 Yeah Okay, we are waiting for you, please come back to the audience Okay, thank you everyone. Okay. Thank you for coming back and we also want to thank Kenny for Cooking cakes for us Sorry, can you hear me now? Yeah Okay, sorry for being late because we need a better quality picture and we put a black curtains behind it and Yeah, I hope it now better and thank Kenny for the cake and Sir our next speaker will be Dennis Ferris I won't be introducing her with the background because we saw her yesterday and We already saw some photographs downstairs from here. So I just Yeah, welcome Okay, okay, hello So I'm looking for a page one and that would be a really good start Okay, so I'm gonna talk quite a lot about photography and art because actually The reason I'm here is that I know very little about heritage Certainly in academic sense So Chandra the place that I'm speaking about is an abandoned mining township on the banks of the Yukinbein River nestled high in the Australian snowy mountains In 1859 gold was discovered at Chandra It's an isolated series of open valleys among mountains exposed to wind, weather and usually snow In winter 1860 80 Chinese miners arrived and their numbers swelled to over 700 But a decade later Just about 150 remained but they were in fact half of the residual population of Chandra at the time a small little town 20 years after that two stores shops owned by Tom Ayan and George Archie were central to in fact that small community Tom Ayan who's buried in Chandra had seven children and through his descendants in the district a lineage lives on That lineage therefore lives on in us and on in our Australian identity From the bustling 1860s the township declined and the last resident moved away 100 years later in the early 1970s Now uninhabited on the ground at the main Chinese camp between two large rock outcrops Overlooking the river. There are fragments of domestic lives shards of pottery broken glass scraps of tin and Rusty wire in the landscape stone water races dams and modified waterways remain as monuments to the Chinese and to their mining practices Ironically the physical evidence of the miners endures while their recorded presence is overlooked and in fact our understanding of their lives Aspirations and fates is completely absent So I will tell you four stories The stories are mine and theirs and ours and ours mine story one 2011 I Returned from China's Bingyao International Photography Festival and sitting in the Chandra courthouse Which was the the only building that had been refurbished at that time heard an Aboriginal elder mention the Chinese gold miners who'd been there I Thought in that instant about connection between their place and that place China and my place this place. I started photographing walking the land reading research about Chandra and Help by an enthusiastic heritage officer in the national parks Identified Chinese sites Previously at I'd understood Chandra simply as a ski place as an abandoned town where snowy mountain scheme workers lived So it's in fact the many layered quite contested site The way I understood it was about to take a radical change In Chandra standing on a rocky ledge the sleep slid down the glass of my lens Pointed towards the east and Chinese camp discernable between clumps of large and smaller boulders Focusing intently on the space between wipe and blur a wind blast knocked me to the ground I Thought about men living under canvas and clambering into my four-wheel drive headed towards shelter and warmth In 2012 I exhibited the photographic series Celestial Spaces which I made during a Chandra residency and I thought and I exhibited that at the Pingya International photography festival in China I I hoped in Pingya that even one of the thousands the thousands that saw the show would recognize a familial connection to an isolated corner of New South Wales an Isolated corner of New South Wales where these people went more than a century before No one came forward So this next part of The presentation is actually about the work Celestial Spaces Now the work that I made Celestial Spaces, which some of you have seen downstairs informs my thinking about the second project, which I'm we're just beginning and which is the reason that I'm here Because it occurs to me that I'm now what seems to be in a heritage space rather than a fine art space So this photograph surveying the mind landscape Establishes place and shows my first site in counter with Chandra It brings in to notice aesthetic subjectivities relationship to my practice What I saw and how I see The pragmatic use of land for mining is also quite clear The weather and the landscape place are introduced As aspects of my account of Speakers in my account They call emotion and they call location In the broader context of identity Simon Pugh makes the point about landscape symbolic uses Pugh says landscape Landscape is stood as a surrogate for the more politicized notions of nationhood a Displaced expression of sentiments of attachment which are denied expression elsewhere and as a source of spiritual strength a moral therapy end of quote This view of landscapes emblematic role and national identity is corroborated in Amory Willis's chapter nation as landscape in her book illusions of identity In all kinds she says in all kinds of contradictory narratives a national character is seen to spring from the land Timeless tough resilient and imprint itself on people who have so recently inhabited it end of quote the landscape photographs of celestial spaces and could assume a coherent uninterrupted Australian identity however Any unquestioning attribution of a soul hermetic identity is disrupted disrupted by the existence of the residual Handmade landforms and discernible land markings that you have just seen Celestial spaces is a series of 10 12 20 whatever large-scale Paired photographs or diptyches photographs of in fact absence The word spaces indicates just that gaps in interpretation and knowledge of the enigmatic site Where otherworldly skies bring down to earth tempestuous weather? So the word celestial is also sort of summoned the left photograph and each diptych Foregrounds the working sites of the Chinese miners The partner photograph on the right Shows shards or the archaeologists call them sheds of ceramics bowls pipes cups and pots Evacuated from the Chinese dwelling places Domestic material touched and used by the Chinese miners in daily life Walking the desolate paddocks of the abandoned town of kaiandra only absence remained