Time trickles like water through our negligent hands: Megan Cope’s Twice Removed
By Lisa Bryan-Brown
This article was first published by Freerange Press in Freerange Vol. 9: The Wet Issue. For a free download of the journal visit here. To purchase a physical copy click here.
Megan Cope’s recent series of Twice Removed paintings take an in-depth look at the history and future of the bodies of water that define the edges of five sites in and around Brisbane, Queensland. Her perfectly circular, complexly layered canvases drown the aerial landscapes of carefully researched historical maps with the swollen seas and rivers of our post-climate change future, flooding areas which are currently densely populated localities in an ominous but all-too-plausible scenario.
In shimmering dot-work Cope engorges the elegantly curved sweep of Moreton Bay and the snaking courses of the Brisbane and Logan rivers, applying a calculated 5 metre sea level rise to the geography. Cope’s practice, which explores toponomy, cartography and geomorphology, considers the environment, language and history through a post-colonial lens. Her Twice Removed series of paintings emphasises the fact that the landscape, and particularly the coastal landscape, is not a static entity.
Coastal erosion poses one of the most significant ecological challenges of the twenty-first century, particularly in Australia where so much of our population and infrastructure is based on the sandy edges of this vast island. Short-sighted colonial town planning coupled with little to no action taken on climate change can only viably result in one possible outcome — not next week or next decade and not necessarily even next century, but certainly eventually — sea levels will rise and coastlines will shift; the environment as we know it today will be radically altered.
Cope is a Quandamooka woman, from North Stradbroke Island, and her family have stories from a time when the area we now know as Moreton Bay was in fact a valley, knowledge that has been passed down through generations orally and through art and music for centuries. Recently this information has been verified by geologists, who estimate the valley began flooding 18,000 years ago and reached it’s present state approximately 6500 years ago (Walters 35). Archaeological evidence shows that Aboriginal people, Cope’s predecessors, were living in South East Queensland at least 20,000 years ago at a conservative minimum (Neal and Stock 618).
While there is no certainty amongst climate scientists as to exactly when we might experience a 5 metre sea level rise, there is a general consensus (according to the Department of Environment) that we will see a rise of 50–110cm by 2100, a mere 86 years away. Considering Cope’s family hold in memory a time so long before the bay even came into being, to forecast the reality of the landscape as it might be in 500, or even 5000 years becomes less incomprehensible. It connotes a radically different attitude to that of Western progress regarding the perception of the natural environment, one that adapts to and embraces, rather than denies and resists, transition and change.
It is a shameful truth of the process of colonisation that Cope’s family, as with all other Aboriginal Australians, were subject to forced displacement and relocation, which for many individuals and families resulted in the loss of important ancestral ties to Country. In Twice Removed Cope’s five large scale paintings depict locations where local indigenous populations experienced forcible displacement from their lands, or conversely the new areas that they were relocated to.
In Beenleigh (Yugambeh) at the German Lutheran mission of Bethesda, on Bribie Island at the reserve at Woorim and on North Stradbroke Island at the Catholic mission at Myora, Aboriginal people were used as a source of cheap labour . At Wynnum (Winnam) Black’s Camp became a gathering and camping site for those who’d been displaced, as did the Roma Street Parklands near the centre of Brisbane (Meanjin). Cope’s depiction of these historically loaded sites use as their basis the equally loaded maps authored by the very entities responsible for the repression and dislocation of Aboriginal populations — the church and the military. These records serve as a sombre reminder of our nation’s history, and how the events of that past have led us to our current suburban geography. They also reveal interesting insights into the evolution of sites and local place names, topics of great impotence in understanding the political motivations at the forefront of Cope’s artistic practice.
By claiming land and water resources and beginning to build structures and conduct agriculture, European settlers not only displaced local Aboriginal populations but fundamentally disrupted their relationships with areas held sacred as country. The deep ties held by Aboriginal communities to their traditional environments are a foundation of their culture, and as such the sites themselves are pivotal to the continued understanding of each language group’s artistic, linguistic, spiritual and ancestral heritages. Cope’s own Quandamooka country has been changed irreparably through development and urbanisation, and from the devastating impacts of sand mining and its effects on the island’s ground water and numerous dependant eco-systems.
Cope’s work, in reflecting upon the future environment that potentially faces Moreton Bay and the rivers that flow to it, places emphasis upon rising, unstoppable waters; a poignant image in light of her family’s oral histories regarding Moreton Bay. While much of the work’s initial impact is tied to the sheer comprehension of the scale of economic and infrastructure loss being imagine, it is important to note that since the environment has so deeply affected Aboriginal culture, the scenario proposed in Cope’s Twice Removed paintings would also result in irreplaceable losses of important sites which inform Aboriginal peoples’ spiritual connections to country. The impact Cope’s radically altered landscape would have on Aboriginal culture (and indeed, the collective accumulated culture of all contemporary Australian society) is undeniable, and a little considered aspect of the potential effects of climate change.
