inside mawson's sleeping bag
I used to live in Douglas Mawson's house. Would this give me any privileged insights into Bonita Ely's show, I wondered? And insights are privileged in this dense, complicated, complex exhibition in which narratives, meaning and memories are interwoven like the fabric Ely so carefully photographs.
At first the works seem impenetrable, a confusingly disparate collection of ink-painted Taoist characters, photographs of crockery, cutlery and cloth, and handwritten excerpts detailing various first-person narratives, including those taken from the Antarctic diaries of Sir Douglas Mawson. But within the elaborate configuration of Ely's sophisticated and clever visual essay, these varied elements act as signifiers, which, with coaxing, reveal the multitude of the artist's thematic concerns. Mawson's expedition is not the sole focus of the exhibition as the title suggests, but rather a jumping-off point for an examination of the practices of exploration, colonisation, appropriation and possession, as well as a rigorous interrogation of our notions of culture and civilisation.
That the European colonisation of Australia brought about the devastation of the indigenous inhabitants is-or should be-an established fact and is one that has been explored again and again in the work of both indigenous and non-indigenous artists. The heroic exploits of Douglas Mawson, too, have been circulated and celebrated to the extent that they are part of the nation's mythology and so its consciousness. By combining quotes from Mawson's diaries with those from the 'Bringing Them Home' report, Ely draws comparisons between Mawson, as coloniser, and the Aboriginal people, the colonised, suggesting parallels between the courage and tenacity of both in the face of horrifying circumstances. The juxtaposition of the quotes align Mawson, alone in his sleeping bag 'no bigger than a