Where in once there had been congested cheek by jail presence? What my photographs could display I came to clearly realize Was their own incapacity to offer a comprehensive explanation of the Chinese miners stories? These narratives remain missing and this is the catalyst for the future project which we call at the moment visible voices Through misalignment the formal construction of the photographic series needed to make clear the spaces and our existing There is a forced encounter in the diptych arrangement While inviting consideration and Making sort of pseudo formal connections. It was questions rather than answers that would be the conceptual key to these photographs But of course these are fine art photographs unadorned and unexplained Just opposed uncomfortably these photographs are meditations on our lack of awareness Their mutinous suggests an exclusion of the Chinese gold miners from the social record The title Celestial Spaces addresses both unearthly presence and expanses Spaces sky and gaps the words are ambiguous The Celestial or otherworldly lingers around traces of previous habitation Worn ground litter with tin stone hearts water races evoke occupation The idea of space is intertwined with place Liz Wells the photo historian teases out the meanings of space in her book Land Matters Well says quote Space is conceptually complex and sometimes apparently contradictory It may refer to that which is not known and that's cannot be precisely categorized end of quote The language of the title Celestial Spaces flags to a viewer That there are uncertainties The force connection of these two Unalike views for grounds disparate ways of both looking in other words to photographic viewpoints That way and that way up and down The formal strategy that breaks aesthetic rules Signals imaginative thinking is required with very much active viewing going on Collections have long formed our knowledge of the past and The diptych also reveals two methods of collecting visual evidence The image the photographic image the visual and the material evidence is also depicted Talking about this work as landscape photography We can think about the kind of postmodern Grounded aesthetics that landscape photography in a postmodern Photographic context Always thinks about formal thematic concerns, but always is situated within socio historical context. It's very Rare that landscape photography is torn out of its historical or social context now Susan Sontag of course is effusive about the limitations of photography Sontag said Photographs are offering invoked as an aid to understanding and tolerance, but photographs do not explain they acknowledge and quote It is this constraint on photographs and their mailable meaning I used as a trope in Celestial Spaces I Challenge the enduring expectations by viewers that photographs Inevitably ipso facto reveal evidence and that this information subsequently Manifest knowledge and that knowledge leads to understanding on the other hand Photography is successful in bringing forth perspectives on the world through its evidence selections and It's clear-cut acts of choosing Putting aside Sontag's view of photography's constrained possibilities Sarah Parson notes writing on Sontag quote her All art is empathetic in that the making of art necessarily acknowledges something worth preserving in the subject end of quote This drawing to attention through vision is crucial to all my efforts Liz Wells says quote vision with all the weight of the double-ondre associated with the notion Constitutes a form of knowledge Furthermore the act of observation brings into being what is being observed end of quote so it's that call of attention that Paying of attention or the honoring as I'll mention later The social context during the gold rush migration in Australia Included the publication of Charles Darwin the origin of the species This is not insignificant in view of the book's impact on thinking about attitudes to race and culture In inventing Australia Richard White argues that the origin of the species quote was very much a book of its time Darwin's theories also suited the social order For the rest of the century social Darwinism as this misapplication of Darwin's ideas came to be called Was used to justify the oppression of one group by another end of quote From the 1850s the increasingly poisonous Visualization of the Chinese in Australia would have an impact on the community and the township of kaiandra The circumscribed location of the Chinese camp and its separation from the township Raises issues that are pertinent to current migration waves in Australia So the Chinese were actually moved from the main town to the eastern section Quite away from the township where they lived in their own kind of Chinese camp Very reminiscent of some things that happen now The socially prescribed arrangements for living and for dying in kaiandra Continue to resonate now as I will show later story to theirs So why do the questions raised by celestial spaces matter? so what The partnership of Tom Aryan and Catherine warts their seven children and their descendants is recorded At that time different religions and ethnic groups were buried in different parts of the kaiandra cemetery Recently someone relocated Tom Aryan's freshly handwritten grave marker adjacent To the grave site of his wife Catherine Johanna warts in fact uniting them in death I don't believe Tom Aryan is actually buried in kaiandra at all anymore He might have a grave marker, but it was pretty usual to To in fact Rebury people's remains in China. I'm not quite sure about Tom Aryan, but This gesture here which moves this marker near Catherine warts as grave site So it it to publicly restate the connection between Tom Aryan and Catherine warts is a statement about devoted interest from someone The gesture recognises dormant narratives that await activation and the importance in fact of setting the record straight Actually in an interesting aside when Tom Aryan and Catherine warts are living in kaiandra one of their children Maggie Yan Could be conceptualised as the first Australian ski champion because in fact She was a she won all the ski races in kaiandra So it's really interesting to to think that the first Australian ski champion was I know lots of you people think there isn't Snow in Australia. There's there are very large snowfields. They're all in national parks, but Yes, Maggie Yan who was some From a German mother and a Chinese father was the first Australian ski champion I really liked the idea