In the way that the environment is intrinsic to Aboriginal culture, with references to sites inextricably intertwined within knowledge of Aboriginal heritage, so too with the many Aboriginal languages. Prior to colonisation more than 250 Aboriginal languages were in use by the numerous Aboriginal communities, but today, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics records, only a handful remain spoken. As Cope has wryly observed, the most common contemporary use of Aboriginal language words (and in reality the only continued use of Aboriginal language words by non-Aboriginal people) are in fact where the words have persisted as current place names. Cope’s works draw attention to this phenomenon through their use of historical maps authored by colonial forces, which bring with them the loaded past of how language has been used in relation to mapping Australia’s environment.
Generally, throughout history, the role played by language in the process of marginalisation of groups and individuals is paramount, particularly in the various ways language is mobilised by an aggressor to assert dominance and enact oppression over another. In the abhorrent and protracted process of the systematic and fundamental disempowerment of Australia’s Aboriginal population, the erasure of centuries-old languages is only one of many injustices carried out against Australia’s First People as part of the routine of British colonisation.
The British explorers and settlers went about recording the particulars of this previously ‘unfound’ land with a disregard for — and obliviousness to — the existing place names. Generally commemorating European monarchs, explorers, battles and noblemen, English labels were applied to the features of the Australian landscape; seemingly arbitrarily inscribing the presence of foreign British national heritage upon a land to which they were really immigrants. In doing so Western naming proclaimed a possession of sites, where the existing Aboriginal names instead had a tendency to reference prominent natural features like bodies of water or clusters of trees — naming practices which reflect two distinctly different conceptions of ownership.
Boldly rendered in meticulous calligraphy, Cope reasserts the Aboriginal place names in her Twice Removed suite of paintings, marking them prominently over historical maps of the regions surrounding Brisbane, or rather Meanjin. Cope’s use of parish maps commissioned by various churches in the late 1800s and locality maps commissioned by the military in the 1940s form the basis for each work. This is an acutely calculated political statement on Cope’s part, effectively interrogating and challenging the power and privilege commanded by these institutions, which generated a certain level of ambivalence towards Aboriginal people and undermined their ownership of their own country.
It is through the simultaneous depiction of historical and future incarnations of Quandamooka, Winnam, Woorim, Meanjin and Yugambeh that Cope’s Twice Removed series articulates to viewers the precarious nature of the relationship contemporary Australian society has built with our land and it’s First People. That history cannot be undone and hopefully will eventually be repaired through genuine reconciliation. One aspect of that process is revaluing the environment and it’s role in heritage, a well as Aboriginal languages and the place names that were bestowed upon the sites of this land centuries before Europeans even imagined they could sail here. Artwork like Cope’s is an important part of this process, concisely articulating the circumstances of decades of past conflict and future ecological change that frame and face the Australia of today.
— — — — — — — — — -
Works Cited
Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Population Composition: Indigenous languages.” Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006: n. pag. Web. 20 Sept. 2014 <http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/2f762f95845417aeca25706c00834efa/aadb12e0bbec2820ca2570ec001117a5!OpenDocument>.
Australian Government, Department of the Environment. “Mapping sea level rise.” Australian Government, Department of the Environment 2014: n. pag. Web. 3 July 2014 <http://www.climatechange.gov.au/climate-change/adapting-climate-change/australias-coasts-and-climate-change/mapping-sea-level-rise>.
Neal, Robert and Errol Stock. “Pleistocene occupation in the southeast Queensland coastal region.” Nature 323 (1986): 618. Web. 2 July 2014 <http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v323/n6089/pdf/323618a0.pdf>
Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority. “Relationships to country: Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people.” Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority 2008: n. pag. Web. 20 Sept 2014 <https://www.qcaa.qld.edu.au/downloads/approach/indigenous_res005_0803.pdf>.
State Library of Queensland. “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander missions and reserves in Queensland. ” State Library of Queensland 2014: n. pag. Web. 3 July 2014 <http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/82602/missions_and_reserves.pdf>.
Walters, Ian. “Antiquity of marine fishing in south-east Queensland.” Queensland Archaeological Research 9 (1992): 35. Web. 2 July 2014 <https://www.library.uq.edu.au/ojs/index.php/qar/article/download/239/283>.
