Living in the middle of everywhere

Suzi Lyon, Alice Springs, 2012  

In responding to the premise that those in the Territory who are from elsewhere fit into a nomadic genre, three Alice Springs based artists come to discuss how they came to be here, in the middle of nowhere, and what it means for them.

Many people living in the central part of the Territory at least, come from elsewhere. Some travel, linger, and years later realise they are still here. Others come for specific jobs or projects, leave, leave not to return, or they return again and again so that the lines that define where their home is, blurs. I personally feel I have three homes: Alice, Northern New South Wales and New Zealand,  and move regularly and easily between the three to feed my soul rather than my body,  to keep the links  and relationships with the familial, with other ways of  being, and  with other physical  properties of earth and sky.

And I do this because I can. Time and space is traversed easily and frequently via online airline bookings.  Like a rubber band with many trajectories, I and my fellow Centralians fling outwards to every point of this land, and return.  Other journeying, usually of the family kind at the end of the year, involves the big drives that eventually empty you out of this wide open land, edging you into increasingly defined spaces that converge finally into the constructed angles of towns and cities. The reverse drive, half way across the whole continent, returns you to a small desert town in the middle of a blazing summer, perhaps slightly shell shocked, and wondering why indeed you do live here, or repeat this madness year after year. And there is the loss too, the great loss of friends who move away, far away, and how easily and suddenly you can feel abandoned and insignificant.

But as the summer eases, the year takes on its momentum. The perspective of the country opens up into you, and you open up to it. You can be reminded that here, in the middle of nowhere, there is more active involvement and conscious awareness of the rest of this land, and therefore this does feel like the middle of everywhere else.

And it is important not to forget those who are born in this land, and whose land it is like none other. Working on an Alywerre community, about a half day’s drive from Alice, I was with some men and we were painting a mural together on a big tin shed. They were nice blokes, very polite. They were smoking a lot of cigarettes, and I asked them if they could smoke away from me, as it was making me cough.

Next moment when I looked up, they were nowhere to be seen. I scanned the horizon, and there they were, having downed their paint brushes, way over under the only tree in the vicinity, smoking.

Later I asked one of them, Richard, had he been away from his country much?

He said yes, he had been to Adelaide once.

I asked him, how he had liked it down there.

Oh, I didn’t like it at all, he said, it was really boring.

How come, I asked?

You couldn’t see anything was his reply. All the buildings got in the way. If you wanted to see, you needed a hill, and they were really hard to find. 

I looked around me, past the smoking tree, out to the few houses all painted a desert kind of pink, beyond the scattered hulks of slowly disintegrating cars, desert grasses swaying in the wind, along the  twisting line of red river gums along the creek bed, up onto the red ridge of rocky outcrops, further to convoluting ranges, on and on into a vastness of sky and space, and agreed that indeed you could see an awful lot out here.

And this is why we are here.

List of Works

Suzi Lyon, Prayer Swag, 2012, canvas, cotton, straw, print  

Suzi Lyon, Shaped like a bird, 2012, digital sound recording

J9 Stanton, Ode to those who didn’t stay, 2012, projection and sound

Ben Ward, Environment Map V3.1, 2012, enamel teapot single channel eight hour video loop, iPod touch

Henry Smith, Terra Firma + Fire, 2012, oil on canvas

Henry Smith, Terra Firma + Water, 2012, oil on canvas

Henry Smith, John Hayes Rockhole, 2010, oil on board