Detail on art work

- 1803, refers to the landing of the first non-indigenous settlers at Risdon Cove, Tasmania.

- 1830, refers to a key date in the “Black War”, where 2200 settlers, military, police and convicts formed a line and attempted to corral the remaining Tasmanian Aboriginal People to the Tasman Peninsula. This line, depicited here as a “White line”, is commonly referred to as the “Black Line”.

- Netting below the ship trawls the land for the boats

- Netting above the ship and the white line has become dark, like the night sky, and the boats caught up in it are white, like the stars in the sky.

- The ships represent and symbolise the non-indigenous community, and are modelled on the typical English Ship of early settlement. (https://sydneylivingmuseums.com.au/stories/first-fleet-ships )

- The boats represent and symbolise the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, and are modelled on the typical Tasmanian Aboriginal bark canoe. (https://shapingtasmania.tmag.tas.gov.au/M/object.aspx?id=35 )

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“We failed to ask, How would we feel if it was done to me... We failed to see that what was done degraded us all” (Redfern Address, Paul Keating, 1992. https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf )

“Neither violent dispossession nor the pronouncement of the legal fiction of terra nullius annulled your sovereignty and we long for it to shine through as a fuller expression of what it means to be Tasmanian.” (Pathway to Truth-Telling and Treaty, report prepared by Kate Warner, Tim McCormack and Fauve Kurnadi, delivered to Premier Peter Gutwein, 2021. https://www.dpac.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/627242/Pathway_to_Truth-Telling_and_Treaty_251121.pdf )

“How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!” (Christian Scriptures, Lamentations 1:1) This is not a statement of no people, but of a lonely place that once flourished with people.

“In the period between the proclamation of martial law in November 1828 and its revocation in January 1832, at least ninety colonists in the Settled Districts were reported killed by the Aborigines… Of the 500 Aborigines in the Settled Districts… an estimated 350 were either killed outright or died from gunshot wounds… In defending their country against the pastoral invaders, the Aboriginal nations in the Settled Districts had indeed paid the supreme sacrifice.”

(Tasmanian Aborigines: A history since 1803, Lyndall Ryan, 2012.)

“The British claim of sovereignty over the eastern half of the continent was an audacious territorial appropriation based on a number of key ideas: that the interior of the great landmass was very likely uninhabited; and that the tribes who lived on the coast had no permanent ties to territory, would abandon the land occupied by the Europeans, and were too primitive to have any political organisation. But colonial experience undermined all of these assumptions…”

(Truth-Telling: History, sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, Henry Reynolds, 2021.)