Murnong by Tahlia Palmer

Murnong is an ongoing audio-visual project, started in 2021 when Tahlia received a gift of yam daisy seeds. A plant of significance to her family and many others from the eastern side of this continent, it was a staple food crop for Aboriginal people before European invasion. This plant represents sacredness, survival after colonial violence, and an ongoing connection to the women in her family and the lives and diets of their ancestors.

This work seeks to remind audiences that we cannot erase uncomfortable histories, and that we cannot build good futures without stable foundations of knowledge about the human relationship to the non-human world; never creating that distinction between human and nature – instead: continuing to recognise ourselves as part of everything and everything being part of us – is how the ancestors lived in balance for many, many thousands of years. Adapting to change, this condition continues.

Murnong is screening at Fed Square as an offsite event of the Gertrude Street Projection Festival, where the work will be accompanied by a 32 minute and 32 second soundtrack that speaks to the presence of the past in our now and our future, the connection of all life and the effects of colonisation, as with the video.

About the artist

Tahlia Palmer is an artist of Murri and European background born on Whudjuk Noongar Boodjar (Perth, WA), working in a variety of mediums to explore history, identity and perception. Descended from a paternal line who survived dispossession, forced assimilation and the Stolen Generations (NSW and QLD), and maternal Dutch grandparents who survived WW2, her art practice works on confronting the conditions that create and perpetuate intergenerational trauma, as well as finding pathways for healing. She releases ambient/drone/noise soundscapes under the pseudonym “amby downs”, named after the QLD station on which her Murri ancestors worked in servitude.

Fed Square is co-presenting Murnong with the Centre for Projection Art.