Artist Statement :

It is our great misfortune that many people and events bequeath no written histories. There are fewer free, raw undeveloped spaces where one can let their imagination run free, without being the victim of a great television producer. All we really have are minute fragments, bits of evidence and signs in the cracks on the street, [the interstices of the world]. Some subjugated personal histories that I find need circulating:

*QUEEN TRUGANINI, On May 7, 1876, Truganini, the last full-blood Black person in Tasmania, died at seventy-three years of age. Her mother had been stabbed to death by a European. Her sister was kidnapped by Europeans. Her intended husband was drowned by two Europeans in her presence, while his murderers raped her. Twenty-five lashes were stipulated for Europeans convicted of tying aboriginal Tasmanian women to logs and burning them with firebrands, or forcing a woman to wear the head of her freshly murdered husband on a string around her neck and still the current Australian primeminister will not acknowledge these events." Truganini's numerous personal sufferings typify the tragedy of the ethnic minority groups and other marginalised people of Tasmania as a whole. "Don't let them cut me up," she begged the doctor as she lay dying. After her burial, Truganini's body was exhumed, and her skeleton, strung upon wires and placed upright in a box, became for many years the most popular exhibit in the Tasmanian Museum and remained on display until 1947. Finally, in 1976--the centenary years of Truganini's death, despite the museum's objections, her skeleton was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea.

*Hecate (or 'Hekate'): Queen of the witches is an ancient and misunderstood Goddess. Finding the 'real' Hekate is a complex task, we learn very little about Her from Ancient Greek sources, and their conception of divinity was almost certainly very different from ours. Hekate is intrinsically ambivalent and polymorphous. She straddles conventional boundaries and elides definition."

* One of the Dead Girls in my Family: My Great-great grandmother Professor Allan, who in 1877 was The Celebrated Magician of the Age, performed 'the most wonderful 'SLEIGHT - OF - HAND TRICKS' coupled with vaudevillian routines. She was the first Lady Professor in Tasmania.