Lizzie Buckmaster Dove on the track she navigated as part of her work on non-Indigenous Australians’ relationship to Country. Photo: Wilkie Dove.
Can going for a regular walk around your neighbourhood change your relationship to the place where you live?
It’s a deceptively simple question, and one artist and writer Lizzie Buckmaster Dove set out to answer as part of her master’s research in creative arts and human geography.
One of the outcomes of that research is the book Walking with Moon, a collection of stories, sketches, maps, photos and poems of Lizzie’s experience walking the same loop around her Coledale home for one full lunar cycle.
To celebrate the launch of the book, Lizzie, Wadi Wadi elder Aunty Barbara Nicholson, geographer Chantel Carr and artist Lucas Ihlein will share some of the ideas and techniques that shaped the work at the Wollongong Art Gallery in March.
The research project considers the ethics of “walking with Country” in south-east Australia, as a non-Aboriginal Australian.
The original plan was for a walk that looked very different to the one Lizzie eventually undertook.
“I was thinking about how I can engage more deeply with place as an artist,” Lizzie said.
“When I make work that’s speaking to a particular place I just kept hitting that bedrock Australian problem that we don’t recognise the sovereignty of First Nations people.
“I felt like I needed to come into relationship with Country through guidance, and because the question first entered my imagination post-bushfires I found myself wondering how long it would take to walk from Coledale where I live to Manyana where I was trapped during the fires.
“I imagined myself taking this walk over three weeks.”
As the project began to take shape Lizzie started to consult with Yuin man Dr Anthony McKnight and Wadi Wadi elder Aunty Barb.
She said it became clear to her that a one-way walk from Coledale to Manyana wouldn’t be appropriate.
“I had to navigate step by step, which was the main guidance I was also given to navigate it physically,” she said.
“I knew it was complicated, but I thought we would be able to identify custodians along the route I would need to talk to.
“Dr McKnight strongly suggested the walk was too long and too linear.
“As an A-to-B style walk it wouldn’t be about place, it would be about me in place.
“He suggested a better approach would be to walk more locally without leaving behind my usual responsibilities, and to walk the same route every day with the moon cycle.”
The moon cycle is a recurring theme in Lizzie’s works, and she ended up working out a 2.5 km loop that she was committed to every day.
She soon found her walks became less of a routine and more of a conversation.
“I was open to the rhythms and pulses that are all around us in the natural world,” she said.
“I would leave the house, step onto the route and it became an act of deep attention and deep listening.
“The first five days we were in torrential rain that made parts of the route impassable, so it was more than a week before I was able to do the extent of the route.
“I felt I was pulled into a gravitational force with the moon and water, where places were closed off and places were revealed.
“I began to ask Country if it was OK to walk here, today and I would get a feeling and over time I was guided to trust my feelings.
“As Westerners we so often override those feelings, yielding to the softness of those edges, noticing them in myself, in place, in relationships, in time is one of the places where the walking and being took me.”
Lizzie said although her walking project was at an end, the lessons she learnt and the work she created remained.
She said the process brought her a deeper understanding of her place in Australia.
“In some ways it is our Western mind that is tangled and through guidance, walking with Country became very simple,” she said.
“What became evident was there is always ambiguity as a non-Aboriginal person. It’s about respecting that and the complications I bring.
“The walk itself happens in a particular time and then disappears from view, but traces and residues are left, and this book is a trace.”
To attend the Walking with Moon book launch head to the Wollongong Art Gallery on Saturday 21 March at 1 pm. Entry is free.
