Title

Imaginary Homeland.

Author

Milojevic, Milan.

Publication date

1997

Type

Conference paper

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Imaginary Homeland.
by Milan Milojevic.

I would like to start with a quote from (Wilton and Bosworth), 'Old Worlds and New Australia'
'There is the story of a young Greek girl in Melbourne who counted the blocks, the houses, and then the fence-palings between home and school. She marked the middle paling and on the way to school, as she passed it, said to herself "Now I'm Australian" and on the way home, "Now I'm Greek"'.

As a 1st generation Australian, born in Hobart, Tasmania of Serbian/German descent, this quotation reflects my own position. The confrontation between European and Anglo Celtic cultures imposed complexities and pressures during my upbringing relating to the survival of European traditions in a hostile environment intolerant of foreign immigrants. Throughout my adolescence I denied my background to the outside world. I wanted to eliminate any trace of my European roots. I was the most 'dinky di' Aussie on the block.

My work deals with this dilemma of cultural identity a culture conflict. It reflects my experience, firsthand and by inheritance of dislocation, adjustment and loss that comes from coming from somewhere else or belonging from somewhere else.

My father was an enthusiastic photographer until his death in 1966. His photographs innocently recorded home and working life and reflect the shared experience endured by the Post World War 2 influx of foreign migrants. They record the acquisition of material wealth, which implied health and happiness in the new country.

These photographs play an important role in my work they capture a particular time and place they are momentos of the existence of an earlier generation. The photographs are used to reclaim links that have been disrupted and broken by migration. The 'family snap" can operate at the point between personal memory and social history. The pictures aren't ever unmediated representations of the past. They can be constructed into a 'fantastic past' in an attempt to consolidate a real one the imaginary homeland.

The Serbian community in Tasmania was small. There were no network/ support system (such as Orthodox Church ) so that the pressures of Anglo-conformity were difficult to resist in the first generation born in Tasmania. The structures inherent in the Greek Community that nurture and develop culture and language were non existent-¬resulting in a conflict between my Serbian / German / Australian cultures.

In the slide in the right my culture is transplanted onto me in the nature of national costume sent over from Serbia. The first series of images I produced which addressed my heritage were a series of four prints titled Nasledstvo.

It was these individuals that taught me language and culture, always referred to Europe as 'Home', and still it's home, and constructed my 'imaginary homeland'.

They were forced through politically intolerant circumstances to leave Europe and be transplanted elsewhere, in this case it was Australia, however it could have been Canada or the United States. The furtherest possible destination was the major priority.

Absorption/Assimilation (a series of 10 lithographs) dealt with the issues surrounding the confrontation between Australian and European culture.

These prints were produced in Hamburg at the school of art where I was undertaking a DAAD German Government Scholarship in 1987. This was for the purpose of documenting cultural and historical aspects of my inherited biography. The images produced not only expressed my parents' experience but also the displacement I experienced reentering my inherited culture.

The research and reading that I had done around Post World War 2 Immigration to Australia yielded some alarming facts, policies towards the ‘outsiders' accorded an inferior status and encouraged relinquishing ties with their homeland. The agenda was to assimilate refugees, with little respect for their ethnic origins, into a vastly different cultural context. Their particular skills were often not recognised or accommodated, manual labour and factory fodder was the lot of these dislocated men and women. My mother worked for Cadburys, my father for the Hydro. Quote A Seventh Man, John Berger Jean Mohr
He strips and lines up with many hundreds of other novice migrants. They glance hastily (to stare would be to show their astonishment) at the implements and machines being used to examine them. Also hastily at one another, each trying to compare his chances with those around him. Nothing has prepared him for this situation. It is unprecedented. And yet it is already normal. The humiliating demand to be naked before strangers. The incomprehensible language spoken by the officials in command. The meaning of tests The rigid geometry of the room. Fine Type (Arrival Series); Ritual (Arrival Series)
These are two prints from Arrival, a series of 10 screen prints that were based on advertising material from the 50's, images that were designed to lure migrants to Australia.

Reception (Arrival Series); Shower Scene (Album).
This was a photograph taken by my father at Bonegilla ( Migrant reception centre in Victoria), rm not quite sure what's happening, people have suggested that it could be a delousing scene, whatever the situation it's reminiscent of images taken from concentration camps during the second world war. I blew this image up to 8' x 6' and printed it onto 200 bathroom tiles, the men were printed onto photographic mural paper and hand –coloured.

Beautiful Balts signifies a cleansing, the baptism into the new culture. The title refers to the first group of foreign migrants selected to enter as smoothly as possible into Australian culture - as Australia's first minister for immigration Arthur Calwell put it 'to look like attractive human beings who would appeal to the Australian people. There had been some doubt about the quality of these displaced persons who had the blood of a number of races in their veins. Many were red headed and blue eyed. There was also a number of platinum blondes of both sexes. The men were handsome and the women beautiful. It was not hard to sell immigration to the Australian people once the press published photographs of that group'. Beauty Point (Arrival); Yes I am Australian.
In pursuing my father's story, I developed a series of prints around the issue of the migrant worker. Bronte Park a Hydro village in the central highlands of Tasmania became my source of investigation.

