Launch Speeches

About 50 people comfortably squeezed into Manning Clark House on April 12 for the opening of

heritage uncovered, the exhibition of work by artists from the region and beyond working in a

diverse range of media. Catherine Moore set the scene for the exhibition before introducing Nick

Brown who officially opened the show. This is a formal version of her impromptu welcome.

Good evening everyone. I am Catherine Moore, Manning Clark House committee member

and curator of the exhibition and I want to begin by acknowledging that the Ngunnawal

people inhabited this land way before it was stolen by colonisers. I am very glad to be part of

an organisation – the Manning Clark House committee and those connected with it – that will

continue to work for justice for First Nations peoples. I would also like to acknowledge the

other committee members and the Clark family – it must be weird seeing your family home

become a public space like this – and, as of March 19, Luciana Todd, the new director of the

organisation.

And you – thankyou so much for coming.

The idea came about late last year when I was at a committee meeting at which we were

exploring ways to keep MCH financially afloat. Like many non-profit organisations, we need

to fund-raise, so I suggested we have an exhibition as one way to bring in some much-needed

revenue. As the idea evolved, we decided that having it coincide with the Heritage Festival

might be good way to raise awareness about MCH and its goals when people came to see the

exhibition.

Artists were given the brief to come up with a work on the theme of heritage, but not just built

heritage – indigenous, environmental, political or whatever. The origins for this go back to my

time on Palerang Council when I was facilitator of the heritage committee, and felt it was

really important to look at other heritage as well – not just the built, mainly colonial heritage.

The theme of this year’s Heritage Festival is “connections,” which I didn’t realise at the time I

started inviting people to participate. Obviously I am connected in one way or another to all of

the artists in the show or how would I have known to invite them – I was at high school with

one, art school with others, several I know from the Braidwood area where many of us reside

or have resided, at least three are fellow Greens members, a couple are friends of friends and

one is my sister! Within the group, many are connected to each other, some as life partners,

members of the same family, and friends. One person I invited suggested another artist I

didn’t know and she in turn suggested another, her partner, and here we all are! And we are

all connected by our love of making art. Thanks to you all for being part of it.

Before I hand over to Nick to do the honours – remember, it’s a fund-raiser, so feel free to buy

the work – 30% of proceeds will go to MCH – or make a donation, so we can keep this place

of progressive ideas going – more important than ever in this world of post-truth, regressive

politics.

So here’s Nick Brown, Professor of History at ANU and also a Manning Clark House

committee member, to officially open the exhibition.

Welcome to share this opportunity to share this extraordinary collection creative work and this graceful space – there are, as I want to suggest – some deep resonances between the collection we are viewing tonight and the ethos of this house.

But I want to begin by acknowledge the  traditional owners of the land on which we meet, and pay respects to elders past, present and emerging and to extend that acknowledgement to the traditional owners of the lands on which the work assembled here was conceived and created This acknowledgment is particularly appropriate this evening: all of the artists drawn together here, as their work so powerfully displays, are in deep ways inspired by country – by a reverence for, an experience of, an activism driven by engagement with deep, precious, often fragile and contested environments.

Before moving on to my remarks this evening, I need to be clear. I am welcoming you on behalf of Manning Clark House Incorporated: I serve on the committee overseeing the mission and management of the house, and I have a particular role in relation to conserving and promoting its heritage values – as a place of gathering, a house with a remarkable modest integrity in design, and a remarkable capsule of social history in the particular landscape that, is many ways, also reflected in these collected works.

I am a historian: I have no authority to speak this evening about the art works we are here to enjoy and celebrate this evening other than as one who appreciates that resonance to place and history and who welcomes occasions such as this as opportunities to reflect on the particular values of this house, its history, but also its function now – a rare place in which to experience a genuine community of intersecting creativity and commitment: that is at the heart of Manning Clark House. As a historian, I have also served on the ACT Heritage Council, an experience that also impressed on me on how complex, multi-layered, fragile and contested many aspects of the heritage valuation and conservation of this very particular city and its region can be and from that perspective, I think it is particularly appropriate that this collection of work, in this particular house, features in the program for this years ACT Heritage Festival and as a historian – and also perhaps more personally – I do have my own interest in, investment in this place, and in my brief remarks in opening the exhibition this evening, I wanted to reflect on that association.

I had the great privilege of knowing Manning and Dymphna Clark, and of spending some time in this house … a long time ago: but a precious time. Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to say so, but I think they would both be delighted to see their home hosting this work.

The collection you can view this evening captures much of the vision Manning had for Australian history – a history shaped by the lives of people seeking meaning somewhere in between a wrestle with themselves, a wrestle with their sense of inheritance and destiny, a wrestle with their place: transplanted place, a stolen place, a loved place, a place of solace and vision.

We might reflect on some of the subtitles of Clark’s six volume History of Australia: ‘the earth abideth forever’; ‘the old dead tree and the young tree green’

The constant resilience, the promise of reinvention, if we attend to where we are and all of these works offer ways of doing exactly this.

When I read through the artist’ statements – their ways they have spoken of themselves, and the ways they spoken of their work – I could hear Manning’s voice, I could even recall his smile. He didn’t smile a lot – it was not part of the rather forbidding public persona, but that rare was at the core to the generous soul be could become in small, trusting gatherings, in quite conversations, and in the acts of hospitality that so defined the spirit of this house – he would have loved see you all here this evening.