actually so the construction of an Australian identity with authenticity is a powerful inducement to unfold history stories Feeding into a far more complex national identity than is currently acknowledged These narratives these stories will reveal and include some currently missing from the social register Okay, story three ours by Easter 2013 all four of kaiandra's remaining buildings had been refurbished and were open to the public Including former residents for the first time in decades So residents who'd lived there and raised some of their children there who are snowy hydro electric scheme workers Not not really any of the miners from obviously the earlier days that had all finished but residents in the next layer of Heritage if you like I Showed celestial spaces in the courthouse where visitors streamed into the room sheltering from the bit of cold Among these visitors. I noticed a man with Chinese features as he looked at my photographs I engaged him in a discussion of their origins in a few words He provided me with what I had failed to obtain in China a Corporal link to the past Simon C whose pictured here with me told me he was the great-great-grandson of a man named Chi one of the not the 1860s kaiandra gold miners Exhilarated amazed and emotional. This was the foothold in the present I had sought providing an arc to the Chinese gold miners miners of an unexamined past Simon's story of his family the cheese nourished my expectations for the public exhibition of my series This familial connection offered me another motivation to the question. So what? Celestial spaces as me and Simon laughing Was pretty wild made me made me cry actually anyway so Celestial spaces was a kind of honoring attention Photography's power that gale jones Protagonists in her book 60 lights equates with quote a kiss because it is devotional physical End of quote showing respect and taking notice the photographs of celestial spaces Signified the emission from the public record called us out on the gaps in our record called us out on The overlooking of the Chinese immigrants But nevertheless it could not fill those gaps The next project visible voices, which is the working title needed to achieve that and So begins a project to populate these spaces in the imagination of an audience Which is gathered because the subject matter and its protagonists captivate them move them as an audience emotionally and Make them emotionally available to the stories that we will research so the next project is a very different project and it is a group of disciplines and While it's foregrounded in art It has a range of people From a team that I have formed So visible voices is a collaborative project rather than multi-disciplinary a team who have strong disciplinary interest in kaiandra These disciplines collaborate by contributing their disciplinary perspective to the whole They make kind of like a multi-layered rainbow cake layers perhaps distinct or combining as an entity in the virtual museum that we are going to make Visible voices will explore the synergies also of those interpretive frameworks as part of the research questions The project will trace knowledge and understanding and make a two-way dialogue from the perspective of Chinese history Inviting Chinese interpretations and familial stories The project aims to examine the role of art and scholarship To historiography and to the tension between evidence and imagination Participating disciplines include history archaeology museology heritage computer science and visual art With diverse research disciplines come different modes of collecting of course intimate history oral history archaeological evidence museology and Heritage hopefully as a verb The new media technologies of virtual reality and hyperlink web-based information offer a way to create a browser based virtual place Virtual places have the ability to evoke a sense of presence or being there in users Establishing a non-destructive Visitation to an experience of the site and its monumental wonders is a core outcome of this project So the site is fragile the audience is global and It will be non-visitation for obvious reasons Virtual places therefore offer the twin benefits of connecting remotely located people to particular places In an experiential way while also protecting fragile sites Virtual places are not limited to 3d depiction of things and places Additional information in the form of text sound images and movies can also be incorporated into a virtual place Creating a multi-dimensional resource Our animation expert kit divine who's on our team uses the term enhanced virtual reality which combines interactive virtual reality with the internet internet and digital databases to create rich rich layers of virtual places that Significantly enhance the user experience but in an emotional immersive and Therefore crucially meaningful way This aims to position the viewer inside the work involve other sensors like sound and of course silence so We're now at the point of having formed the team of kind of looking Looking at what's needed. What's kind of crucial? How do we go ahead with this? If the indexical and imaginative possibilities photography are central to the articulation of the mining site How can the practice of photography mobilise the contribution of all other disciplines in? picturing place photography in the geographical imagination Joan Swartz considers the photographic archive over a range of Photographies she says that to understand how photographs were and continue to be part of the practices of processes By which people come to know the world Situate themselves in space and time is is quite crucial The pressure on photography is factuality our assumption about Its connection its indexical connection to its reference to where it came from offers a powerful representing medium something that can possibly Oddly enough represent absence through being such a representational medium The visible voices project needs to activate remembrance and will culminate in gathering an audience stirred by a virtual site of thinking and memory Igniting collective remembrance of the Chinese gold miners French historian Pierre Nora makes a distinction between history and memory Nora says memory is quote a bond tying us to the eternal present and a quote Whereas history as represent representation He suggests maybe less fluid and possibly more static Nora suggests that sites of memory require a will to remember It is this will to remember that must be triggered by the virtual museum Through positioning the digital the digital data of photographs or the videos sound using timing and aesthetic effects of light and darkness The space of imagination must be constructed to be compelling Affective and while inviting broad interpretation Direct attention and thought attracting the viewer to feel but crucially to think How can photography of place direct the sympathies of an audience Well says photography photographs but splice space into place The landscape and land and their stories do convey place When asked in a recent interview what photography offered anthropology, I could decisively respond Well at least place a sense of place The landscape and place in Chandra are dominated by absence and missing narratives as I've said Place can also stand in as a kind of portrait of the Chinese gold miners Including the place of their past through interactive dialogue in the project's Construction so the place they were before this Cultural landscape reading the land and the site offers both information and a site for memory The stone mining mounds and residue left behind by the Chinese miners who were tantalizingly absent Continue to evoke the hands that built them These hands laboriously touching each stone Geographer Karen Till argues that place can facilitate atonement. She explains Quote true placemaking people mark social spaces as haunted sites where they can return Make contact with their loss Contain unwanted presences or confront past injustices end of quote Depiction of the land at the center of former lives is a potent site for reflection on that past And I've heard a couple of people yesterday mentioned Laura Jane Smith Who wrote uses of heritage actually I have to acknowledge that I've I've actually got the chapter In my folder about place which I haven't managed to read. I keep going to read it and don't get to it Laura Jane actually works at the school next to our school and she I will have to read the book but You know She makes them really I think I've heard her give a conference paper when I was sort of touting for People to join in this project. I did a range of small conferences symposiums right out of my discipline and Her her some of her explanations about the use of heritage are really quite interesting and I've as I've also heard How slightly contentious But she does in fact note that the natural world Is a witness to the lives lived and passed over and it's certainly something that I will make use of in the next project Using the land's weather in a somber and allergic tone can be a space of reflection on the poignancy of a mission Where there also ties into time-based work, of course when you're making it in terms of video and moving image The wild and diverse weather conditions of Chandra can be used to represent both endurance and change While the past will not be reconstructed narratives can be made by con conjuring images images of heritage and Images of belonging this raising of the past when I when I think of that I actually think I actually mentally think the raising of the dead actually but is an evocation reinforced by photography's indexical relationship to its references to its reference Images of vacancy are evidence of a missed encounter in history a missed encounter By me to photographing them and by us knowing their history That possible encounter is long gone and has no prospect Opportunity has passed and photography has just non existence to represent The images constitute certificates of absence reproducing absence a strategy Used in many physical sites of remembrance internalizes memory This project rather than offering a fixed monument or memorial Acting as a cenotaph allows memory to be prompted through a virtual site Time-based art rather than static memorials encourages viewers to remember and use their imagination Continually on an ongoing basis so that it is active rather than something that needs to be returned to physically at any time Sontag also questions memory And saying in quote perhaps too much value is assigned to memory and not enough to thinking and she's really referring to the kind of Active space of engaging with images, which I am very keen on Viewer participation and contribution of Information and perspectives on that material is something will be part of the actual virtual museum. So there has to be The hosting needs to be constructed well so that you can actually deal with the feedback This extends into further data collection and gathering possible narratives of associated Viewers of course who as I said can be anywhere in the world So my conclusion about being there 2014 and we're in between our day jobs trying to prepare an Australian Research Council grant application Building a team situating the research questions grappling with ideas About heritage some of us investigating possibilities and as chief investigator, I'm seeking participation from institutional and government partners in an environment with a very conservative both state and federal government so the National Parks and Wildlife the people who run the National Park are very interested and that's great and the Chinese Heritage Association of Australia Who our grassroots community basis are really interested in the project and that's also really great So that story really I think is about broad stakeholders the people of the state and the people Of the nation so reaching right out into a very different space that I'm used to Certainly communicating with I hope that's going to be a good story with a good ending In picturing place There's a section on colonial encounters and it has a chapter on Egypt through the stereoscope stereoscopic views published in 1905 These images reconstructed scenes with immense depth Which at the time was really privileged as a sort of an index of meaning You know it was like more if the more real you could get at the more great it was These views were championed as in fact superior to being there Absolutely better than actually being there and it's because they offered aerial perspectives Triangulated views connecting to maps and commentary not afforded the average tourist while our project is Going to use current technologies and it will look for immersion It is definitely not the flyover or the surround image in 3d Or all that whiz bang stuff about animation That will offer value and success That will all be there, but that will not in my view what makes this project come off It is the measure of the interaction and the affective involvement the work will engender that will be it's