leonora : kate mcmillan PROJECT TITLE: Locus Deperditus ARTIST: Kate McMillan COMMUNITY: Leonora PARTNERS: Shire of Leonora RESIDENCY DATES: March–June 2011 EXHIBITION DATES: 30 June 2011
Lonely country Dr Thea Costantino
Kate McMillan’s engagement with the goldfields town of Leonora grew out of an ongoing investigation into themes of islands, displacement and isolation. She envisaged the town’s detention centre as an inland island where detainees from afar were marooned. While conducting drawing workshops at the detention centre, McMillan started investigating the town that lay beyond its walls. As she built connections with locals, she was struck by a desire to understand the site and make a lasting contribution to the community. She formed a relationship with local historian Jill Heather as a means of accessing the history of colonial settlement in the area and to consider the site with reference to Aboriginal ways of seeing. This led to McMillan’s investigation of the lonely graves that pepper the landscape of the goldfields. To Western eyes, this landscape reads as barren. Small, spiky bushes pierce the red dirt; skeletal trees scratch at a cloudless sky. Here and there, a historical ruin lies half submerged; it creates the illusion of an absence of life, of an empty land. Many bodies are buried here. Leonora : kate mcmillan
Roughly dug into non-consecrated ground, lonely graves bear witness to the struggle for survival on the colonial frontier. Some graves are barely discernible within the landscape, while others have markers erected to memorialise the deceased and to warn passersby. They are sites of pilgrimage for tourists, particularly ‘grey nomads’ in search of the ‘real’ Australia, trying to locate unknown lives in the story of settlement. It can take several hours to drive to a particular grave; this extreme isolation adds to the touching melancholy of the site. The urge to visit and reclaim these graves within popular memory is comparable to the ritual mourning that accompanies monuments to unknown soldiers; it creates a fragile relationship between the living, in the present, and the life that was erased long ago. These rituals characterise the attempt to transform the losses of history into memory: to feel history. 72