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Transcript
Transcript
Rory:
Hi there, my name's Rory Hyde. I'm one of the curators of You Have a New Memory here at the State Library Victoria.
Kate:
And I'm Kate Rhodes, also one of the curators of the exhibition.
Rory:
This is the audio described tour where we'll be pointing out particular objects, the lay of the room and the different things that are happening within this space.
Kate:
And describing all of the objects on display.
[the sound of two pairs of sliding doors opening, and the clop of shoes walking on wooden floors, into a room with the hushed but constant background sound of air-conditioning]
Kate:
From the North Rotunda entrance of the Library, we enter through two sets of glass doors. This large 19th Century room has been turned into a contemporary feeling gallery. Half the room is dark chocolate brown, smooth plaster gallery-type walls. And the top half of the space is quite different, 19th Century plaster moulded ceiling. The room gives a strong sense of its past while also its new life as a contemporary gallery space.
Rory:
The walls are painted dark brown, and the floor is a herringbone-style timber parquetry. The speakers are positioned high up on the walls throughout the length of the room, projecting the audio of the film which is being shown on the large screen in the centre of the room.
Kate:
On the left hand side of the entrance is a projection that gives us the title of the exhibition, 'You Have a New Memory', and some exhibition acknowledgements, lists of names and the roles of people involved with the project.
Rory:
Looking ahead into the space of the room, we can see a round table with lamps on it and with book catalogues on it. There's a big shape covered in a sheet which has a projected video on it with seats and beanbags in front of it, sitting on a carpet, and then within the room there are cases of different sorts, ages, timber and glass with sheets draped over them like it's a house in renovation or in storage.
Kate:
The draped cases on the left of the room are contemporary and those on the right are a mix of contemporary and 19th Century. Some are draped in the white cloths, and the first on the right holds four exhibition objects on perspex boxes and mustard-coloured soft materials. Inside the first case is a 19th Century album silver photograph of an American landscape with a tattooed inky stamp saying ‘Public Library Victoria’. This 19th Century photograph is presented on an easel.
Next to the photograph are two old boots, what we think is a man's shoe and a woman's shoe. These two boots were found inside the walls of the library when it was renovated in 2019. Behind the boots is a black and white photograph, an empty Library space from the early 20th Century with drawers and a large chandelier and a tiny figure of a librarian at the window.
Also in the case is a large rock, the size of a three litre carton of milk. The rock was found during the construction of Library Station and for us reminds us that the land itself might be considered our oldest library.
Rory:
Turning away from this first cabinet on the right and looking into the large space that we're in, it's probably 50 metres long, 20 metres high, 20 metres wide. Proper big Victorian era piece of architecture, echoing the historical origins of the Library, which we're here to explore as part of this project.
Kate:
The large round architect-designed table has many chrome legs. It gives the table an insect-like feel. Four Italian fancy lamps, library-style lamps, sit in the middle of the large table and add antenna-like feel. Surrounding the table are 11 black standard museum public programme stools that fold up that visitors can sit down to read the exhibition catalogue or engage with the iPads, and may also move around the room to find a place that's comfortable.
Rory:
iPads on the table give a visual description of the film which is displayed on the large sheet in front of us. The catalogues on the table is a printed essay of the slideshow which is being projected, so it's a written document copy of this project. Headphones as well, for listening to the audio description.
As we walk around the left side of the large round table, in front of us there are two vitrines. One of them is fully covered in a sheet, and the other is uncovered glass containing objects. The largest most prominent in here is a gong, a big brass gong which was used for many decades in the library to announce the closure at the end of the day. We can also see the stick used to bang that gong. There are a number of other smaller printed objects here, a photograph from 1990 of a dinner happening in a residential house. This is part of the commission project of the Library to document migrant families in Melbourne. There's a banner that says 'Stop the War’, also from circa 1990. A sketch by William Strutt of a woman holding a crying baby. This is an unfinished sketch, that talks about some of the objects in the collection which are partial or incomplete, suggesting other forms of creativity to pick up and carry forward. And finally in this case there is a fob watch, maker unknown, from the 1870s, and it belonged to the bushranger Ned Kelly — who stole the watch from his accountant.
Kate:
An enormous synthetic grey rug fills a large portion of the gallery. It mirrors the large grey table in the space. It's filled with three different kinds of seating: soft modular couches, black metal outdoor chairs with grey cushions and three black floor pillows. Most of the furniture can be moved around by visitors to find a place that's comfortable for them, and enables different kinds of viewing of this 25-minute slideshow film.
