Nine circling stone tools appear, superimposed above a birds-eye view of a rocky outcrop and a murky river. I am watching Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough’s video work p/re-occupied (2022), presented as part of a larger installation by the artist in rīvus, the 23rd Sydney Biennale. The video is an almost ten-minute clip of Gough’s travels by kayak along the network of rivers that pass through the heart of Lutruwita/Tasmania.¹ Aerial shots of the river are occasionally augmented by images of Tasmanian Aboriginal stone tools, held in the collection of the Australian Museum in Sydney. Through the course of the video, Gough positions the archive as the nucleus of a continuing cultural forcefield, maintaining colonial divisions to (physically and metaphorically) fence Country off from its rightful custodians.

In presenting p/re-occupied, Gough reminds us of the absence enforced by the archive. The rabid theft of Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural material in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by European collectors and curators has perpetuated a disconnect between rich cultural practice and an all-but-erased material historicity on Country. A staggering quantity of cultural material still lies in foreign archives: almost 15,000 Tasmanian Aboriginal stone tools remain in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford alone.² Gough sees the removal of cultural objects from Country in Lutruwita as an integral part of the process of colonisation, writing that ‘with so many Ancestral tools absent and far distant, our (Ancestors’) “occupation” or presence is erased, and cultural places are not protected from destruction’.³

In Western systems of land management and distribution, without (and occasionally even with) evidence of occupation or cultural significance, there is little that can protect Country from further abuse and appropriation. Archives in Lutruwita and offshore continue to enact ongoing colonial violence; the act of withholding maintains a physical and cultural barrier between objects and Country, perpetuating a false perception of cultural absence. Greg Lehman identifies that an inversion of this dynamic through truth-telling and archival interventions—exemplified by works such as p/re-occupied—are ‘essential if we are to gain an honest, powerful relationship—and truly own—our colonial past and the implications it has for today’.⁴

Gough has always taken to her art practice with a forensic approach, combing through the mires of Australia’s colonial history with the aim of uncovering hidden or forgotten truths. Particularly interesting is Gough’s negotiation of the relationships between archives in the metropole and those in the colonial state. For example, her work for the 2013 exhibition The Lost World (part 2), Gough offered an alternate virtual return of stone tools held in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA). Tools from the collection were displayed alongside a video work by Gough in which she returned printed photographs of the objects to the sites from which they were taken. Jessyca Hutchens suggests that Gough’s work at the MAA refutes the seemingly comfortable notion that digitising and uploading an object to a collection website is an act of accessibility.⁵ When Gough returns the photos of tools to Country, it is a glaring reminder that these are reproductions, the work suggesting a ‘durational, contingent’ repatriation.⁶

Each stone tool displayed in p/re-occupied, like those shown at the MAA, is inscribed with the settler name of its place of discovery—Avoca, Swanston, Port Sorell, Lake Leake—claiming possession over not only the tools, but the landscapes and the peoples they belong to. This defacing, in Gough’s words, is ‘discomforting; it disfigure{s} the object’.⁷ However, as the artist notes, these inscriptions ensure that these tools are not completely divorced from their original collection sites, unlike most, which remain ‘in perpetual limbo’.⁸ The settler place names inscribed on the tools reveal the wider colonial effort to rename, in an attempt to lay unassailable claim to the landscapes of Lutruwita. The very presence of the tools in the archive and their connection with the Country they were stolen from undermines the Anglo-Celtic microcosm fostered through colonisation. By pointing to the paradoxical effect of possession through naming, Gough highlights how unwittingly this act locates and challenges the colonial possession of Country now. Furthermore, while the prevalence of the countless works that remain unlabelled and untethered to Country could be seen as an attempt to dehistoricise Tasmanian Aboriginal sovereignty, Gough reminds us that they still belong on Country, rather than ‘in boxes in state museums’.⁹

Much of Lutruwita, especially its arable Midlands—the traditional lands of the Big River and Oyster Bay nations—remains divided into neat parcels drawn up by the colonial powers of the first decades of the British invasion. Large tracts of Country were given freely to settlers with requisite capital, and many descendants of original grantees still live on the land handed out to their ancestors two hundred years ago. Access to these landscapes remains contingent on landowners’ permission, and thus Country often lies out of reach. Describing her 2015 work The Gathering, Gough suggests that in the act of exclusion, through the network of fences that criss-cross the island, that settlers have ‘enclosed something that they’re keeping hidden.’¹⁰ While cultural objects in archives may not necessarily be ‘hidden’ on purpose, in practice, material held in European and American archives remains largely inaccessible. This is especially the case with objects lost in collections. Professor Gaye Sculthorpe’s recent work in locating a miscatalogued eighteenth century rikawa (kelp water carrier) in the collection of the Musée du Quai Branly demonstrates that known collections are merely the tip of the iceberg; how much more that was taken lies in the archive miscatalogued or forgotten?

In p/re-occupied and the recent Aftermath (embarkation) (2024) the rivers traversed by Gough—Paranaple (Mersey River), Panatana creek, Tinamirakuna (Macquarie River) and Lokenermenanya (River Clyde)—become a vehicle to access Country otherwise out-of-bounds. Footage of Gough kayaking in these works sharply contrasts with the slow, unsettling drives past the driveways of colonial homesteads that characterise the Gathering. The river as a site of colonial conflict, and its relationship to the archive is paramount to interpreting p/re-occupied. The Thames (as depicted in Gough’s work The Mire, 2023) and Timtumili Minyana/River Derwent served as Imperial arteries for London and Hobart, through which people, directives and spoils were conveyed from one side of the world to the other. The rivers that Gough traverses in p/re-occupied could be seen as a synecdoche for the greater role of the archive; offering an in-road to the stories and culture that have been disarticulated and dislocated from their original contexts, laying out-of-bounds in foreign territory.

The hermetic nature of the archive to its victims is the axis on which p/re-occupied turns. A gesture on a path to restitution, Gough’s work questions the role of the archive in perpetuating colonial dis/possession and ongoing violence. Yet through the virtual act of returning these stone tools to the Country and culture to which they belong, she also enacts a further step towards truth-telling, and ultimately, healing. The colonial power of the archive, enforced through the kidnapping of evidence and culture, is perhaps hidden better than other aspects of British control in Lutruwita. Gough directs our attention to this, revealing objects and connecting them to material landscapes, to unsettle the forces that continue to divide and deny access to Country.