Brenda L Croft’s creative practice has long been informed by her family’s layered history and her main preoccupation, as a First Nations person, has been with her father Joe Croft (1925–1996), a member of the Stolen Generations. However, in her latest exhibition, after/image, an ambitious initiative of Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Croft looks to her non-Indigenous settler-colonial heritage. The focus is on her mother Dorothy and her family’s connections to the Goulburn Mulwaree region that extend back before 1857. In still photographic images, a three-channel audio-visual work, and a free prose text published in the beautifully produced exhibition catalogue, Croft traces these ancestral links. It’s a personal project but the passing of time dictates that it can’t be an intimate one. Very few physical or material objects have survived as potential touchstones, despite Croft’s notion of an expanded, capacious archive that can accommodate anything from official documents, photographs and artefacts to sounds of the natural environment.
Much about after/image is familiar. There is, for example, the unabated yearning for ancestral connections, realised here in coincidences and chance occurrences. Croft is delighted to share a birthday with Caroline, her great-great grandmother, but she is not the one with whom she most profoundly identifies. Croft writes:
seeking connection with
Caroline it is her mother my
great-great-great-grandmother
Augusta Sophia that
draws the greatest admiration her
tenacity determination ambition
dedication to
her family mine too
The widowed Augusta, Croft discovers with pleasure, ran the Coach and Horses hotel in Goulburn for seventeen years from 1878 till 1880 with her husband William until his death, then with her eldest son William until her death in 1895 (a formidable achievement unacknowledged in the public record).
When Croft hears what she has described elsewhere as ‘calls from history’ she gratefully and ecstatically acknowledges them, bringing them into a contemporary temporal dimension. Encountering a postcard of the Anglican cathedral in Goulburn in one of her mother’s photo-albums, her handwritten notes on the reverse, moves her to tears. Despite having looked at the album countless times, Croft couldn’t ‘see’ the postcard until she was ready to–then, in one of those longed-for moments, the past opens up and the ‘invisible ancestral chain’ is activated to include Croft herself. A variant of this temporal rupture can be seen in the video footage of a blue tongue lizard on the cathedral floor; Croft describes the reptilian creature as a ‘guardian’, a messenger who waits to greet her.
Continuing her well-honed rituals Croft goes on Country to create this latest work. She makes multiple visits to Gundungara/Pajong/Ngambri/Ngunawal Country, walking across the plains bordering Weerewa/Ngungara (Lake George) in an embodied quest, often with company and collaborators. This is an important point because creating connections, building community, linking kin are also key to Croft’s practice. Prue Hazelgrove is her ‘artist-technician-magician’ who uses a wet plate collodion process to produce stunning tintypes from which large-scale prints are subsequently made. Baden Pailthorpe shot the mesmerising drone footage of the landscape (and buildings in Goulburn and Sydney associated with Dorothy’s life) and produced the audio-visual work under Croft’s direction.
The unstable viewpoint Croft often favours is also evident, especially in the audio-visual work in which the layered drone footage and still images emulate the layering of memory and history. Nothing seems fixed, everything is in flux. The images derived from the tintypes achieve a similar instability through disturbances of the emulsion and the little losses of resolution that arose during the wet collodion process. Sometimes one can’t be certain if an image is coming into being or disappearing. In one spectacular image a flaw in the tintype’s emulsion strikes the ground like a meteor, flaring up with inexplicable energy.
As this exhibition makes clear, Croft’s four decades-long practice is a questing one predicated on geographic, literal, spiritual, metaphysical journeying. The task being to secure a toehold in the past, bring it into the present and keep oblivion at bay. Several years ago, Croft explained that since her father’s death: ‘I have found myself following his and our people’s footsteps—going over the same ground, time and again, retracing, re-tracking, revising, revisiting, recollecting and reconnecting.’[1] It is an exhaustive and exhausting ritualised process. In a First Nations context the repeated actions, iterations and reiterations relate to strategies of resistance—assertions and reassertions of survival—but Croft’s art works also function as incantations or invocations designed to affect their viewers in various ways.
While Croft often uses self-portraiture to place herself within her visual narratives, in after/image she takes a different tack. She does not inscribe herself visually, but she is not absent. In the prints from Dorothy’s Kodachrome slides, which document Dorothy and Joe’s courtship in vibrant colour, the next generation—their children, Brenda, Tim and Lindsay—has no visual form but it is immanent. Where Brenda does overtly position herself is in her poetic catalogue text that is an integral part of after/image. It’s an intriguing move and delivers after/image to a place I did not expect — one that is not only mournful and elegiac but existential as well. In a disarmingly personal final section Croft asks several ultimately unanswerable questions:
who remembers those who are
no longer here?
what happens when we are gone?
who will take my mother’s photo albums?
…
what happens when my brother and I
are no longer here
when nobody is left who remembers her
voice or mine?
who will remember me?
Footnotes
- ^ Brenda L Croft, “home/lands,” in Brenda L Croft, Penny Smith, Felicity Meakins Still in my mind: Gurindji Location, Experience and Visuality (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Art Museum, 2017), 26.
