Paull McKee, "Presence" detail, found objects, furniture, velvet, bricklayer's line

Memories in Place: Art in High Country Huts is a unique project has been developed and presented by Craft ACT Craft and Design Centre in association with Namadji National Park. Instigating artist, Paull McKee, along with Joanne Searle and Daniel Maginnity created visual art works responding to three historic sites. The artists installed temporary works in the huts that inspired the project, but an exhibition can also be viewed in Craft ACT's Gallery 1, located at Civic Square, until Sunday November 6. Craft ACT organized a tour of the sites: Brayshaw's, Westerman's and Waterhole Hut, which was wonderfully supported by Namadji's rangers and members of the Kosciuszko Huts Association. Interpretation: Imagining Past Present Future, another item on the program, is a one day forum scheduled for Saturday November 5 at the Namadji Visitors Centre. Speakers will include: artist and writer, Anne Brennan; Manager of Namadji Park, Brett McNamara; heritage specialist and curator, Matthew Higgins and President of the Kosciuszko Huts Association, Mark Cleghorn.

The forum will investigate the possibilities that collaborative art, heritage and environment based projects present. Performance and multimedia are being used more widely in heritage interpretation and visual art also offers intriguing possibilities. The language of visual art is quiet, reflective and philosophic. It is voiced through metaphors, references and symbols and offers sensitive and insightful ways of looking at and understanding heritage. As case studies, the works in Memories in Place: Art in High country Huts are interesting examples of this innovative cross disciplinary practice. Paul McKee, for instance, is interested in memory; the ways in which it persists and the influence that memories have on individual identity. He uses textiles for their capacity to evoke sensory memory and to reference the vernacular or 'make do' practices of the pioneers. Similarly, the huts themselves are examples of pioneer crafts which came alive in a woodcraft demonstration by ranger Dave Whitfield. He provided safety tips on wielding an adze, used a maul and froe to split shingles, an auger to make holes and showed a deft touch, shaping green timber with broad, shingling and lathe axes.

Whitfield has learnt the old skills so as to be able to assist in hut restoration projects and he was quick to point out that Brayshaw's, Westerman's and Waterhole huts were constructed not by carpenters or craftsmen, but by farmers, who needed a range of practical survival skills to be able to carve out a living on their remote properties. A wooden crate, fixed to the wall in Waterhole Hut, contained cutlery and tin vessels, dissolving with the passage of time. The objects reveal a story of ordinary daily routines that sustained life in the remote pastoral setting. The familiar smell of wood smoke from the hearth was a poignant sensory link with the solitary shepherd that once occupied the place. McKee's work on fabric evokes the memory of the rudimentary comforts Waterhole Hut offered. His gallery installation includes a bed and chair placed on a drop sheet. The furniture is aged, invoking an earlier era and resembling historic images contained in the Waterhole Hut Heritage Management Plan (HMP). No ordinary cloth, the black velvet shows signs of wear and mending; it was a theatre curtain in a former life and dramatically delineates the installation space.

McKee has created a continuous line drawing in running stitch on the cloth, which traces shadows cast by the chair and the bed with a jacket discarded upon it. The measured and painstaking process of stitching is used metaphorically by textile artists to refer to the passage of time and the patient performance of repetitive tasks. A hanging thread with the needle still attached implies an interruption and suggests the lingering presence of the maker's hand. The stitching stands out as a graphic, but fragmented outline. It speaks visually of traces left by shepherds for whom the hut provided welcome shelter, a bed and a place to sit by the fire. Installed in Waterhole Hut McKee's velvet cloth transformed the earthen floor into a void, in which the outline of the bed and chair hovered in surreal and distorted perspective. It suggests the challenge of understanding the life of pioneers, which is far removed from our postmodern urban version. I wondered about the shepherd's response to the nocturnal possum caterwauling McKee complained about and recalled the recipe for 'Possum Terrine' in my 1919 CWA cookbook. Damper, tea and roast or stew cooked over the open fire would have been the daily fare. Consumption of native fauna would have protected financial investments in valuable exotic stock. Time has inverted our value system and ranger man hours today are dominated by noxious weed and feral animal control.

Did some pioneering Scot, yearning for the highlands and glens deliberately plant the seeds of weed invasion? It is a question that ceramicist Joanne Searle must have asked when she decided to focus her attention on the scotch thistles infesting the pasture around Brayshaw's Hut. When she first visited the site, she was attracted to the pretty mauve flowers, she said, but learned that the thistles can harm stock, contaminate and reduce the value of wool and invade disturbed pasture land, competing with and displacing desirable fodder plants. After flowering each head will disperse some 200 seeds which are scattered widely on wind borne down. Searle has constructed mounds from the dried seed heads and these are exhibited at Craft ACT. The forms strongly resemble the granite outcrops of Namadji, but in her artists talk, she described them as 'topiary,' a practice that controls and transforms a natural organic form into a manicured cultural artifact.

