An Ominous Blending of Cultures

A quick word before I begin: I am including my amateur shot of the sculpture Edge of the Trees which is the subject of this posting. I am also including a hyperlink to the piece’s page affiliated with the museum’s website, which includes both a description of the sculpture which I refer to as well as a professional photo of the piece. This photo, a far better effort than mine, is where I draw my ideas and interpretation for this post – the ingenuous perspective of the shot lends a different meaning which will become clear through the course of this essay. 

http://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/exhibitions/edge-trees

Art is another way that we tell stories about ourselves. Interpreting the world around him or herself, an artist makes commentary on the world around them in ways both overt and subtle. In other words, art is an embodiment of culture. Outside of the Museum of Sydney, artists Fiona Fowley and Janet Lawrence have made just such a statement on Australian history and identity, suggesting that Australian culture is forever in conflict with itself, unable to reconcile its violent past with its present prosperity.

            Commissioned and built with the opening of the Museum of Sydney in 1995, Edge of the Trees is a sculpture of sandstone, wood, and steel arranged in twenty-nine pillars. Each pillar represents one of the Indigenous tribes in the area of Sydney when the English first arrived and began colonization in 1788. Various organic materials are visible within the pillars through windows, while names of botanical species in both Latin and Aboriginal languages as well as the signatures of First Fleet settlers are carved into the wood. When one moves through the “forest”, faint voices can be heard naming parts of the Sydney region now swallowed by urban development as they were originally known in Aboriginal language. The piece is meant to mirror the setting of first contact, where Indigenous people stood in the forest watching as the invading English came and took their homes.

            Australian culture has always been and continues to be a concept almost impossible to define in certain terms. Australia has been an amalgamation of various cultures and peoples from its very beginning. In more recent times, Middle Eastern and Asian cultures have further diversified just what it means to be Australian, but the original mixture of cultures which has led to modern day Australia was that of the English colonizers and the Indigenous tribes. Taken in isolation, the Edge of the Trees sculpture is an obvious reflection of this blending. Recalling the original English settlement, Fowley and Lawrence have visually rendered the intertwining of British and Indigenous culture which took place and has continued since. Place names and fauna are written in both Latin and Aboriginal language. Indigenous Koori voices whisper the place names of Indigenous sites now built into European metropolis. Wood and sandstone, the old materials of Aboriginal and early European Sydney, give way to the steel pylons of today. The sculpture is a literal fusion of cultures old and new, Indigenous and British.

            Yet while the sculpture on its own is an overt statement of blending, when viewed in conjunction with the surrounding cityscape, the piece takes on a more subtle, nuanced, and foreboding meaning. Placed in the center of the Central Business District of downtown Sydney, Edge of the Trees is quite literally overshadowed by the multitude of steel and glass skyscrapers penning it in from all sides. From the vantage of a viewer within the forest of pillars such as the one in the linked picture, taking on the perspective of an Indigenous person watching the English landing on Australian shores in 1788, a more ominous and threatening feeling takes hold. From within the trees, the European metropolis is hungrily leaning over, eager to swallow up this last open space within the city and incorporate it into the Western, capitalist society which has already devoured the rest of the Sydney region. This last refuge, itself touched and altered by the invading hands of European First Fleet settlers with their foreign place names and strange Latin script, is not safe; the wood and sandstone pillars, with their Indigenous echoes, could at any moment be destroyed and replaced with more metal. Read in this way, the piece is not just a bland statement on the blending of white and Indigenous cultures, but rather a harsh rebuke to the policy of reconciliation and subsumation into a Western, homogenous Australian nation, a process which can be seen across Australian literature as described by Graham Huggans, as well as in current governmental policy.

            On one plane, Edge of the Trees is a piece about the fusion of white European and Indigenous cultures which has formed the modern Australian identity. Yet from another perspective, the piece assumes a more critical tone, showing the predatory colonialism infused in the Australian experience. This conflict charges through the sculpture, which continues to serve as a thought-provoking storyteller and commentary on Australian culture worthy of such a prominent place in the center Sydney. Sydneysiders would do well to reflect for a moment on the portents embedded within Edge of the Trees.