Andrew Constable challenges us to each write:
Invitation to engage in Circumpolar Navigation
200 words.
Who are you?
What knowledge do you have of your place?
What makes you interested in the project?
How would others benefit from your contribution?
Motivation – understanding beyond lifetime values
Connection & Importance of places (make explicit)
Knowledge, history (different ways of expression, understanding)
I invite you to recognise your story in Circumpolar Navigation.
I am an Australian woman with Aboriginal Australian and English ancestry. I was born on Norfolk Island and grew up in Victoria’s Dandenong Ranges. There I experienced two worlds: one through my mother’s work as an artist in ‘Aboriginal Enterprises’, led by Aboriginal artist and activist, Bill Onus, and the other through my father’s relationship with the house we lived in, that was built by his grandfather, the Colonial artist Tom Roberts. I have worked in Tasmania as a community artist and in Antarctica as an Arts Fellow with the Australian Antarctic Division. I now work as Artist in Residence in the Faculty of Science at the University of Technology Sydney. I am passionate about education as a lifelong process of finding your path and purpose in life, and of understanding how we must relate well to each other to sustain the natural world that sustains us.
My contribution to this work is animations that interweave stories shared through art, science, and cultural knowledge. I have no knowledge of my mother’s country and this gap in knowledge combines with my understanding of growing threats to scientific knowledge coming from the Southern Ocean, that is vital for predicting and responding to changes in the health of lands and waterways worldwide. I invite you to recognise your story as part of the global threats and opportunities for re-connection to be found within Circumpolar Navigation.
