On Sunday 11 November 25 of the Archer Mountain Extended earth community gathering at the Potters House and explored through art the story of non-indigenous Australia.  The paintings ranged from the work of an early convict Joseph Lycett (1824), to TS Gill’s ‘Grim Evidence’ (1956), to John Olsen’s Lake Eyre (1975), to Arthur Boyd’s Crucifixion and the Rose 1980 Wendy Martin’s Born in the Landscape.  Each image challenged our way of seeing the Australian land which the early European pioneers saw as dry, desolate and murderous (terra Nullius) to see the land and our patch of earth where we reside as ‘beloved companion’.  The work of Chris Dalton (From Terra Nullius to Beloved Companion) was the inspiration for the sessions.  The sharing finished with a dance with the beloved companion ‘earth and sky, earth and stone all the earth is sacredness’.  (PH)

The Australian Poet David Ireland writes:

A Woman of the Future

The future is somehow…
somewhere in the vast and neglected desert,
the belly of the country
not the coastal rim.
The secret is the emptiness.
The message is the thing we have feared,
the thing we have avoided
that we have looked at and skirted.
The secret will transform us
and give the heart to transform emptiness.
If we go there
If we go there to listen
We will hear the voice of the eternal.