As a 5^th generation descendant of Scottish and Irish pioneering families to the district, I respectfully acknowledge the past, present and future traditional owners of the land of Georgetown, the Ewamian people and pay my sincere respects to the indigenous Elders for they hold the history, the cultural practice and traditions, of their people and of the land.

 

Story and Artwork by Sandshoe.

‘Grains of Sand’ is not a new piece. It is newly bordered and signed, only now.

Its patina and intrigue now refreshes me, yet it has been lying in the ‘drawer’ of embarrassment for years, of sensitivity, of half-formed ideas and to-be-rediscovered ideas, its busy intonations confusing me until now. Where does art come from and what is its meaning if its artist is not the primary observer, if she does not see, if she cannot speak to it?

‘Grains’ is not derivative. It is an original idea, but harks to other people’s work for that is what art does surely or, otherwise, it is original as far as certainly a person is concerned who believes it is. How easy something is to not see anyway and understand for itself.

On my return to where I currently live – I have been travelling for a number of weeks – I understand why it appealed. I see the journey lines. I recalled some years ago even when I viewed a painting like it, although far from the same, a painting that published its artist’s map.

I, too, I discover have a map and in it is my story.

Reflecting back, as I was saying I have been travelling – and I have been visiting friends, made new ones, embraced strangers, re-formed in some ways as I was in my childhood and travelled into my childhood, then further paying my respects to my ancestors and their places I learned of.

I walked and walked, watching the birds, hearing the small animals in the undergrowth, photographed the dirt, the leaves fallen on the grassy parks, looked at the sky, walked to rivers’ edges where – once there were hundreds if not thousands of people – it is quiet of humanity, its hub-bub deserted. That is not all I did of course, but that is what was very important for me as it has transpired to eventually know, interpret, understand what I was seeing, see this map.

Travelling on a bus on the road on my physical journey to the shoreline of the Gulf of Carpentaria, I was careering into the setting sun at journey end and the flat salt plain that characterises most for me its beauty appeared velvet green and velvet gold. I wondered I had been mistaken to think it is only the wattle that is our inspiration. The stunted grasses and ground cover as far as the eye can see sometimes is a natural wonder of the world surely.

Travelling back on the bus to my next destination where I would stop for a few days, Georgetown on the bend of the Etheridge River where my great-grandfather is said to have been called ‘the white Chinaman’, I saw the fabulous countryside in grainy outlines of yellow and yellow sand that altered to red and back to alternate yellows and ochres, changing forestation, eucalypts, patches of the blackened bases of forest burnt by fire, the initial dark navy blues of mountains that sprawl as a ring of sentinels around their secrets, like an itch, those sort of secrets. Who would not want to impetuously alight from the bus and leave the holidayers and commuters travelling to neighbouring properties and towns, to the big centre of Cairns and further afield and walk into the bush to look more closely at the delicate burnished apricot blossoms on gum trees, the wattles, the circlets of blocks of granite variously placed as if by human intervention, and find the bones of our people. Some of them have been lost for centuries. Some washed away.

My forefather I have been told had a market garden in the midst of exclusively Chinese otherwise leaseholds so I go down to the river and walk along the edge of it where I know the market gardens were.  Instinct took me there. By instinct I knew where and have it verified later. We can see the people, you know, in their historical procession of individuals and groups living in, working and tramping this bush, black and indigenous, white and new chums.  I know because I followed the map to find my people. Only when I went did I find exactly where to look for my earliest antecedents. Of course only when I got back I found I did have a map. Somehow, this spirit we cannot define better than in a brush stroke or by holding a growing organism up to the light, the cell perhaps of the leaf of an aged tree in which these people still are leaps alive into the imagination when we find the tree or the rock, seeds, a cacophony of birds in ancient trees in river sand.