Rory:
The projection screen that the slideshow film is being projected on is a large wall five metres wide by five metres tall, freestanding in the space. It's draped loosely with a large sheet.
We can see the pleats and folds of this loose ‘projection screen’ (in quotes). It's deliberately a kind of rough screen, like we're watching a slideshow at home with a sheet draped over the sofa as a projection surface. The way that this film — this slideshow, we call it — is made, is by passing still images in front of a camera so that we see them moving as they arrive on the table, and then moved out of the way. So it's a slideshow, but it's being enacted by hands, which are visible.
Kate:
Behind the very large screen are seven exhibition display cases, both old and new, all draped in white theatre fabrics. Some of the cases in the gallery space behind the big screen aren't draped, and hold collection materials. The lighting in this space is soft, almost dark.
Each of the cases holding collection materials are spotlit from within. The first case, on the left-hand side, behind the projection screen, holds four photographs. One is a 19th Century album of a well-known theatre actor from the time, memorialising eight of his most famous characters.
A quite shabby but very beautiful souvenir diary made by Mirka Mora of a holiday with John and Sunday Reid, showing photographs of John playing with sparkles. A black and white photograph of a Chinese acrobatic artist, made by Helen Skye in memorial of her time spent with the troupe. Juxtaposed with a tiny black and white photograph by Albert Tucker, which is very blurry and shows a painting, a self-portrait painting by the artist, so that it is not visible, but something that we must imagine.
Inside the case are four very large cream paper-coloured labels with information about each of the objects.
Rory:
Back to back with this case, we have another smaller case containing two objects. One is a sketchbook which is open spread from the 1930s and 40s, shared by sisters Dorothea Francis and Margaret Francis. We see a pencil sketch drawing of a nude, almost in Art Deco stylised lines, and a kind of echo of that pencil sketch imprinted on its facing page. Also in this case, we have a very small and quite creepy image of eyes, created in the 1830s. It's a very small painting, picking out 10 eyes painted onto ivory by the artist Georgiana McCrae.
Kate:
Each of the display cases in the exhibition includes mustard-coloured soft fabric in some way to support the objects. For the wall work in the exhibition by Hayley Millar Baker, we've put the mustard-coloured fabric behind the framed work, like a kind of coaster, and the label sits on the right-hand side of that.
Hayley Millar Baker's work is quite devastating. It's a black and white collaged image recounting a memory of the Gunditjmara people. In the photograph, she recounts a story about how the Aboriginal people at the time, in the late 19th Century, had been caught stealing flour from a hut keeper. Enraged, the hut keeper put arsenic in the flour, and when the Aboriginal people took the flour down to the river to make cakes, they consumed the flour, were driven to a terrible thirst and dived into the river where they drowned. And this image, in a kind of sad but unspoken way, tells this terrible story visually.
The image is a contemporary photograph collaging a landscape with gum trees across the top of the image, a curved hut, a dark hole for an entrance. Through the middle band of the photograph is the river. A black crow sits on a rock that seems to float in the waterway.
Quite strangely, the three flour bags float collaged on top of the image, on the banks. In the foreground are rocks and daisy bushes that seem unrelated to the rest of the landscape, giving the whole image a sort of strange, layered, uncanny feeling.
Rory:
Turning around from the wall work, walking towards the centre of the room, we have another tall case, as tall as a standing person with four objects in it — with really the sort of strange and curious things that the Library collects.
On the left, first off, we have a photo from the 1950s of a hypnotist scene … so we see audience of a hypnotist kind of rolling on the floor holding their heads, a line of chairs behind them where they might have been sitting before. A very unsettling image of people out of control. In the middle, we have a book open on a book wedge, with locks of hair snipped and pinned in very carefully. This is from the 1870s. Tiney Grant is the name of the person who carefully preserved and labelled locks of hair, poems and photographs and sceneries of people. Very strange way to remember other people.
Also from the 1870s, we have a very small silver photograph, which is a double exposure, showing a, I guess, a pioneer of gender fluidity and orientation: Edward de Lacy Evans. And they are standing in this one photograph, dressed both as a woman and as a man, wearing a three-piece suit as well as a dress.
And then finally, in this case, we have a sketchbook from Edward Wilson from the 1840s to the 70s, early colonial era in Melbourne. And it has a brushed, messy, watercolour, brown sketch painting with the caption, ‘the dust is troublesome’.
Kate:
In a tall case, right behind the screen, are a series of objects that in one way or another refer to lost memory. A brown archival tray of keys that once belonged to zookeepers at the Melbourne Zoo and now are without a purpose. A tiny gem tintype photograph of an unknown man by an unknown photographer.
