Spot Fire 1:
Landscape and language

 

State Library of New South Wales
Saturday 7 May

Crowning a high ridge above the city, the impressive Garden Palace dominated Sydney’s 19th century skyline. It was erected in the present-day Royal Botanic Garden, a final inner-city vestige of grassland and Indigenous country scraped clean. Announcing Australia to the world, the palace welcomed international visitors and their goods to the Sydney International Exhibition, 1879–80. Indigenous languages seemed to have been silenced on the ancient ground, while a chatter of other languages, currencies and philosophies from all round the world were ushered in. Spot Fire 1: Landscape and language reveals the cultural landscape and built environment that led to the Garden Palace, asking `what are the configurations of country still active in the site on the edge of the city?’.

Spot Fire 2:
Spectacle, manifestation, performance

Art Gallery of New South Wales
Saturday 16 July

Housing the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879–80, the ostentatious Garden Palace completed the Chief Colonial Architect of New South Wales, James Barnet’s, vision for Sydney. Gesturing out to Middle Harbour and the Heads, it was the city’s boast of its burgeoning colonial enterprise. But the Garden Palace’s magnificence was fleeting, lasting only three years. In 1882, in an ultimate spectacular display, the palace and all its contents were destroyed by an intense fire that took only a few hours to obliterate everything except the gates at the south-west entrance to the grounds. Spot Fire 2: Spectacle, manifestation, performance considers the history of spectacle in Sydney and interrogates the grandiose cultural vision that promoted the Australian colonies to the world.

Spot Fire 3:
Loss and resilience

 

Australian Museum
Saturday 6 August

When the grand Garden Palace burned down in 1882, vast stores of archival and cultural material were lost, including an ethnological collection assembled by the Australian Museum – a loss that is felt to this day. But out of the void, new modes of display and public cultural engagement developed and Sydney began to recover. The burning palace was generative too, causing the growth of several fledgling organisations that may well have failed to emerge if the great centralised vision of the post-exhibition palace had prevailed. Spot Fire 3: Loss and resilience will celebrate the resilience of the many cultures impacted by the Garden Palace fire, showing how communities can heal and then find ways to thrive after catastrophe.