Birds of the Footscray District (2023)

Five Walls Melbourne Australia
Gallery 4 - A small solo show of photographs based on a bird field guide published in 1939
Address - Level 1, 119-121, Hopkins Street, Footscray Melbourne 3011 Australia
Opening - Friday 17 November 6-9pm
Exhibition Dates - 15 November - 2 December 2023
Opening Hours Wed-Sat 12-6

The photographs in this exhibition are details from the book Birds of the Footscray District by Jack Jones (‘Gerygone’),1939, a settler-colonial guide to urban bird watching. Despite the author’s deep appreciation of the birds’ lives in the complex landscape of Footscray in the 1930s, there is no consideration of the traditional owners of the area, the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples, whose knowledge systems are deeply entwined with the lives of all other creatures. According to Wurundjeri Custodian Mandy Nicholson, birds are powerfully symbolic for Wurundjeri people. This absence makes for distinctly uncomfortable reading given our extensive debates around decolonisation today. With an abstraction of the content that may indicate its partial/selective knowledge, the photographs can be understood, perhaps, as a reframing of the guide to generate new meanings, a posthuman contribution to the decolonisation debate.