35Hunting Ground (haunted) (2016) is a series of A4 printed posters that reprint fragments of written
records by settlers. One reads: “Mr Shoobridge’s father was out dining with a country settler,
when a man came in, and called out, “Well, Master! I’ve shot three more crows today,” meaning,
BLACKS.
These texts accent the casual quotidian violence that grounds Tasmanian (and Australian)
contemporary identity, yet they are replicas of past words printed afresh, stained onto new paper.
These papers also feature in Gough’s video work Hunting Ground (pastoral) (2016-17) projected
in large-scale onto the adjacent gallery wall. In the video, papers are pinned to trees or lie quietly
between grass and dirt, shot between still views of landscapes in Tasmania. The video’s light
illuminates the rest of the space including the viewers that sit to watch or pass through the
exhibit. The colonial records do not remain static in an archive but active, living proof.
A powerful symbol of the colonial violence leading to dispossession is another small vitrine in
the gallery containing pieces of wood lying on a bed of dried ferns. The wooden vitrine contains
a broken box that once held a plaster relief of Manalargena, a Tasmanian Aboriginal warrior and
Chief by settler artist Benjamin Dutteareau c.1835. A text inscribed on the box reads ‘Manalargena
/ A celebrated chieftan of the east coast of V.D. Land one/ of the Mr. R[obinson?]’s faithful
attendants atach’d to the mission 1831.’ The artist is unable to find this colonial representation of
her ancestor but includes the missing historical placeholder as an object to be studied.