Anna Gibbs
Anna Gibbs is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. A member of the Writing and Society Research Centre and the Digital Humanities Research Group, she writes across the fields of textual, media and cultural studies with an emphasis on feminism, affect theory, and fictocriticism. Co-editor of three collections of Australian experimental writing, her experimental and cut up writing has been widely published and internationally performed, and she is currently collaborating on a project about the work of the late Ania Walwicz with Sneja Gunew and Marion M Campbell.
A PhD supervisor at the international Transart Institute, she is a frequent collaborator with visual artists, most recently with Elizabeth Day, Julie Gough and Noelene Lucas as a member of The Longford Project, which works with the colonial history of Longford in northern Tasmania to turn the coincidence of common ancestry into connection and reconciliation in the present through a collaborative practice in contemporary art. The Longford Project won an Australia Council Development Grant (2014), has exhibited work at Sydney College of the Arts Gallery (2013); Articulate Project Space (2014); Tasmanian International Arts Festival (2015), Ten Days on the Island (2019) and was awarded a residency at the Bundanon Foundation in 2016. They are currently working on exhibition projects in Sydney and Tasmania for 2022 and 2023.
A PhD supervisor at the international Transart Institute, she is a frequent collaborator with visual artists, most recently with Elizabeth Day, Julie Gough and Noelene Lucas as a member of The Longford Project, which works with the colonial history of Longford in northern Tasmania to turn the coincidence of common ancestry into connection and reconciliation in the present through a collaborative practice in contemporary art. The Longford Project won an Australia Council Development Grant (2014), has exhibited work at Sydney College of the Arts Gallery (2013); Articulate Project Space (2014); Tasmanian International Arts Festival (2015), Ten Days on the Island (2019) and was awarded a residency at the Bundanon Foundation in 2016. They are currently working on exhibition projects in Sydney and Tasmania for 2022 and 2023.
less
InterestsView All (49)
Uploads
Papers by Anna Gibbs
This series of works spread over four rooms maps some of the tragic consequences of the colonial dispersal of people, ideas, ways of life, plants, animals, goods and money from England across the map of Empire. In particular we focus here on a series of secondary dispersals to particular colonial ‘crime scenes’ – from England to Norfolk Island, then to the Norfolk Plains and finally to the Lunatic Asylum, New Norfolk (1827 – 1859), later the Hospital for the Insane (1859 – 1915).
The connections between the colonial occupiers of the Norfolk Plains and New Norfolk ran deep: both groups were sent to these places on the closure of the first penal settlement on Norfolk Island and these people would all have known each other. They were almost all originally convicts or jailers who were former members of the NSW (‘Rum’) Corps, and the culture of the penal system ran deep in them, their families and their descendants. Granted land on the country of Aboriginal First Nations, they were thereby turned into an occupying force, defending, enclosing and forever changing the nature of what they henceforth saw as their land. They were quickly joined by various ‘free settlers’ who also arrived in both areas, some already extremely wealthy, others finding ways to enrich themselves in colonial society, many taking up and enclosing further massive land holdings on Indigenous country.
‘Crime Scene’ is an investigation of murder and violence on the Norfolk Plains, each of the four short films taking a particular incident to examine from its own unique angle: the shooting and attempted murder of Indigenous woman Dalrymple Briggs by Jacob Mountgarrett in 1825, the murder of Joseph Edward Wilson by John McKay & John Lamb in 1837, the violent murder of Ellen Moriarty near the Railway Inn in Longford in 1867, and the alleged murder of Captain Thomas Hammant by George Cox in 1832. There are also family connections between some of these stories and some of the artists.
Drawing on case files and other research, the four short films composing ‘Past Due’ focuses on the fates of four women sent to the Asylum from the Norfolk Plains and the life stories that led them there. Even white women in colonial culture were often victims of sorts, not so much always of individual crimes but rather of norms and expectations of a social and cultural colonial world that – in different ways and to different degrees - marginalised and often criminalised those it made into its others: Indigenous people, women, children, and people deemed to be ‘insane’. The Asylum was in some ways an extension of the penal system, an instance of the colonial crime scene. Inmates were held apart from and sometimes out of sight of family and community until they were released, or died. Treatment of inmates varied according to the prevailing wisdom of the day and the whims of those in charge at any given time. Nevertheless, women in colonial times could be highly resistant and resilient to a violent patriarchal culture, and of necessity, invented their own often ingenious ways either to survive in it or to escape from it in whatever ways they could.
A further room presents works in a variety of different object-based media, all responding to aspects of colonial culture and colonial violence, while the Mortuary Room evokes the daily world of life and death in the Asylum in sound.
https://longfordproject.com
This series of works spread over four rooms maps some of the tragic consequences of the colonial dispersal of people, ideas, ways of life, plants, animals, goods and money from England across the map of Empire. In particular we focus here on a series of secondary dispersals to particular colonial ‘crime scenes’ – from England to Norfolk Island, then to the Norfolk Plains and finally to the Lunatic Asylum, New Norfolk (1827 – 1859), later the Hospital for the Insane (1859 – 1915).
The connections between the colonial occupiers of the Norfolk Plains and New Norfolk ran deep: both groups were sent to these places on the closure of the first penal settlement on Norfolk Island and these people would all have known each other. They were almost all originally convicts or jailers who were former members of the NSW (‘Rum’) Corps, and the culture of the penal system ran deep in them, their families and their descendants. Granted land on the country of Aboriginal First Nations, they were thereby turned into an occupying force, defending, enclosing and forever changing the nature of what they henceforth saw as their land. They were quickly joined by various ‘free settlers’ who also arrived in both areas, some already extremely wealthy, others finding ways to enrich themselves in colonial society, many taking up and enclosing further massive land holdings on Indigenous country.
‘Crime Scene’ is an investigation of murder and violence on the Norfolk Plains, each of the four short films taking a particular incident to examine from its own unique angle: the shooting and attempted murder of Indigenous woman Dalrymple Briggs by Jacob Mountgarrett in 1825, the murder of Joseph Edward Wilson by John McKay & John Lamb in 1837, the violent murder of Ellen Moriarty near the Railway Inn in Longford in 1867, and the alleged murder of Captain Thomas Hammant by George Cox in 1832. There are also family connections between some of these stories and some of the artists.
Drawing on case files and other research, the four short films composing ‘Past Due’ focuses on the fates of four women sent to the Asylum from the Norfolk Plains and the life stories that led them there. Even white women in colonial culture were often victims of sorts, not so much always of individual crimes but rather of norms and expectations of a social and cultural colonial world that – in different ways and to different degrees - marginalised and often criminalised those it made into its others: Indigenous people, women, children, and people deemed to be ‘insane’. The Asylum was in some ways an extension of the penal system, an instance of the colonial crime scene. Inmates were held apart from and sometimes out of sight of family and community until they were released, or died. Treatment of inmates varied according to the prevailing wisdom of the day and the whims of those in charge at any given time. Nevertheless, women in colonial times could be highly resistant and resilient to a violent patriarchal culture, and of necessity, invented their own often ingenious ways either to survive in it or to escape from it in whatever ways they could.
A further room presents works in a variety of different object-based media, all responding to aspects of colonial culture and colonial violence, while the Mortuary Room evokes the daily world of life and death in the Asylum in sound.
https://longfordproject.com