Jonathan Jones remembers learning for the first time about the Garden Palace fire of 1882. The Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist was 20 years old. While researching his family history, he discovered nearly all his nation’s artefacts had been lost in the flames.
“It felt like a kick in the gut,” says Jones, 37. It’s a bitter spring afternoon in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden. Jones pulls his coat closer around himself. “Ever since that day I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell that story.”
In 1879, the vast Garden Palace was erected on the spot where Jones is standing. The domed timber and glass structure overlooking the harbour was, according to reports at the time, like the “fabled palace of Aladdin in the Arabian Nights”.
Equivalent to two football fields long, with a dome over 65 metres high, this was Sydney’s tallest building. Built to host the 1879 Sydney international exhibition, it had the city’s first hydraulic lift and electric lights. Australia, the Garden Palace announced to the world, was no longer a backward convict colony at the ends of the Earth. It had arrived.
On September 22, 1882, however, the building burnt to the ground in suspicious circumstances. As well as razing convict records and government archives, Indigenous objects and remains, including skulls, skeletons and shields, were reduced to ashes. Now Jones has resurrected the palace, in spirit at least.
The Kaldor public art project barrangal dyara (“skin and bones” in the Gadigal language of the Sydney region) has 15,000 chalky-white shields scattered around the Botanic Garden. Made of gypsum, often used in Aboriginal mourning ceremonies, they map out the palace’s extensive 250-by-150-metre footprint. Between the shields, among the bushes and flowers, whispered voices drift: soundscapes recorded in eight Aboriginal language groups, listing the items that were burnt, destroyed forever.
“It’s a horrific story of loss,” says Jones. Yet his artwork is about renewal. “This is not the end of the story. There’s ways of moving through it.”
Flames are central to barrangal dyara. In the Wiradjuri language, the word for fire is wiiny. But add an extra ‘a’ and it becomes wiinya or “enlightened”: the imagination on fire; the shedding of light on understanding.
Aboriginal cultures use fire to renew the land. For Sydney as a city this fire, too, was creative. The destruction of the Garden Palace, built when Australia was still part of the British empire (a bronze statue of Queen Victoria sat under the central dome), made space for other, more forgiving institutions to rise up post-federation, such as the Opera House.
Yet Jones hopes to draw attention to one of the Garden Palace’s aims: a nation-building exercise, it showcased items that portrayed Indigenous Australians as little more than prehistoric savages.
The skulls and skeletons in particular were used as reinforcement for social Darwinist ideas about Indigenous inferiority, which helped justify the concept of terra nullius – “nobody’s land”. The international exhibition was, says Jones, “designed to exclude histories of agriculture, histories of architecture, histories of how people have lived in this country in different ways for thousands of years”.
Barrangal dyara (skin and bones) was chosen as a title to reflect the malnourished version of Australian history taught today. Few know that the Garden Palace ever existed. Even fewer are aware of Aboriginal history. “People don’t know that the world’s oldest ceremonial burial happened here in New South Wales. People don’t know that Australians were the first breadmakers by 15,000 years,” says Jones.
Jones has planted a field of sculptural kangaroo grass in the pioneer memorial garden, a pretty, sunken sandstone plot where the palace’s great dome once stood. Rustling in the breeze, the grass not only looks picturesque; it is a symbolic rebuttal of the myth that Indigenous people were agriculturally unsophisticated before the British arrived. Jones points out that the early settlers recorded in their diaries evidence of Aboriginal populations cultivating the land with yam fields, crops and irrigation systems.
In his book Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? the Indigenous writer and researcher Bruce Pascoe challenged the misconception of Indigenous societies as strictly hunter-gatherer. Yet this is not without controversy.
“Some have refused to acknowledge the words ‘agriculture’ and ‘Aboriginal’ in the same sentence,” says Jones, clutching a paperback copy of Pascoe’s book in his hands, staring at the jacket. “So I’m terrified with what we are facing. People are terrified of [revoking] terra nullius. It’s the whole underpinning of our legal system; it’s the whole reason Australia is in existence.”
Honouring the skulls and skeletons incinerated in the fire, body parts which never received proper burial, is crucial to barrangal dyara. Jones does not know how these human remains came to be exhibited in the Garden Palace, but he does know that “the frontier was a really violent place. That Aboriginal objects were stolen.” Barrangal dyara, then, is about “peeling the layers of skin back off this site and revealing these bones in the landscape”.
Jones tells one more story. To prepare for his artwork, he asked for help to resurrect and use Indigenous languages, some of which had been forbidden, others lost.
In one particular Indigenous community, a community member asked why they should help him. “Because our ancestors are buried there,” another replied. “Our ancestors need to know we haven’t forgotten them.”
• Barrangal dyara (skin and bones) runs until 3 October at the Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney