JONATHAN
JONES

In 2016, Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones presented barrangal dyara (skin and bones), a vast sculptural installation stretching across 20,000 square metres of Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden. Jones had proposed the work two years earlier for Your Very Good Idea, a public call-out to Australian artists for a site-specific project in celebration of forty-five years of Kaldor projects.

barrangal dyara (skin and bones) traced the outline of the grand Garden Palace, where it originally stood on Macquarie Street, facing Sydney Harbour. The Garden Palace was purpose-built for the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition, the first world fair in the Southern Hemisphere. After the exhibition’s close, the building held many of the colony’s important records, along with countless Aboriginal artefacts and objects taken from the colonial frontier. On 22 September 1882, the Garden Palace went up in flames and all was lost.

barrangal dyara (skin and bones) was Jones’ response to the loss of these cultural objects. He had come upon the story twenty years prior, on a visit to the Australian Museum. “When I first went looking for cultural material from where my family is from,” Jones remembers, “I found out that much of this material…was destroyed in the Garden Palace fire of 1882. Ever since, I’ve been struck with the loss of our cultural material, what that loss means for our communities and how you can move forward as a culture when you can’t readily point to your cultural heritage in museums”.

The title, barrangal dyara, comes from the local Sydney Language—the project took place on Gadigal country with approval from the community—and is translated as “skin” and “bones”. The installation featured 15,000 bleached-white gypsum shields, a material used in Aboriginal mourning ceremonies, to mark the extent of the building’s footprint and echo the masses of rubble left after the fire. A native meadow of kangaroo grass formed the heart of the work, on the site of the Palace’s original dome. Moving through the installation, visitors encountered eight different Aboriginal languages spoken across south-east Australia, through soundscapes created by Jones in collaboration with communities. barrangal dyara (skin and bones) was open to the public for just over two weeks, and each day the site was activated through talks, performances, workshops and special events.

“The Garden Palace has become a symbol for the repercussions of forgetting”, Jones said. “Aboriginal communities have often been the victims of Australia’s ability to forget… I’ve also been struck with the way we as Aboriginal communities remember, and through this project I’ve begun to see Aboriginal communities as the nation’s memory holders”.