always come back to that sense of the sacred. It was interesting, in that work of Damien Laing's on display with the churches – how people always try to work out a way to worship, to practice culture. And I think one of the things of the sacred and home ownership and property ownership is, to me it feels like anything that becomes commodified immediately becomes less sacred or de-sanctified.

SR: Less a part of the language. When there's quite often this physical overlay with little to no consideration of Country, you can really feel that disembodiment from language and connection. And that is maybe ironic, because within each of our homes, as families or in any sort of configuration that we live within these places, we are otherwise striving for belonging and connection.

JM: We're yearning for belonging, I think, in a way that we don't often allow ourselves to realise. And what we want to belong to is place, to Country, in a deep way. I think we all have cultural memories of times when we did belong in a much deeper way. And I think, especially throughout Western Europe and places all over the world really, histories of empire and warfare and disconnection and migration and all these things that have been slowly engendered over time into our bodies and hardened our hearts for survival. And over time we sort of lose cultural safety, and to me that's what culture and ceremony and ritual sort of does – it allows us to refind that cultural safety, familiar patterns where we feel held by this kind of pattern of engagement to allow ourselves to more porously open up and soften again to Country, to be able to become more resonant instruments that can feel. And I think it's hard to feel that within cities, and as cities spread out we feel more of the city, we don't feel Country as much anymore. The wider body of culture has hardened.

SR: I'm reminded of our Zoom and you sharing your experiences of moving to different places and having a particular difference in experiencing, I think you mentioned Smith Street for example. Many people Indigenous or otherwise might think of Country as being very much embodied by the physical and the ground that we're on, but it's more than that. It's complex and layered and I guess beyond the otherwise generally accepted notion of what gives something a presence or an existence, there's this loosening, a loosening of that calcification that we maybe inherit through various histories, in order to connect to Country.

JM: Yes, and to feel country to truly feel it. I think to truly feel it, you have to be able to feel everything that you carry too, that's in your heart, that's been developed over time, grown through that lineage that all hearts are grown in. There's a story; Uncle Noel Nannup, a Noongar elder, we spent some time recently doing a project looking at the history of the crayfish. We went up to this place where the original crayfish dreaming site is in Western Australia. It's up on the border of Yamatji and Noongar Country. He shared some stories about that border and how that border was delineated in the way that say two suburbs might be. But the border between Noongar and Yamatji Country was delineated by the Greenough River. But the Greenough River, it has flood plains that would sort of come out to the coast and there's three pools on there where the original crayfish Dreaming sites are. In a certain time of the year, the winds from the north would blow the red dirt, the pindan from the Pilbara down and cover the flats of the Greenough River, which are the area called the Greenough Flats, which is just this big wide flat expanse on either side of the river. And when it was covered in that pindan, it was considered Yamatji Country. And then when the rains came and it washed the red dirt into the river and back out to the sea and expose the harder rock underneath, it would return to being nomar country. And so this idea of where cultural and language groups met; there's nothing fixed about it. Your whole idea of where your responsibilities were, the borders and boundaries and your Country, that was changing as well but it was also very clear. I think there's a loss in the fixed and muted way we treat Country through the grid of ownership.

He was also saying that on Noongar country, the Moodjar tree, which is a sacred tree to Noongar people and the Xanthorrhoea – the grass trees, the balgas – they thin out as they get up closer to Yamatji Country; but wherever they were, that still denoted Noongar Country. It's just such a beautiful thing to be able to allow you to belong to a place, if you think about it in those terms, if that's what's going through your mind as opposed to: 'This is my house because I own it. This is my borders, this is my boundary, this is my neighbor and this is what it's worth.' That's how we all live and that's fine, but it's also a loss.

SR: That's a really interesting story about how Country would change with the seasons; it's a much more flexible idea, maybe even of Country expressing itself and changing, that is quite contrary to the Western idea of demarcation. And I guess in some ways in living in the time that we do as First Nations people, it's unfortunate that part of reclamation and revitalisation of culture and connecting to Country is partly via the Western lens. The need to define where Country starts and where it ends outside of that much more, I guess for lack of a better way of putting it, organic nature.

The Weariby Yallock, the river here, is similarly a fluid – no pun intended – boundary between the two lands that we're situated on. That perspective and story is emblematic of not only less defined boundaries, but it also speaks to broader types of interfaces and relationships between different mobs and also to that idea of it being not only linear, as the Western perspective is. The idea that things just keep going and then it becomes something else. That there's this vertical line, which is actually part of that complex but beautiful potential for Country, and expression of Country as well. [It ignores] the various ways in which we can be part of and sort of feel Country as well; having these little boxes and grids maybe sit in the way of the potential for any of us to access that nuance.

JM: I've had a few people, including Wadjelas, express this feeling of being shut out from that nuance and wanting to find that nuance and recognising that disconnection from that nuance, but not knowing how to access it. But it's emotional too. It's really sad, I think, because there's so much more beauty, life is more beautiful in being able to experience Country in that way, and the impediments to that and the damage to that incredible amount of time, that forever of people experiencing country and living in that way. And it also, that denotion of, I guess, responsibility; the foundational principle of a culture in terms of treatment of land and place being belonging, and therefore [the responsibility of] looking after it for the continuation of that belonging, as opposed to ownership.