Fernando do Campo
Few Central Queenslanders would recognize the names Hugh Anderson, Manicka Dhanasekar or Daniel Clemmett. Even within the art community, these artists’ names are rarely associated with Rockhampton’s most known artworks - the seven giant bull sculptures scattered around the city.1
Yeppen Roundabout, Bruce Highway, first week of January 2001, one of these mighty figures was my first sighting of Rocky when my migrant family arrived here.2 Like a farmgate guardian, the illusion of a non-human animal encounter, concrete and paint, ushered us into the city’s perimeter. This was Brahman Bull (2000) by Anderson.
Driving from Melbourne to our new home in the tropics, I still remember the conversation this artwork triggered. My mother had grown up in a cattle farm in Argentina, and although a similar breed is common in Brazil, this was a new humped-back specimen for her knowledgeable eyes. Like most humans who enter or egress Rockhampton by vehicle, my family and I, we the human, acknowledge these sculptures as ‘animal’ before ‘art’.
In the locals’ imaginary, this sculpture trail of oversized-man-made-animals, signifies Central Queensland’s settler-colonial history (and its lingering shadow upon contemporary identity); 20th century global genetic breakthroughs matching cattle breeds to harsh environments; a beef economy; and public art. Whether residents are aware of it or not, acknowledging the beef capital status and being an art audience are interchangeable.
Crystallized by visionary Rockhampton Mayor Rex Pilbeam’s commissioning of the first bulls while simultaneously establishing a nationally significantly art collection and stamping this city as the Beef Capital of Australia, 20th century Rockhampton modernism presents the animal as a central component of the city’s cultural identity.3 Thinking through the interwoven narratives of human and animals in Central Queensland offers an insight into the confluence of discourses still at play in the region.
Surveying the Rockhampton Museum of Art collection, echoes the ways our species has historically defined itself as human in relation to other animals across schools of philosophy and art history.4 We see the notion of the animal negotiated alongside pre-settlement, colonial, nationalistic, agrarian, and environmentalist concerns. Important to note, is that these conversations are complex and that they don’t always emerge distinctly from each other.
The relationship between storytelling and animals appears in ancient through to contemporary art objects made by first-nations peoples. This is captured beautifully in Walking Stick in the form of a snake (circa 1971), part of a collection of hand-carved wooden objects with incised pokerwork design depicting various reptiles encountered in Woorabinda. In these instances, Western classification and ordering of species is secondary to affective multispecies encounters and Aboriginal oral histories. These objects are atemporal; both as animal and as art.
In Davida Allen’s Children and dogs on Zilzie Beach (1993), paint is not just a medium through which to depict a narrative or a landscape, it is rather an embodied expression of woman and companion animal (via human child and dog) negotiating space together. This painting from the collection, marks feminist and environmentalist concerns emerging at the same time as grazier-conqueror narratives of frontier Queensland. While multiple giant bulls are being erect along the national highway; Queenslander Allen, along with many women painters globally,5 was locating herself in the world alongside animals.
The human negotiating the animal is a re-occurring theme in contemporary Queensland art and exemplified in this collection. Michael Zavros’ Prince/Zavros series (2012), hyper realist paintings measuring masculinity along metrics of the horse and the Outback cowboy; Marian Drew’s Emu with two drawn bowls (2009) an incredible compositions of native wildlife alongside her signature manipulation of Dutch still life conventions through the digital lens; and Bill Yaxley negotiating the animal playfully with his sculpture Living Dangerously (2013), a ballerina like figure reclines upon the jaws of a saltwater crocodile, reminding us of the precarity but necessary daily encounters between humans and other animals in Queensland.
Human-animal histories are messy. Delving through them unpicks the layers of Australia’s complicated and unresolved history of negotiating ethics within an enormous land mass and alongside non-human animal companions that were here prior to settlement, arrived with waves of humans, and, as much as we the human pretend otherwise, they all have a life and a history of their own. Their histories are sticky and are knotted with our own.6 These knots exist within this art collection.
The bulls are everywhere in this nation, and like tropical minotaurs they stand tall and proud in Central Queensland. The animal, or rather, our complex wrestling with the idea of it, is an undeniable part of our national identity. All Australians are subjects to an unresolved settler-colonial legacy, while in this case, basking under a Capricornian sun that extrudes love for this country. However, this love must be accompanied by an earning to become the companion animal to the colonial animal, and in that moment, as occurs in this collection, we the human start telling a fuller story.
February 2022
1 For information on Rockhampton’s Museum of Art Sculpture Trail of the seven bulls, including details on each artist commission and breed of cattle depicted, refer to the online map and didactics available through the museum’s website in archived programs Where’s the Beef?
2 I spent my teenage years living in Rockhampton, amongst many things, as a volunteer for Rockhampton Wildlife Rescue. All my memories of this region are a melting pot of animals and art.
3 For a comprehensive and beautifully written history of the city refer to Lorna McDonald’s An Overview of Rockhampton’s History (2003) available through the Central Queensland University manuscripts collection.
4 Much of the posthumanities has focused on interrupting anthropocentrism and the ways the human-animal has historically defined itself in relation to the non-human animal other. Recommended reading Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), Rosi Braidotti The Posthuman (2013) and Barbara Creed’s Stray: Human-Animal Ethics in the Anthropocene (2017).
5 As well Davida Allen, many women artists of her generation have represented animals alongside women in painting. Some examples, Cecilia Vicuña, Maria Lassnig, Jenny Watson.
6 Donna Haraway uses the idea of the ‘knot’ to explain the entangled life of humans and their companion animals. This is a focus of her book Staying with the Trouble (2016).