Home Ground (detail2)

Home Ground detail

Home Ground, 2001, was an installation I made for 'The [Cultivated] Garden', four artists working in the grounds of the Hazlehurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, Sydney. The following is my artist's statement from the catalogue of that exhibition.

Home Ground

When I was asked to install an artwork in the gardens of Hazlehurst, now the site of a Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, my first impulse was to visit the place and to learn something of its history. What I found was a story that struck me personally as well as intellectually. I think it is the sort of experience that has shaped many of us, is embedded in the culture. It is a story of peoples' strong connection to place in the face of rapid change.
The Broadhurst family, from the 1940's until the 1990's, loved and nurtured this five-acre patch of ground. They planted orchards and gardens, raised goats, poultry and fish, sheltered possums, bandicoots and stray cats. They enjoyed the fruit-raids and myth-making of local children. They held out against the pressures of urban development.

In the 1970's, the developers became more aggressive, using subtle menace and threats to drive people from their homes Dix Hawke, Hazlehurst Cottage, Sutherland Shire Council, Sydney, 2000.

Eventually the Broadhursts bequeathed the land to the community as remnant green space; Hazlehurst was saved. But there was a cost to this transformation from private to public, as a tangled and inhabited garden and house became low-maintenance public park and offices. It is a story that carries someone's burden of pain and loss.

Where the Gallery now stands were...roses, dahlias, gladiolus, sweet peas, snapdragons, marigolds, pansies and more roses; also enough vegetables to feed the family and friends. Hawke.

Loss layers on top of loss. The land that became Hazlehurst was previously lost and is still mourned by its Aboriginal owners. In my own journey to a sense of belonging in this land I face this fact of recent Aboriginal dispossession.
I remember as a small kid tearing out survey pegs, as the country of my childhood was carved up for development. The rolling hills I roamed and loved were bulldozed for a car assembly plant. Briefly it burned on cheap immigrant labour; now it is closed down, the workers are unemployed and the land is unrestored. Now, like Ben Broadhurst, I have planted my migrant's feet in a new garden; I too seek to nurture a patch of Australian earth.
So for this artwork I bring to Hazlehurst the branches of trees indigenous to my adopted home ground in Australia. With forest redgum and box I weave a delicate chain of twigs to entwine the house once more with vegetation, with memories, with sorrow, with the labour of love. As the chain winds across the walls and swings out to the Norfolk Island pine near the back door, I imagine reconnecting Ben and Hazel's house to the plants that once embraced it, to the soil that nurtured them. Each rubber binding is a reconnection. Each Eucalyptus twig is a reminder of where we've got to.