Measurements
Susie Anderson
Untitled (dismay, displace, disperse, dispirit, display, dismiss), 1989
Bennett has combined six key scenes in the process of colonisation – the arrival of the fleet; the raising of the Union Jack; the murder, imprisonment, and demoralising of Aboriginal people – with stencilled words that stamp the brutality of that process. Using a palette that successively darkens from white to black, he tracks the dismay of Aboriginal people at the invasion of their land to their dismissal as inhabitants of it, using the visual and verbal language of oppression that was integral to the colonising process. To ‘dis’ something in English means not only to disrespect; when used as a prefix it reverses and undoes the meaning of the root word, and can thus ‘refer to negation, opposition, separation, or deprivation’. The repetition of ‘dis’ in each word in Untitled (dismay, displace, disperse, dispirit, display, dismiss) sets up a rhythm, a beat which marches in grim lockstep with each image to its termination in the empty black square of ‘dismiss’.
measurements
The shoreline was measured by year. The people were measured by blood. The distance was measured by time. The pain was measured by depth, but then again so was all feeling and especially love. And the place was pulling me under.
Everyone knows that jacaranda means Spring and comes in the warmth of late October. Purple plumage signalling and delighting until November when rain turned the violet petals into brown. That air was tacky from January to about April and I hated it. Sticky bricks your shoes caught on, where people dropped ice cream from one of the twelve local creameries. Perfumed by rubbish bins picked over by ibis who have already scoured the overflow. All sickly, somehow. Never-ending horn cycle of boats backing in and out of the ferry terminals. Crowds of white cornrowed tourists lugging suitcases, looking lost, going slow and getting in the way. Bringing gastro off the boats. I can feel the humidity even now, like a cloak I’m struggling to get out of let me go.
A line crookedly loops sandstone to sails, the shoreline creeping forward as the harbour grew. Plaques of writers who visited or lived there join dots between its boundary line. I came into port there five days a week, five years in a row. I jogged around that water and rode my bike up to the white buildings, but didn’t just become a runner there: the impressive self conviction of the place deeply intoxicated me. Once, a cab driver back home asked where I lived and he said, “oh that’s the rat race” and he was right, you want to win and be part of the race even though the finish line keeps moving further and further away.
Two charity runs took me across landmarks I’d only seen on telly, one through the park and the other along the coat hanger. Daily life became a competition you’re always jostling with others and all trying to win first prize.
The artist Gordon Bennett tracked cycles of removal at the harbour and didn’t give it a title, but blak people don’t need it named because they lived it. Only six shades take the eye from dismay to dismiss, operating in the negative space. It’s not black and white. Everything greying, before its disappearance or is it just absence of presence. Place may miss spirit. Maybe I realised how salt water is healing and that is why I dived into the deep end so often. May spirit play, miss.
During a festival that put the harbour in plain view but cast more shadows, those shells were brighter and flashier than ever. A void creating an amnesia of ideas, light and music. Many feet hit the pavement, crowds who don’t even pause to know what they are ignoring; a mob mentality. What else came over me? Oh, came over me. I said I would never write about you and I’m not. This is about The distance of your heart
by Tracey Emin, an installation at Macquarie Place, 60 bronze birds and a water trough about the loneliness of a city. A small ugly park with none of the charm of the other micro parks around the Inner West with an obelisk marking the distances between settlements. Where is the massacre site obelisk? Where is the line drawing memorial between battles? Survival milestones deserve plaques and place.
This is about local people and stories that taught me warrior ways of Barangaroo on the water and Maria Locke a little inland I am humbled to know how and did and whether water connected us all? This is for the mob who held my hand when I didn’t know how to step into my
place who keeps nothing of its people but holds everything about the past: a riddle of the same disappointment.
Shoreline is never fixed. An ebb and an untetherable place. Never fixed, not like the problem of the Aborigines was meant to be. We cannot be worked out. Measure next to erasure creates the story. The everything else. I am all parts compassion so I understand grey area; I am unfixed/unfixable yet I never wanted to write about politics and I’m not.
This is about throwing my shoes overboard — no
About jumping into the sea — no
About hearing you say ‘no — no’
About an ebb.
An untetherable place.
A flow.
Southern waters are flat and calm but all ports are the same. If it’s shallow you can still drown. Make no mistake I am still throwing myself in.
Susie Anderson writes from the nexus of compassion and resistance. Her poetry and nonfiction is widely published online and in print, in Archer Magazine, Artist Profile, Artlink, un magazine, Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia and in many poetry anthologies. She is a 2021 Black&Write! Fellow and is currently working on her first poetry collection. Descended from the Wergaia and Wemba Wemba peoples of Western Victoria she currently lives on Boon Wurrung land in Melbourne.