Drawing on her habit of 'collecting nature', Searle transformed bits of four different spiny plants by dipping them in slip and firing them. The Collected Residuum was sorted by type into old fashioned scientific jars with glass stoppers and these were presented on a small table in the dim interior of Brayshaw's Hut. The audience was encouraged to interact with the work by handling the small ceramic objects, which strongly resembled fossils or archaeological specimens. It would have been interesting to have the audience locate, collect and record the intriguing fragments around the Brayshaw's site. Such an interactive performance would have related the work to the site as the source of the original material and to core heritage practice. While Collected Residuum invoked familiar themes of collection and classification, the installation was essentially self-contained and would not be diminished or altered by display in another place. Daniel Maginnity touched on similar themes in his installation at Westerman's Hut. His collection of skulls greeted visitors entering the two front rooms of the painstakingly restored homestead.

Each skull was painted a different colour and carefully placed on an obliquely positioned book on the floor so as to face the door. They were disturbingly sculptural and confronting. Transient existence is invoked by the skeletal remains and the proximity of the Westerman family grave site is a piquant reminder of human mortality. Maginnity's diverse specimens including: kangaroo, goat, bullock, galah, sheep, wattlebird, bluetongue, dog, chook and wombat, suggested the complex colonial heritage that themix of indigenous and exotic species represent. The precise placement strongly invoked concepts of classification and informing epistemologies, which Maginnity has located within the confines of a man made structure rather than in the environment. He typically works in installation and juxtaposes environmental elements with references to urban spaces, achieving a thoughtful, poetic effect. In the Craft ACT gallery, his delicate floor composition of rectangular plots of earth and kangaroo skulls reflects on the heritage of land ownership and the economic, social and environmental tensions that are a consequence of heritage conflicts.

Maginnity's works in the two sites are mutually informing and while separately, each piece has a delightfully elusive abstract quality that demands a level of intellectual engagement, they reward the viewer. It is the kind of work that is an absolute delight to some and completely mystifying to others. Ideally, this should not be the case; visual language should be more widely understood as poetry for the eyes. If a culture and its leadership has no capacity for or interest in supporting genuine self reflection and inquiry through the arts, be it visual, literary, cinematic or through dance and theatre, its people are impoverished, they are dispirited through denial of expression. History must feature in honest self examination and the pioneer buildings in Namadji, which have been restored through the efforts of Kosciuszko Huts Association, are significant artifacts connecting to that heritage. The three huts that inspired Memories in Place: Art in High Country Huts are divergent examples of vernacular buildings and feature slab, lathe and plaster and ironclad timber frame construction methods respectively. The sites miraculously survived the 2003 fires that swept through the region destroying some 25 historic places.

Vernacular buildings are relatively rare; they tend to deteriorate and have mostly disappeared in urban areas where, until quite recently, they were not considered important. This contrasts with attitudes to grand, craftsman built homesteads and government buildings. Vernacular buildings are invaluable connections to the lives of ordinary people, to the battlers that contributed their courage, stoicism and amazing self reliance to our sense of national identity. Crafts are living heritage, but clashes of class, culture and economics have created inequities in how they are understood and valued. In recent years, Art on a String: Threaded Objects fro the Central Desert and Arnhem Land sought to revalue the craftwork of indigenous women by elevating it from the souvenir shop to the museum space. In contrast, Rare Trades at the National Museum of Australia might be interpreted as perpetuating the idea that traditional crafts, such as stone masonry, are repetitive manual tasks rather than creative arts informed by skill, experience and an acute physical and kinetic intelligence.

Highly skilled craftsmen were employed to restore the chimneys at each of the Memories in Place: Art in High Country Huts sites. Each chimney is a uniquely beautiful piece of work in which form, function and material are in exquisite synergy. One must wonder how the new chimneys, which have been reconstructed from the original materials, might differ from the old. Authenticity is a major issue in conservation and it is a methodological imperative to consult historical, documentary and oral histories in preparation for work involving rebuilding. But how far do you go? The acrylic sheets lining the walls and protecting the fragile remnants of lathe and plaster in the back rooms of Westerman's hut invest the site with the feel of a museum exhibit. Maginnity's only intrusion in this part of the building was to leave his sketch book and a tin of artist's materials on the mantle as a self referential statement.

An emphasis on original fabric in heritage places is informed, I would suggest, by classical ideals of truth. This differs markedly from the Japanese approach to conservation, in which the periodic reconstruction of significant temples and palaces is intrinsic to a living culture of respect that embraces process. It is noteworthy that under this regime craft skills are also renewed and preserved. This is consistent with Japanese recognition of crafts as living heritage. Conspicuous craft mastery and achievement is revered in Japan and someone like Australian ceramicist, Les Blakeborough for instance, would be honored as a living treasure. In this post modern world of global mass consumption, people are being alienated from processes of making and from traditional ways of life. So, it is more important than ever to acknowledge and celebrate craft and heritage. In Australia the two fields are separated by disparate theories and methodologies, but they are both integral to our sense of identity. They are each concerned with place, with tradition and evolving values. Projects such as Memories in Place: Art in High Country Huts have the capacity to bring craft and heritage together in an exploration of culture as a dynamic continuum, connecting the past with contemporary practice.