Verandah vignettes

Vandana Ram discovers deep connections to colonial India in a historic Australian house, SHIVANGI AMBANI-GANDHI reports.

 

Elizabeth Farm, Australia’s oldest surviving homestead and now a beautifully kept house-museum in western Sydney, has a long connection with India. Artist Vandana Ram unearthed these Indian links in Australia’s colonial history after her curiosity was sparked by references to this building as an Anglo Indian bungalow.

“I was intrigued to find out what that meant. I later realized that in Australia it is used to describe something that originates in British India,” says Ram.

She has now reinterpreted these Indian connections through a series of works for her new exhibition at Elizabeth Farm titled Verandah.

“I have worked in Western Sydney for the last 15 years or so, and more recently, I have focused on embedded histories in Parramatta and the surrounding region. I became particularly interested in the untold history of Indians in the early colonial history of Australia, and approached the Historic Houses Trust about two years ago to develop some site-specific work around Elizabeth Farm,” explains Ram.

The house, built in 1793 by John Macarthur and his wife Elizabeth, is now cared for by the Historic Houses Trust. “I have looked for Indian resonances within Elizabeth Farm, a building which physically manifests the Anglo Indian experience,” explains Ram. “This includes the early 19th century trade connections which brought textiles, furniture, ceramics, food supplies, seeds and most importantly, people from India to Australia. By 1840, a ship was leaving Sydney for India roughly every four days,” she adds.

Even in her initial visits Ram found many objects in the house that evoke Indian sensibilities, such as muslin and calico furnishings. Moving beyond these obvious material evidences, Ram began looking through diaries and letters to find further connections. “I found references to blue gurrah cloth and Bengal canvas in the Macarthur household shopping list, chintz curtains in the dining room, furniture, cane stools and Kashmiri carpets, and we know in 1830, John Macarthur purchased three Calcutta mats,” reveals Ram. “He also put 60 Bengal sheep to graze as his first flock of sheep on the farm in 1793, predating the Merinos, which is the more broadly understood history of the wool industry in Australia. Unfortunately for these Bengal sheep, they seem to have ended up on the Macarthur dinner table!”

In researching the history of the house, Ram also suddenly stumbled upon a more specific reference to one of the domestic servants that appears in the 1820 muster. John Bono, the 23-year-old ‘coloured’ footman, a Mussalman (Muslim) who arrived in Sydney as a free man on the Brig Active (a ship owned at one point by Samuel Marsden, that sailed constantly between Calcutta to Sydney via Hobart). “Little is known about him, but it is believed that his responsibilities would have included polishing the silver and crockery,” reveals Ram.

As part of the exhibition, in her installation titled John Bono, Ram spells out his name in Western crockery and cutlery, as well as Indian utensils and spices and houses the lot within the butler’s closet. “Discovering people like John Bono is critical in telling the story of the integral connection with Indians in the history of Australia as it emerges as an early British colony,” says Ram. “There are numerous references at this time, in shipping lists, newspapers, diaries and letters, to Indian coolies, servants, ayahs, nursemaids, grooms, natives, lascars (Indian soldiers) or ‘blackies’– most often with little else to go on.”

Ram found another telling reference to India which she represents in her work, titled Doob. In an 1843 letter to her son Edward, Elizabeth Macarthur wrote, “… the lawn mown on which there is a very heavy swathe of Doob, an Indian grass that the Hindoo worships by an Hymn inscribed to it, as a divinity…”.

“Doob is an artwork made from Darba grass, which I have planted in front of the verandah and surrounded it with red gravel. The words inscribed in the grass are from the first line of the Gayatri Mantra – Om Bhur Bhuva Swaha, which for me is the most powerful of Sanksrit mantras.”

In another work, Whitewash, the reference to the title of the exhibition – Verandah – becomes apparent. A deeply personal work, Whitewash is an installation of a series of images of Ram’s childhood, much of which was photographed on that verandah juxtaposed with images of what she imagines Elizabeth Macarthur would have looked out at, sitting on her verandah. “There are snippets of songs and stories told by my grandmother, as well as Enid Blyton telling a Noddy story. These post colonial residues are embedded in the language with which we grew up and the English literature we read, as well as the multiple cultural influences that we have in India.”

In her artistic practice as well as her work as Director of the Blacktown Arts Centre, Ram has had a longtime commitment to involvement with the Indian community in Sydney. For instance, her first solo exhibition, Indigo (held in 2006 at the Blacktown Arts Centre) emerged through a series of workshops she conducted with women from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India living in Blacktown, in which she explored the ideas of homeland, significant colours, spices and associated rituals and recipes.

For Verandah, Ram interviewed elderly people from the South Asian community to describe their encounters with the British in India and their memories of Partition. “I was curious to see if there had been much interaction between our communities and if so how that was manifested,” she explains. As part of the exhibition, Ram has installed a small screen showing these interviews in the Dining Room closet—a small room that comes out from the main Dining Room.

“They add a different layer of meaning to the exhibition, and it is also a way to encourage more storytelling by local Indians about these kind of memories of British India – to bring our community into this very historic home. I am interested to see if there are other things that can be brought out through our ways of seeing this house and the objects within it,” she reveals.

This exhibition, which is part of the flamboyant Parramasala 2010 Festival, also makes subtle connections to the recent racial attacks on Indian students in Australia. “This exhibition is very significant in a place like Harris Park and the location of Elizabeth Farm within it. I did want to respond to the recent history of racial violence against Indian students in this area, and the fact that it is also now home to a huge number of people originating in South Asia,” says Ram. “I think it is important for the wider community to be aware and acknowledge the much older history of Indians in this location and rethink what it means to describe home and a sense of belonging to a suburb.”

Verandah continues at Elizabeth Farm, Rosehill until February 2011