Yhonnie Scarce
Missile Park

The earliest work in the exhibition, The day we went away was produced during Yhonnie Scarce’s final year at the South Australian School of Art in 2004, where she undertook a major in glass. The medium of glass has continued to lie at the centre of the artist’s practice. Scarce has become an expert glassblower and frequently works in collaboration with artisans at the neighbouring Jam Factory in Adelaide. As catalogue essayist Daniel Browning has observed, ‘Scarce has almost single-handedly created a medium-based genre of Indigenous art that is without precedent’. A found suitcase containing a collection of bush bananas, The day we went away speaks to the histories of displacement and dislocation related to the removal of Aboriginal children from their homelands and families, and to the experiences of Aboriginal people being sent to missions, to foster families, into domestic servitude, and to work as itinerant labourers. In counterpoint, it might also refer to the suitcases of colonisers and missionaries who imposed themselves on Aboriginal communities, extracting resources as well as exploiting human labour.

As white European settlers took up farmlands in remote South Australia in the nineteenth century, they were met by resistance from local Indigenous communities who fought to retain their traditional homelands, hunting grounds and waterholes. Now documented as part of the frontier wars, the 1849 Elliston Massacre was the culmination of a series of reprisal attacks that resulted in Aboriginal people being shot or herded to their deaths over the cliffs of Waterloo Bay, South Australia. Whilst colonial records are limited and underestimate the death toll, recent scholarship confirms that at least fourteen Wirangu people were killed at the site. However, oral histories have circulated since at least 1880 that more than two-hundred Aboriginal people lost their lives at Waterloo Bay. Yhonnie Scarce’s work Blood on the wattle (Elliston, South Australia, 1849) memorialises this distressing, and until recently, unacknowledged and contested history. Scarce’s Perspex coffin contains four-hundred blown-glass, black bush yams, which stand in for the unknown number of Indigenous people killed at Elliston, and for the many unknown Aboriginal people who have died as a result of colonisation. Seeking to redress the lack of memorials dedicated to the Aboriginal narratives of Australia’s frontier wars and massacres, Blood on the wattle preceded the public memorial to this event that was eventually established at Elliston in 2017 after much public contestation.

From the moment the British colonised Australia in 1788, settlers encountered active resistance from First Nations communities as sovereign people defending their lands. Known as the frontier wars, thousands of Aboriginal men, women and children were killed in these exchanges, with violent massacres strategically deployed by colonists to eradicate Indigenous people from their Country. Yhonnie Scarce’s practice has a memorial function, exploring the far-reaching impacts and legacies of colonisation, government policies and historical atrocities committed against Aboriginal people. Acknowledging the lack of public monuments dedicated to the frontier wars, What they wanted is one of numerous works by Scarce that memorialises First Peoples who were murdered as a result of colonial violence and subsequent genocidal government policies. The cruciform format of the work also alludes to the historical role of the church in these events.

Dinah Coleman is Yhonnie Scarce’s great great grandmother. Her photo was taken at Koonibba in the 1920s, a Lutheran mission on Wirangu country near Tjutjuna/Ceduna, in remote South Australia. The photographer is unknown, but the image coincides with photographs taken by anthropologist Norman Tindale who visited Koonibba in 1924. Dinah is one of a number of works by Scarce that retrieve historical photographic images from the containment of colonial archives and liberated them from the restrictive focus of the ethnographic gaze by recasting them as treasured, aesthetic, family portraits. In these works, the artist makes delicate, hand-crafted glass gifts, or offerings, to her ancestors, in an act of appreciation, reverence and respect. Here Dinah is presented as though above a mantelpiece, in the manner of a family portrait at home, accompanied by a collection of precious bush plums. This act of reclamation serves as an intimate memorial to Scarce’s great great grandmother, whilst also affirming the enduring influence and importance of ancestors and family connection to the present.

Working class man (Andamooka opal fields) is a portrait of the artist’s grandfather, Barwell Coleman, pictured with his daughter Beverley—one of a long line of assured, resilient women in Scarce’s family—looking on confidently in the background. In search of a better life for his family, Scarce’s grandfather worked in various jobs, including as an itinerant labourer, shearer, and as a miner. The photo is taken on the Andamooka opal fields, not far from Woomera, where Scarce was born. The original image of Barwell is enlarged from an intimate family photograph, imbuing her grandfather and aunt with presence and dignity. In this shrine-like installation, Scarce gifts her late grandfather a collection of glass yams, bestowed in an antique bucket, which echoes that in the pictorial field. In Scarce’s work, the anthropomorphic figure of the yam attests to the inherent connection between people and country and, equally, to the importance of family networks across country. These precious and sustaining bush foods also refer to Scarce’s inheritance of the fruits of her grandfather’s knowledge, labour and love of family. As with the accompanying portrait of Dinah, Scarce pays homage to her ancestors, sharing their significant stories in the present.

