Memoryscoping the Bunurong Coast: A project-based PhD speculating on the intimate and complex histories of a personally significant place
There’s this historical marker at Wreck Beach which has a couple of quirky little anecdotes. It’s the weathered bluestone cairn that can still be seen on the verge of the beach carpark but it’s also an uproarious memorial to accidental misadventure.
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Speculative Polaroid of an 1882 geological map with audio of walking through the scrub of Wreck Beach Farm.
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The piece builds on an eariler iteration to offer a stocktake of features, associations and characteristics observed from the heath of Wreck Beach Farm. It attempts to observe the same location while also adopting a more attuned approach the features.
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Early attempts at layered mixed-media articulations of the complex implications that can be read into the marks and features encrypted into the ground.
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It’s mild for mid-winter. Ten or twelve degrees Celsius perhaps and a sou’wester blowing no more than five knots. Standing
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This digital map offers an overview of the series of accounts of, and reflections on, the happenings of the Bunurong Coast that would otherwise pass unrecorded and untold.
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This interactive historical map ‘Reminiscing on the family weekender’ offers a snapshot of the intricacies, complexities, reassurances, and discomforts that accompany my affinity for my family’s property ‘Wreck Beach Farm’ and its surrounds. It tries to understand and articulate the loss I felt when the property was sold and also comprehend the nostalgia I still hold for that place.
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Overlooking green paddocks and a Manna Gum laneway my snug weekender sometimes smells like sausage fat but always of black coffee.
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Rain cloud rainbow / Blue white, blue grey, blue black / Crows picking through bracken fields. A view from the ridge at Wreck Beach Farm.
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Observing from a tin shed overlooking scrubby paddocks and an unsettled past, I have come to see the realms of the past and the present as inherently entwined. The past informs the present, but the present is also always changing the past.
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Fences delineate once-open plains, tracks and trails have been tarred, diesel fumes catch on the breeze, trees have been felled and burnt, and ‘for sale’ signs accompany the front gate of every second property.
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An image/prose speculation on standing amongst a thicket of Tee tree on Wreck Beach Farm.
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Nahla’s brown fur is bathed in the soft light of late autumn. She surveys her domain, eyes alert for signs of movement.
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run through the paddocks of Wreck Beach Farm, mobile phone in hand. Near on 132 acres of beautiful scrub on the Bunurong Coast. Need to pay attention, the ground is a little treacherous, pock-marked with hoof-prints, rabbit holes and wombat warrens.
Continue readingThis work was developed on the unceded lands and waterways of the Boon wurrung and Woi Wurrung language groups of the Kulin Nations. Much of the fieldwork, including visitation, writing and documentation, was undertaken on the lands of the Bunurong/Boonwurrung people.
The Bunurong/Boonwurrung people are the first storytellers of these lands. Their sovereignty was never ceded. This is, and always will be Aboriginal Land.
I respectfully acknowledge the Ancestors and Elders, past, present and emerging.
In terms of my position as a visitor on those lands, I state my lineage and purpose. I am Rees Quilford. I am a fourth-generation settler of Welsh-Irish descent. I am a writer, communications professional and a PhD candidate with RMIT University.
I was born and currently live on Bunurong/Boonwurrung land. I try to tread lightly, understand my place and listen to what it’s telling me.