He would have particularly treasured opening up conversations with the artists represented here, as they spoke modestly of their work

-         Gwenna Green speaks of ‘my observations of the flawed nature of our world’

-         John Pratt’s reflections on ‘the impact of human presence within a range of natural landscapes and constructed environments’

-         Alison Alder – through her long and esteemed career – seeking the ‘visualisation of common social aims and under-represented histories’

-         Bill Dorman who powerfully evokes thatrelentless image of the boat on the horizon: boat-borne invasion through to a boat-borne search for asylum in his sculpture so evocatively crafted from the brass of Goulburn’s courthouse roof, underneath which the state has weighted the lives of many its subjects and citizens: as Manning would often remark. ‘let those among you without sin cast the first stone’.

-         Victoria Clutterbuck ends her statement by simply stating  ‘I try to do the best I can’.

-         William Verdon ends his with ‘I endeavour to make my art say something’.

That humility, that tentative search, would have delighted him.

In the fruitless task of tidying up my office recently I came across one of the postcards Manning would send to those he felt needed encouragement. It is of Rodin’s ‘Monument to Balzac’, outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York:

-         In his near impossible-to-decipher message to me he wrote: ‘Here is a man whose heart was hot within him’ – who was, as Manning so often put it, on that long journey to find something to say, and that struggle to find a way to say it.

-         Every morning but Sunday, up those stairs by 7:00 am, Manning went to his study.

-         ‘I try to do the best I can’.

All of the works on these walls this evening have, in a way, found an appropriate home given these resonances; all of them – as Surya Bajracharya puts it – are in their own ways charting a synthesis between ‘place, politics and personal experience’.

All of them, as Manning would put it, have something to say, and each powerfully captures the struggle, whether it is Lea Durie’s commitment to working with local ‘300 million year old clay’ or the layers of paint, of the past, in the cedar Cecile Galiazzo has reclaimed, of trying to find a way (the words, the medium, the voice or texture) to say what matters.

So, there is Manning’s voice. But at the risk of being sentimental, there is Dymphna’s soul.

Through much of the work we are celebrating this evening there runs a distinct aesthetic: it is local to this place – to this city, to the surrounding hills, to the plains running down to the Monaro, out to Braidwood, to the coastal escarpment and onto to Tasman Sea.

In all of these work there is a sense of a community in this place, this landscape, this ecology - and of care for it about seeing the connections between those big themes – post-colonial land use, climate change, justice, migration – and local practice, local engagement and about the humility and respect of working with the discarded, the found, the second-hand, the fragmentary, the remembered and the reimagined.

I don’t know whether Dymphna knew Rosalie Gacoigne: she must have met her, if only in the rather dismissively named University Ladies Drawing Room at which the often more than equally able wives of professors met to try and find shared meaning in their transplanted lives in the Canberra of the 1950s, Dymphna in this house, with her six children, her garden, her quiet erudition in European languages, and Rosalie wandering the shoulders of Mount Stromlo, alone, isolated.

Early on in finding her vision, Rosalie offered classes to the University Ladies – I don’t think that was Dymphna’s style: she rejoiced in flowers but in exuberance, just as she also rejoiced in a kitchen garden, her hens, her fruits, her sewing and of course Dymphna’s world was a cornucopia, not a spare arrangement.

But both Dymphna and Rosalie grew to love this place, and reject those who ridiculed its smallness. As Rosalie turned to the art of the found object – to some extent such an emblematic practice for those who made Canberra – she observed  ‘at first you think there is nothing there, and later you learn that there is everything’.

With that, I think, Dymphna would agree. And so, it seems, do that artists represented here. The aesthetic that runs through the works on these walls was hers. There is everything here – in the honesty of spare materials, in the reuse of still purposeful objects, in the respect for craft, function, simple form and the complex stories of human use and chance those simple forms can capture.

Look around this house: spare, simple, pure, scuffed, enduring – if we can keep it, if we can honour it: that is the mission we as members of Manning Clark House Incorporated have, and we would welcome your support.

But for all that deep investment in the here, there was also – as Nikki Main reminds us in her artist’s reflections – Dymphna’s role in leading with Nugget Coombs and Judith Wright in forming the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, which met in this house, or in replanting with native vegetation her deeply loved property at Wapengo on the South Coast, or in reaching out to all the people in need, or alone, or despair, that Dymphna quietly, modestly, brought into this house, and into the full warm embrace of her life.

So – Dymphna’s soul would rejoice at the work on her walls this evening. It was more Manning’s style to go biblical, but some passages I seem to recall her saying, “For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace; the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.’

In such a deep investment in place, such a deep respect for the layering of history, for the lost and found, for truth, for the trees in the celebration of their world, in all of this these works have found their home in this exhibition. What a privilege to experience them in this place, and in this company.

And what a triumph for Catherine Moore, whose vision this exhibition reflects, whose commitment has brough it together, and who deeply deserves our thanks for making this possible. Thank you, Catherine, and congratulations.

So these works have there home here for the next couple of weeks, but they are also for sale, so can let them enrich your own homes, and in buying them – to put it bluntly – you will help us keep this home together.

I have enormous pleasure in declaring ‘Heritage Uncovered’ open.