Bush foods, such as yams, bush plums, and bush bananas appear repeatedly in Yhonnie Scarce’s work, attesting to the abundant and sustaining nature of the land, as well as to the significance of Indigenous ecological knowledge and connection to Country. In works such as Burial ground, and the accompanying Blood on the wattle (Elliston, South Australia, 1849) 2013, also in this room, the elongated heart-shaped yam figures are uncannily anthropomorphic. They lie here in memorial to ancestral figures who lost their lives in the frontier wars defending sacred ground. As a resting place exploring the darkest parts of Australia’s colonial history, Burial ground also refers to ecological destruction—to the devastation of Country—as a direct result of colonisation.

Symbolically deploying the material of glass as both a lens and a mirror, The cultivation of whiteness focusses attention on historically racist scientific theories of assimilation. This work is underpinned by the litany of harsh and degrading abuses suffered by Aboriginal people in the name of scientific and medical research, including the practice of eugenics and biological theories in the construction and ‘cultivation of whiteness’. These practices also led to the forced and systematic removal of Aboriginal children from their families, known as the Stolen Generations, who were placed in white Australian families as a means to ‘breed’ out their Indigeneity, and ultimately Indigenous people as a whole. In The cultivation of whiteness Scarce presents sixty bush bananas, yams and plums in sixty glass beakers, each bearing an uncanny and disturbing resemblance to embryos, hearts, and kidneys. Extending the length of the gallery walls, these organ-like objects are presented in taxonomic fashion, like an enduring timeline of the continuing legacy of policies and practices that continue to have traumatic repercussions for Indigenous communities today.

Yhonnie Scarce’s new commission Missile Park continues the artist’s research into the British nuclear tests carried out in Australia in the 1950s and ‘60s. Born in Woomera, and belonging to the Kokatha and Nukunu people, Scarce’s extended family were displaced from their homelands after tests were carried out at Emu Field and Maralinga—a region now zoned as the Woomera Prohibited Area. Scarce has returned repeatedly to her birthplace to investigate the effects that nuclear tests and radiation have had on local Indigenous populations and the landscape, much of which remains inaccessible today. The installation Missile Park encompasses three sheds that reference the temporary dwellings established by the military at Maralinga during the height of nuclear testing in the region. Echoing vernacular Australian architecture, each structure houses twenty bush plums, a native food found on Kokatha land. These glass orbs, redolent of Country and sustenance, bear a strange resemblance to both atomic bombs and the umbilical cords of fallout babies. Contained within these dark and tomb like structures, Missile Park becomes a memorial to the scores of unmarked graves, to hidden burial grounds, with each plum symbolising a life lost. Glass is a material of particular significance for Scarce: made of silica, or sand, it is derived from the landscape, from the materiality of Country. Silica naturally melts to glass at intense heats—or when struck by lightning or nuclear fission, as is the case with the vitreous landscapes at Maralinga. For Scarce, glass serves as an especially relevant lens to expose and memorialise these histories.

First presented at the Biennale of Sydney in 2014, Weak in colour but strong in blood is one of several works in the exhibition that critically refers to histories of scientific, medical and anthropological research conducted on Aboriginal people, including harmful and degrading theories and quasiscientific practices of eugenics, anthropometrics, the blood quantum debate, and the racialised ethnographic gaze. Presented in the ‘white cube’ of the gallery space, the clinical and forensic environment of Scarce’s installation is further emphasised by industrially scaled infirmary curtains and cold steel hospital trollies. Our attention is drawn to collections of glass forms, presented as specimens on display, which are subject to varying degrees of scrutiny, categorisation, contortion, and deformation by scientific and medical implements. These ‘eviscerated organs’, as writer Daniel Browning has referred to them, recall the historical collection and dissection of human remains by colonial museums around the world in the name of scientific and ethnographic research. The title Weak in colour but strong in blood also offers a counterpoint to these troubling and traumatic histories, referring to the strength and resilience of First Nations peoples in maintaining cultural knowledge and identity, and keeping culture strong despite these historical abuses.