A dead letter — that is, a letter that was neither received nor able to be returned to sender because it was so thoroughly destroyed. A black and white newspaper photograph recounting the scene of a young girl who went missing, and imploring its readership to send in information about her disappearance.
A red brick stamped with the word ‘Yallourn’. This brick memorialises a town built by the State Electricity Company for its own staff and famous for its neat, trim, perfectly laid out and well-appointed amenity that was destroyed once brown coal was discovered underneath.
A small 1920s photograph of a family sitting on a veranda with one person, who was presumably a woman, as the edge of her dress peeps out, neatly cut out of the photograph. And next to that, an undated wood, rubber and leather police swing baton made by an unknown maker, given to what was referred to as a special constable to help keep the peace and now can probably only remind us of the things, the terrible violent things it may have seen or done at that time.
In a display case on the right-hand side of the gallery, and also behind the big screen, is a red handmade flag with the word ‘ANARCHY’ in white bold writing, hand-stitched into the top of it. On both sides of the flag, you can see the stitching for the word ‘anarchy’ on the other side. There is rope attachments on either end of the flag to help hang it up.
And we know that this red flag, along with another one that said ‘freedom’, was hoisted by a man called John William ‘Chummy’ Fleming every Sunday for almost 50 years at the beginning of the 20th Century on the banks of the Yarra, where he would hold weekly meetings about social justice issues and invite people to discuss matters of the day with him. This flag remembers his work and his life and dedication to social justice issues.
Rory:
In the centre of the room, in the back half of the large room, we have a case which is waist high, containing eight archive boxes and within them, dozens and dozens of notebooks. And we can just see the edges of those pages sticking out of the archive boxes. This is a really amazing and bizarre thing that the Library has hold of.
They're the diaries of Ian Banks, collected between 1972 and 2012, which is titled the ‘Record of forgettable transactions’. I'm going to read the label because it gives a good story of Banks and his process:
‘Although titled “forgettable”, the 194 diaries that Ian Banks wrote over 40 years are a feat of memory. He records his meals, the contents of his mailbox, the cost of petrol and cafe meals. He documents shopping at the Victoria Market, attending various clubs, descriptions of his photographs and meetings with friends. Banks was a taxi driver, and cars are a running theme.
Some days are memorialised by nothing more than a pasted-in medical label and food packaging. These mundane details, delivered with the detachment of a report, leave Banks unknowable. Emotion is rarely revealed, as in his entry of 26th March 1978, when he simply writes, “We had a good day.”’
One of these many diaries is presented open in a book cradle. We can see two pages. On the left is a label from a sweet corn can, the paper label pasted in, and underneath it is written, ‘Apple Jelly, April 1977’. And on the right-hand side is a label of Kraft Crunchy Peanut Butter and what seems to be another few annotations of what Ian Banks has done that day. Myer House undercover car park leaflet, and yet another couple or printed of handwritten pages from the ANZ bank.
Kate:
On the last stop of our tour, we encounter Vicki Louise Couzens' possum skin cloak. The title of Vicki Couzens' work is Turam Gunditj. From 2004, made of possum skin, cotton and nylon. It sits across a tall, clear, perspex stand, partially draped down the back of that large rectangle stand, but mostly displayed across the front, so that when you stand in front of what is the tallest case, in the gallery. You encounter the many panels that Vicki has scarred the possum skin pelts with her burning tool.
The label that accompanies the cloak reads: ‘Vicki Couzens' cloak holds cultural knowledge of the Keerray Woorroong clan. Burn designs trace connections to the Keerray Woorroong homelands in the Western District of Victoria through ancient and contemporary stories. Read from left to right and top to bottom, the cloak, like those made tens of thousands of years ago, remembers important sites, events and practices, swimming holes, body markings, gatherings, food sources and totems. We can see and read those designs across the inside of the possum skin. The fur side is underneath but visible through the perspex stand. The tails of the possum skin cloak hang down across the front and the back.’
Rory:
We're now at the very far end of this big long room that we've walked into. There's a low couple of leather chaises with an iPad on it for the audio description of the whole exhibition. And looking back towards the entrance, we can see rough clusters of cases draped with white fabric, the looming object of the screen and the echoes of its projection reflected throughout the room. The ceiling itself has glass, and we can catch reflections of other visitors and of other objects as we walk around.
Thanks very much for coming on this journey with us.
Kate:
Thank you!
[the sound of sliding doors closing]
By Kate Rhodes and Rory Hyde
Produced by Access Lab & Library
Produced by Access Lab & Library