Welcome
Eliza Tree – Artist and Expeditioner,
Community activist and Environmentalist.
I combine my creative passion, historical research, and deep concern for the climate crisis to explore Culture, ecology, and landscape. My visual arts practice is of multi-disciplinary enquiry, drawing upon diverse historical documents, contemporary sources, images, maps, and journals, to question and re-evaluate the meta-narrative(s) of Colonialism in early Australia.
OPEN STUDIO EXHIBITION 2024 – AO24
TO BOTANY BAY…… #2
As an Artist and Expeditioner, I travel through maps and text, space and time, exploring ideas and realms – seeking to understand the Colonial Invasion of Australia, via Botany Bay.
This exhibition represents the latest chapter in a fascinating journey towards addressing Colonial Denialism, instead, looking towards revisionist Truth Telling.
Throughout many Arts Open, and Castlemaine State Festival Exhibitions, I have evolved my thoughts, knowledge, images and ideas, in the process of re-interpriting and understanding the myriad of lies and obfuscations, which have been delivered to us, through ‘primary source documents’, Official Journals, public gazettes, etc. – in a fabricated ‘narrative’ of “peaceful settlement”, in ‘unoccupied’ land.
Re-evaluating other perspectives, voices and silences. Public Narrative or Private Correspondence.
Making the Invisible Visible.
10-4PM. 9- 17 MARCH 2024. 137 MOSTYN ST, DJARRA COUNTRY. CASTLEMAINE.
Eliza Tree elizatree@castlemaine.net
Acknowledgment of Country
I wish to acknowledge that I live and work on Djaara Country, the homelands of the Dja Dja Wurrung Peoples, who have owned, lived on and cared for this Country since time immemorial. I pay respect to their elders past, present and emerging. I respect and appreciate the Peoples and ancestors, their lands and water, birds, plants and animals who have lived in harmony for millennia. We will continue to respect and protect. Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
