Tom Nicholson: Chimney in store (Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty)

Tom Nicholson’s Chimney in store (Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty) 2021 marks the culmination of the artist’s long-term public art project Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty, the project that begins with the conflicted meanings associated with Melbourne’s first European chimney, built by William Buckley for John Batman, and with the counter-narratives that assemble around that form.

The project has continued to evolve through a framework of projects and collaborators, including exhibitions and education programs at ACCA, TarraWarra Museum of Art, the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture, as well as discussions with City of Melbourne and Creative Victoria.

Critical to its development has been dialogues with Senior Wurundjeri Elder Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin (over a ten-year period), Professor Tony Birch, and artist Jonathan Jones, as well as more recent dialogues with N’arweet Carolyn Briggs (Chair, Boonwurrung Foundation) and Aunty Melinda Kennedy (Wathaurung Aboriginal Corporation).

The central trajectory of this iteration – the matter of a chimney that is returned to Country, the spectre of a monument that becomes its own topography – has evolved in relation to these important discussions with Kulin elders and intellectuals.

From installation to public monument:

Chimney in store (Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty) is based on Nicholson’s large-scale installation at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art – the central work in the major survey exhibition Tom Nicholson: Public Meeting, which was presented at ACCA from 6 April – 16 June 2019. A tumult of 3,520 bricks held the main space at ACCA, the number of bricks required to build the monument the project imagines: a brick form poised between a free-standing chimney and an obelisk. These bricks were surrounded by a frieze of texts for the plaques that would inscribe a future monument, running the perimeter or ‘lap’ of ACCA’s main gallery. These texts are now collected in an artist’s book which forms an integral part of the now public work Chimney in store.

A column of bricks returned to country:

The movement of these 3,520 bricks – originally sourced around Healesville near Corranderk – to the site at Batman Park returns the bricks to Country, whilst at the same time storing the material for a future monument to be reconstituted in the public domain.

The current form of the work as a mound covered in native grass to create a small hill is accompanied by a single bronze plaque with a text:

On 26 April 2021, 3,520 bricks are transported here from the upper reaches of the Birrarung/Yarra River, Wurundjeri Country. These bricks are stored here for a future monument: a free-standing chimney encased in thousands of words in plaques. This vertical form reprises this city’s first European chimney, built by William Buckley for John Batman. It is a monument to Batman’s treaty, the confected document Batman claims he signs with Wurundjeri elders in 1835. These bricks here – towards an obelisk that is also a hearth for a treaty that triggers an invasion – become this store. Tom Nicholson; Chimney in Store (Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty), 2021

Chimney in store (Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty): is an attempt to modestly enact an alternative monumental language. It mobilises the way a monument can speak to the place and scale of our collective life as a society, but also repudiates the false certainties of the monuments we have inherited.

Vital to Nicholson’s gesture of returning the 3,520 bricks to the ground, to form a mound, is the brick itself, both its material density as an object of Country, and the interring of memorial traces, to create a space and place to reflect upon Melbourne’s unique origins, and the complex meanings of Batman’s Treaty.

Site:

Batman Park is a site that draws together several critical narratives and associations in this project. Its close proximity both to the original site of the chimney and Batman’s Hill, on the current site of Southern Cross station, amplify critical aspects of the work and its counter-narratives. Perhaps most importantly, the proximity to the Birrarung / Yarra River provides a link to Coranderrk, and to the many walks and representations that William Barak undertook along its course, from Coranderrk to the seat of colonial power in Melbourne.

Spatially the site’s relationship to the vertiginous perimeter of the city grid links to the verticality of the free-standing chimney, and its echo of an obelisk. The openness of Batman Park and its sense of being more or less without topography makes the mound a more pronounced or uncanny presence. Above all the work engages but critically re-inflects the very name of the Park itself, as well being a site where commemorative gatherings can readily happen. Along with the close proximity to the City Loop tram it also provides a way for tourists to engage with the work and Melbourne’s remarkable early histories.

Artist Book and visual documentation:

Accompanying the brick and grass mound is an artist’s book that includes all of the texts for plaques that would inscribe the disinterred material for a future monument to Batman’s Treaty. Designed by Ziga Testen studio, the plaque fonts are evidence of a complete census of the plaque typographies of inner Melbourne (and in this sense constitute a meditation on the entirety of the city’s monumental complex).

Public monument / anti-monument:

This culminating sequence of iterations of the project reverberates critical parts of the historical narrative it engages. Chimney in store (Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty) reconstitutes a hill from the components of a chimney; inverting the historical process which saw the destruction of Batman’s Hill, the nearby site of the city’s original European chimney. It also echoes the mound at a critical juncture in Buckley’s assimilation into Wathaurung society; Buckley is said to have taken from a burial mound a spear which then facilitated his entry into Wathaurung society, where he assumed the name Murangurrk, the man buried within that mound. And it inverts the depression in the landscape at Coranderrk, which bears the shape of the clay extracted to make bricks there. The work is open to further participatory iterations, including movements to other sites, as part of its ongoing activation, its performative life, its deferral of the moment when the meanings and potentials of these histories would be finalised.

The figure of the buried form:

Echoing the remarkable German phenomenon of Schuttberge (where German women carried rubble from cities largely destroyed during WWII to create ‘rubble hills’), Chimney in store (Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty) also meditates on the monument itself. It is poised between a final repudiation of the monument (and its burial, out of sight); an enduring persistence of the monument (where the spectre of a monument becomes its own topography); or its deferral into a subterranean storage. In this ambiguity, Batman and Buckley are at once relegations (to a less heroic position), as well as insistent ground (for the city’s origins and its uncomfortable truths). The bricks that would re-issue that original European chimney are returned to their origins in the ground.