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Podcast: EMPIRE LINES
Episode: Possession Island (Abstraction), Gordon Bennett (1991)
Description: Dr. Desmond Manderson lashes new layers atop Australia's colonial founding myths, through Gordon Bennett's 1991 painting, Possession Island.
When Captain Cook planted the Union Jack on Possession Island in 1770, Australia was entirely subsumed within the British Empire. Colonial imaginings of this moment reinforced the legal myth around terra nullius, still propagated in constitutional classes today. Gordon Bennett whip-splashes alternative histories atop the time-worn tropes, exposing the hidden witnesses to violence at Australia's coming-of-age party. Possession Island perverts our expectations of empty, untamed lands, and collapses the strict divisions between aboriginal, colonial, and post-colonial art. Showing at the Tate...