2) Relics of Empire: 1885 Jubilee Pavilion.
The University of Adelaide Napier Building was built on the site of the Jubilee Pavilion, What was disturbed during these construction phases? What survives? Whose voices could we hear if we tried? |
This is a backwards write up evolving as I post it and make sense of it.
Integrating with walks I have hosted in the past and in the present. Imagining Finding Country Scroll down for part 1 or read it in reverse order. Cut and paste entangled writing, there will be more pictures and some day references. |
Adelaide
For the past 10 years most of my creative work was based where I was living, Bath (UK), the names of Bath-based enslavers became very familiar to me. When the University of Adelaide fellowship opportunity came up one street name in particular leaped out at me, Pulteney Street. William Pulteney was the enslaver and property speculator who funded Bath’s grand Georgian housing estate, with Sydney Gardens at its centre. It was the commissions in Sydney Gardens that opened up my current phase of work around botany and empire. Colonial occupation and place naming in Australia resonates in the gardens and in Bath Abbey with the memorialisation of Sydney's convict fleet commander and first Governor, Arthur Philip. Closer inspection of the Adelaide map and I saw a Bath Lane just running off Pulteney Street. I even found an Airbnb there! In the end the Airbnb was already booked and it turned out that the Pulteney I had first spotted had, like Governor Sir Henry Edward Fox Young, had been given someone else's name at birth. Our man in Bath had changed his surname as a condition of marriage, this man in Adelaide has Pulteney as a first name! He was Sir Pulteney Malcolm, the street supposedly named for him in recognition that he had recommended Sir John Hindmarsh for the South Australia project. Since moving down river from Bath I have been following exploring the stories and business empires of Bristol connected enslavers and their business associates, notably those on my doorstep, the interconnected dynasties of Gibbs, Brights and Miles. As ever, following Lindqvist's exhortation, to dig where you stand, starting where I live and walking from my front door. |
I walked those strange connections in Adelaide:
at the intersection of Angas Street and Pulteney Street where Bath Lane leads off there is now a hospital. The fine country house of the Brights at Ham Green near Bristol is now a place of sanctuary for people living with cancer.
Perhaps there's a metaphor there |
I am currently weaving the walks in Adelaide towards a cycle of walks in a triangle denoted by the country houses of 3 dynastic estates in North Somerset, the hinterland of Bristol (UK)
The Gibbs at Tyntesfield and Belmont, the Brights at Ham Green and the Miles at Leigh Court. They were enslavers and/or their wealth was derived from the labour of trafficked and enslaved Africans and other forms of colonial extraction. The Gibbs and the Brights used their wealth to fund the Great Western Cotton Company, the Great Western Railway and the Great Western Steamship Company. They bought the SS Great Britain as salvage and relaunched it in 1852 as a ship carrying economic migrants to Australia; the Bright Brothers, subsequently Gibbs, Bright & Co, were active in many forms of extraction and terraforming in Australia including wool and mining. I am interested in following the entangled business and social threads of these neighbouring and intermarried families and thereby grow my understanding of the impact and legacies. I am particularly interested in the land they transformed for pleasure and profit at home and abroad. Walking through these estates, sensing presences of enslavers and enslaved in the landscape, we acknowledge the buildings and land forms as sites of memory. . |