History is often seen as a time zone that is severed from contemporary life, yet the past and its residues are at constant interplay with the everyday, as well as how we imagine what be might yet come.*

Every day we walk among residues of the past. Along Bendigo Creek, an observant walker will encounter traces of a time that predates colonisation, mining and urban development. Artists Kylie Banyard and Jessie Boylan spent time visiting Bendigo Creek during winter and early spring 2021. Rising gently about here is the result of their collaborative experiments with historical and contemporary photographs, maps, topographical drawings, oil paint and watercolour.

 For thousands of years prior to European colonisation, Bendigo Creek flourished under Djaara custodianship. The oral traditions and knowledge of the Dja Dja Wurrung People describe a healthy series of interconnected waterholes surrounded by wooded areas and treeless flats.

 A map created by miner, William Sandbach, in 1851 describes the rhythms of the landscape as ‘sloping gently to the creek’ and ‘rising gently about here’. Such records inadvertently reveal the successful management of the creek by Djaara. Looking towards the city centre from the top of View Street we can imagine water pooling in the valley at the bottom of the hill, now paved in bluestone and hidden beneath the Alexandra Fountain.

 In Rising gently about here, we see – and hear – a section of the creek north of Bendigo, where the waterway breaks out of the heavily engineered drain that runs through the city into a more naturalised, grassy bank just before the township of Huntly. As visitors on Country, Banyard and Boylan have made a speculative work that evokes the histories of the creek, its current state and its potential future.

——

 The artists and La Trobe Art Institute acknowledge the Dja Dja Wurrung People, Traditional Owners of the Country that includes Bendigo Creek. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and recognise their continued work ensuring that Bendigo Creek will once again be Wanyarram Dhelk (a good waterhole).

*Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha. Potential History : Unlearning Imperialism, Verso, 2019, p. 19.