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Clip description
A woman (voiced by Julie Forsyth), reflecting on the view from her balcony in St Kilda, considers the differences between Indigenous and white settlers’ understanding of the landscape and the latter group’s ‘seduction by glamour’ – or images of glamour from far away.
Curator’s notes
Leading on from a reverie on the seductive qualities of glamour, the monologue considers the way this landscape’s different inhabitants have invested it with meaning. Fooke’s historical evocations of glamour are ambiguous. Historical photos shift from anonymous figures on piers and in dance halls that could be St Kilda, to poster images of Marlene Dietrich, suggesting in fact that the unlocated scenes could be anywhere – or, rather, ‘quite a particular anywhere’ (see clip one). Could it be St Kilda, Hollywood or Cannes?
The sequence touches on the colonial and post-colonial practice of recreating spaces to reference other spaces far away. Fooke contrasts this creation of meaning with the different meaning the land has held for the area’s Indigenous inhabitants. We are invited to reflect on both the similarities and differences between these perspectives and through this, perhaps, on the impact of colonisation.
