'Bass Sails Into Booderee' finalist for Halloran Art Prize

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, manned by convicts offered pardons to do so into the bay then 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. Once you turned right at Sydney heads, it was into oblivion.

 

Astrolabe’s, sextant’s, compass’s, chronometers and the sketchy running survey done by Cook thirty years before were Bass’s companions in this voyage from Sydney heads to Bass strait and back.  It was the surgeon sailor who first recognized that a strait must exist between Tasmania and the mainland. 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.  

 

Later came worse, disease, warfare, massacre and the hallmarks of imperialism to turn indigenous cultures and civilization into objects of study, classification and ridicule. As the great Franz Fanon indicated, the imperial project turned a multitude of intense systems of knowledge by the first peoples into silenced voices for western imperial exploitation and subjugation. This does not condemn Bass or those convict crewmen, rather it shows that science and the search for knowledge whatever the reasons, is not innocent.  Dr. M. Elliot-Ranken and Bernadette Bayley Smith MFA