baanytaageek
Great Swamp Fragments
for: MUMA Museum and Monash Urban Lab
location:
Boon Wurrung Country
size: 50 sqm
with:
Monash Urban Lab, Nigel
Bertram,
N’arwee’t Carolyn Briggs,
Catherine Murphy, Rutger Pasman
publication design:
Stuart Geddes and Ziga Testen
N’arwee’t Carolyn Briggs,
Catherine Murphy, Rutger Pasman
publication design:
Stuart Geddes and Ziga Testen
date: 2023
The following project text is written by Nigel Bertram and Catherine Murphy - Two hundred years ago, on the estate of the mayune buluk of the Boon Wurrung language group, a vast baanytaageek, the Great Swamp, was covered with shallow waters and thick, impenetrable vegetation. With much difficulty, this dynamic low-lying region on the northern edge of Western Port Bay was comprehensively cleared and drained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and subdivided for farming, infrastructure and settlement. Today we are all custodians of this altered ecosystem, degraded after more than a century of extractive processes. Only a few remarkable fragments of the wetland complex remain— a raised mound of melaleuca, a tidal inlet edged with mangroves, and a dense thicket on a boggy creek bed. This exhibition reveals the intricacies of these particular, isolated and generally inaccessible fragments through moving and still imagery, a geophonic soundscape, Boon Wurrung spoken language, and a layered, archival map of the larger catchment.
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Exhibition Layout- -