The trees have no tongues (2019)
‘The trees have no tongues’ is a portal to the in-between. It tells of the thousands of years of cultural practices that were dismantled as a result of the introduction of Christianity and the irreparable trauma that ensued. Christianity’s guise as the saving grace for the future of a new nation led to the detachment of identity for my family. The heaviness of their spirits scarred the places they touched leaving behind remnants of their stories of bare survival embedded within trauma.
Georgina was eleven years old when the Aboriginal Mission Station opened its arms to her preaching protection with food a plenty. In exchange for asylum, Grandmother, uninformed, surrendered her liberty to Christianity – a tool that sought to control, domesticate, and assimilate, a stratagem used to dictate the abandonment of her language, culture, and identity. When she was fourteen years old the Aboriginal Mission Station arranged her relocation and subsequent domestication, so many miles away from home – the Aboriginal Mission Station saw potential in her to serve White homes ensuing a license of integration into the new nation they called ‘Australia’.
Her daughter May was seven years old when her mother was rejected by both the Aboriginal Mission Station and the White Australian community. Belonging to neither, as a ‘domesticated’ Aboriginal woman, May was out of place and fearful. The intergenerational trauma paced through her veins from the attempted apocalypse on her culture. The pain of her foremothers was too strong to endure, May surrendered herself unwaveringly to the new nation in the hope for a merciful future for generations of family to come.
‘The trees have no tongues’ is a portal to the in-between. It tells of the thousands of years of cultural practices that were dismantled as a result of the introduction of Christianity and the irreparable trauma that ensued. Christianity’s guise as the saving grace for the future of a new nation led to the detachment of identity for my family. The heaviness of their spirits scarred the places they touched leaving behind remnants of their stories of bare survival embedded within trauma.
Georgina was eleven years old when the Aboriginal Mission Station opened its arms to her preaching protection with food a plenty. In exchange for asylum, Grandmother, uninformed, surrendered her liberty to Christianity – a tool that sought to control, domesticate, and assimilate, a stratagem used to dictate the abandonment of her language, culture, and identity. When she was fourteen years old the Aboriginal Mission Station arranged her relocation and subsequent domestication, so many miles away from home – the Aboriginal Mission Station saw potential in her to serve White homes ensuing a license of integration into the new nation they called ‘Australia’.
Her daughter May was seven years old when her mother was rejected by both the Aboriginal Mission Station and the White Australian community. Belonging to neither, as a ‘domesticated’ Aboriginal woman, May was out of place and fearful. The intergenerational trauma paced through her veins from the attempted apocalypse on her culture. The pain of her foremothers was too strong to endure, May surrendered herself unwaveringly to the new nation in the hope for a merciful future for generations of family to come.