Port of entry

(2022)
Nine-channel video with sound, 5 minutes.

Despite engineering reports declaring Botany Bay’s unsuitability, the government forged ahead with its plan to develop and expand the port, suggesting that it would vindicate Cook’s opinion of the bay as a ‘capacious, safe and convenient harbour.’ The reshaping of the bay to allow for the container port and airport runways has permanently disrupted the natural tidal flows, currents and waves. No matter where you locate yourself within Botany Bay, the shoreline is dominated by human intervention.

This work juxtaposes the past and the present, problematising the notion of a natural landscape whilst bearing witness to how the environment has been disrupted and reconfigured. I appear as staffage exploring the southern headland. I, too, first entered Australia via Botany Bay. The narrative of the male colonial explorer at the site where Cook landed talks to the complexities of my connection to the land as a non-Indigenous occupant.