Opening night visitor studies 'Surgeon Bass Sails Into Booderee', a collaborative expanded painting by Mark Elliot-Ranken and Bernadette Smith showing at Jervis Bay Maritime Museum for the inaugural Halloran Art Prize until 30th January 2023.
In the Halloran Collection of the Jervis Bay Maritime Museum is a painting of Surgeon Bass sailing his open whale boat into the bay called ‘Booderee’ by the Dhurga people past Point Perpendicular. Also in the collection are the tools Bass and others used to undergo these voyages of exploration sailing quite literally off the edge of the charts. This voyage however was not into undiscovered virgin lands, the continent had been inhabited by the first voyagers for at least sixty thousand years. Aboriginal explorers had spread across the continent to its farthest edges. White explorers simply followed in their tracks. Yet western science and the search for knowledge whatever the reasons, is not innocent. Our artwork uses the archive to confront valorised colonial exploration and ensuing cultural erasures that have occurred on Indigenous lands.
Dr. M. Elliot-Ranken and Bernadette Smith MFA
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