Hydro image; Group (Album).
Hobart Mercury, Saturday 26th March 1949.
At least 100 Balt migrants will be arriving in Tasmania each month until the end of June 1950, as the States' quota of 35000 displaced persons coming to Australia in that period ... Most of these displaced persons were employed by the Hydro.

Bronte Park was the first of the Hydro's post-war construction camps. Hydro sent officers to Europe to recruit workers - accommodated at both Tarraleah and Bronte Park. This was for work on the Tungatinah project. It was started in 1948. My father worked their from 1949 -1953. The number of migrants recruited:
1176 British
796 Poles
853 Germans and Italians
432 Displaced persons
Population in it's heyday: 2000 (1949-1959)
Prefab houses: 1000

At the official opening of the Lake Echo Power Station the Minister for forests C.H..Hand stated

'the taming of god's rain for man's benefit as the most romantic story in the saga of Tasmanian development,' and pressed the switch that released the flow into the canal. For us and the majority of migrants in Tasmania the Hydro provided an income.

These two prints are from a series of six titled 'Dragi Moj Djoko', deal with 'making it' and the acquisition of material goods in the 'brave new world'.

I made a number of trips to Bronte, documenting the remnants of which once was a thriving village of 2000. Each time I returned, less evidence remained. I produced a piece titled 'Bronte Park I' developed from overlaying the photographs my father had taken with the ones I had taken., applying my presence to the same landscape. Trying to imagine his impression of this hostile environment and it's relationship to the words 'Bronte Park'.

At this stage I’d been looking at 19th century engravings and I came across a series of prints after Joseph Lycett that were in a book titled ‘Views in Australia’. This book was produced to celebrate the discovery, settlement and progress of the new colonies, in the introduction Souter, the London Publisher, claimed 'the Views as absolute facsimiles of scenes and places, having been taken from nature on the spot by Mr.Lycett who resided more than 10 years in the country, in the special employ of the Governor as an Artist’.

These images were intended to lure immigration to these new colonies the images were manipulated to become palatable to the European sensibility. This form of mis-representation is not too dissimilar to Calwell's ideas developing immigration strategies.

The print is about illusion / disillusionment / representation /misrepresentation. The kangaroo was engraved by Thomas Bewick after a painting by George Stubbs This painting was commissioned by Joseph Banks and based on a kangaroo skin brought back to London by him. Another form of interpretation.

Further imagery that developed out of Bronte Park included Bronte Park 2 which was produced for an exhibition curated by Raymond Arnold titled To the Surface Contemporary Landscape. In this piece I was directly working on a variety of surfaces reflecting the industrial landscape (stainless steel, copper, perspex wood ). The piece is 2m X 3m, it has a sound track associated with it, in terms of the viewer I wanted to create a more interactive piece. The sound track consisted of an irritating hydro generator.

In 1994 1 was commissioned by the Tasmanian Trades and Labour Council; the brief was to produce a 6m x 3m billboard representing Migrant Workers within the Hydro. The project involved interviewing migrants who had worked for the Hydro in the 50's and 60's.

The tower was an early 50's model that Yd found at the Hydro's workshop complex, it seemed perfect, (coincidental it was the right height) so I constructed the billboard around it. The image of the migrants had nothing to do with the Hydro, it was taken at a refugee camp in Germany. For me it captured the essence of the migrant workers.

I had taken many images of an old Hydro Shack at Bronte, which is now long gone bulldozed. Each man had a single 8' x IO' hut, I photographed the hut in order to reproduce it foot by foot. I also used a video camera in order to create a different view point and a better sense of space; in the end I was far more interested in the bits that I'd missed with the camera that were on the video what happened between taking this photograph and that photograph, the flow of imagery between each individual photograph.

These images were developed into "Fragment I and 2". 1 see them as being an archaeological tableaux They're evidence, clues, the residue of an existence. Absence is what is important in this work. I was interested in creating a physical space and surface, a multi sensory experience.

My interest in working with photographic images naturally led me to explore the possibilities of computer generated images, Photoshop offered me release from many hours working in dark rooms with the process camera. For me, the computer was that other press in the comer of the print room.

In 1995 I was involved in the foundation of DARF (The Digital Art Research Facility) at the Tasmanian School of Art at Hobart. My fellow researchers include; Geoff Parr (a painter), Mary Scott (a painter), Bill Hart (multimedia artist and computer specialist), During this time, the team has generated $235,000 in Research and Research Infrastructure.

The DARF research team has been experimenting with and exploring issues, concerning the digital print, bringing to bear some of the traditional methodologies of printmaking and painting. My particular focus has been to develop techniques for overprinting, where the printed image is formed by printing up to a dozen layers of ink to achieve depth and surface so intrinsic to traditional printmaking. I would like to finish off with two recent digital prints from a series in progress titled 9 lives.

© Milan Milojevic, 1997.
Paper presented at The Third Australian Print Symposium, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997.

Last Updated

02 Dec 2024