'Remember Aesi':

Kiera Lindsey

doi:10.5130/phrj.v28i0.7760

Abstract

In this article I draw upon a definition of ‘dialogical memorial’ offered by Brad West to offer an experimental artist's brief that outlines the various ways that a contemporary monument to the colonial artist, Adelaide Eliza Scott Ironside (1831-1867), could ‘talk back’ to the nineteenth-century statues of her contemporaries, and ‘converse’ with more recent acts of history making. In contrast to the familiar figure of the individual hero, which we associate with the statuary of her age, I suggest a group monument that acknowledges the intimate intergenerational female network which shaped Aesi's life and also ‘re-presents’ – a term coined by the historian Greg Dening – several native born and convict women from the Georgian, Regency and Victorian eras who influenced her life. Instead of elevating Aesi upon a plinth, I recommend grounding this group monument on Gadigal country and planting around it many of the Australian Wildflowers she painted in ways that draw attention to the millennia-old Indigenous uses of the same plants. And finally, by situating Aesi’s monument in the Outer Domain (behind the New South Wales Art Gallery in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens and to the east of the Yurong Pennisula, near Woolloomooloo Bay), in an area where she once boldly assumed centre stage before a large male audience in a flamboyant moment of her own theatrical history-making, I argue that this memorial will have the capcity to speak for itself in ways that challenge the underepresentation of colonial women in Sydney's statuary, abd, as West suggests, do much to ‘alter the stage on which Sydney's colonial history 'is narrated and performed’.  [i] Greg Dening, Performances, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1992, p37.

Highlights

When Adelaide Eliza Scott Ironside (1831-1867) became the rst native-born artist to leave Australia to train as an artist in mid 1855, she did so with the explicit intention of returning home to fresco the public buildings of Sydney with the ‘future history’ of her country.[1]
As a group of British historians recently observed in their discussion about the intersections between public history and women’s history, there are numerous challenges associated with putting anyone upon a public pedestal. 10 is is so for a nineteenth-century colonial woman who shared many of the social privileges and ideological limitations of her age, but, as a passionate patriot, was an enthusiastic participant in Australia’s colonial project
Such contexts mean that in contrast to the sort of celebratory statuary that was produced by and for her nineteenth-century contemporaries, any monument dedicated to remembering Aesi must grapple with her ambivalent status as someone who was a nineteenth-century woman and artist and a colonial subject. Her position as a member of the ‘Rising Generation’, ‘native-born’ or ‘Currency’, requires careful consideration, for, as historians John Molony and Ben Jones and myself have elsewhere noted, this demographic of colonial society wrestled with the ‘double bind’ of being both ‘the coloniser and the colonised’ in ways that were often expressed in a strident forms of colonial patriotism, the strains of which can still be detected in the more parochial expressions of contemporary Australian nationalism.[11]

Summary

Kiera Lindsey

When Adelaide Eliza Scott Ironside (1831-1867) became the rst native-born artist to leave Australia to train as an artist in mid 1855, she did so with the explicit intention of returning home to fresco the public buildings of Sydney with the ‘future history’ of her country.[1] Her vision was explicitly republican and public and extended to statues Writing to her ’sincere friend’, the controversial pastor and politician, Dr John Dunmore Lang (17991878), while living in Rome a few years later, Ironside expressed her desire to one day see him in ‘statued marble somewhere on the coasts of the city’.

Infusing the Feminine

Where and Why?

Conclusion