The Potter Museum of Art, Parkville VIC
Ngarn Wa’ngal: Art of the gum tree
01.07.26 – 21.11.26
‘Castrated, broken, a thing wronged’
— Oodgeroo Noonuccal, 1960, Municipal Gum
This month I was reminded of the folding powers of grief and of its parsimonious insistence that time does not stop in the way that it should; that life, albeit changed, does and must go on. Displaced by the awareness of this unsolvable wound, I walk to the Potter Museum of Art along the residential flank of Lygon Street and pass a gum tree packed in with bitumen. Lopped branches lie at its roots as if beheaded; the leaves still a virile green — preternaturally greener still for the white lacquer backdrop of a Holden Captiva. Above, a length of telephone wire seems to account for the amputation.
Ngarn Wa’ngal: Art of the gum tree, a major group exhibition currently showing at the University of Melbourne's Potter Museum of Art, elicits similar philosophical questions and fecund discomfort. Curated by Alisa Bunbury and Sophie Gerhard, the exhibition spans over seven gallery spaces and includes 163 colonial, twentieth-century and contemporary works depicting gum trees. This momentous exhibit is seemingly in an effort to question the uneasy difference between an attempt to possess something powerful and beautiful, while also representing a sense of belonging to it. This question appears to me particularly charged in relation to the curation of the photographic works.
In the accompanying publication, Bunbury and Gerhard write that the exhibition ‘encourages us to reflect upon the fundamental role of the eucalyptus in our society,’ yet coasting the three floors, it seems apparent that this self-effacing tree — and unassuming locus of collective identity — resists such containment that a ‘role’ risks implying. [1] Throughout the gallery, the gum tree appears variously as ecological agent, cultural medium, historical witness, specimen, shelter and symbol. Within this dense multiplicity, the exhibition asks us to consider not only what we look at when we look at a gum tree, but who is looking and what looking does, or enables us to do.
The exhibition’s dark-glassed entryway from the foyer is infused with lemon-scented gum oil (‘Corymbia citriodora’), pneumatic and intravenous, a synesthetic prelude to a room of simulated dusk. The gallery, titled ‘Witness’ after Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough’s eponymous multi-screen video work at the centre of the space, is composed of damson-coloured walls and tenebrism from the downlighting that sustains a dirge-like atmosphere, regulating the attitude one takes stepping inside. To the right, a photograph by Ballardong/Noongar artist Dianne Jones asserts itself. The generously sized c-type photograph, The Hidden (2011), depicts three children in white clothes lying stomach-down on littoral grass at the feet of an older woman. She appears like a guardian figure gazing beyond the frame, standing as anchored as the whorling gums around her. To the right of Jones’ photograph, three unattributed nineteenth-century wooden shields are installed at eye level, comprising two broad shields and one parrying shield. They bear designs specific to their original place and makers, the details of which the wall didactic determines unidentified, and, implicitly, collateral oversight of colonial trade practices during the period following the Frontier Wars. Each shield sits proud of the wall, the clearance allowing oblique shadows to fall behind them, simulating the gesture of a braced yet absent body.
To the left of Jones’ The Hidden is Frederick McCubbin’s iconic painting Lost (1886); a young girl is depicted alone and overcome by a looming, coalescing bushland. This is my first reckoning, within the exhibition, with the act of looking; who, in fact, is looking at whom and at what, for that matter. The curatorial logic here seems to trouble the distinction between protection and concealment; the shields offer an immediately recognisable vocabulary of defence in their confrontation, while Jones’ image proposes a mode of protection contingent upon invisibility. The Hidden’s wall didactic explicates its narrative context in the history of Aboriginal children concealing themselves from ‘welfare’ officials intent on their removal from their families. The children face away from us and the woman does not meet our gaze, yet our vantage point places us as benevolent witnesses of the scene. By choosing this vantage point, Jones seems to position herself on the side of ‘the hidden,’ postulating her inclusion in this history. With the photograph’s dramaturgy rendering its truth legible through the staged quality of its composition, Jones’ photograph becomes an image of visibility withheld and yet proof of historic and enduring presence, its proximity to the shields supersetting this chain of historic assertion of occupancy. The shields’ placement alongside The Hidden is compelling, but also risks making resistance too readily legible, as well as collapsing distinct histories and practices of resistance into a single, visual metaphor. What saves the relationship is its uncertainty.
The curation of McCubbin’s Lost establishes a fuller linkage and consequent interrogation, bringing nationalist mythmaking into tension with knowledge of Country and the assumptions underpinning claims to land. In both The Hidden and Lost, the landscape itself is positioned as a repository of knowledge either known or unknown to the subjects, as their respective titles confirm. In The Hidden, the gum trees become another veil of protection determined by relation, unlike McCubbin’s arrangement that establishes the gum trees as a threatening, undifferentiated wilderness.
On level one, the rather prosaically titled ‘A Sense of Place’ gallery presents two evocative black-and-white photographs by Sue Ford, providing a critical foil beyond their direct contribution to the room’s themes of suburban sprawl and national iconography. Like Jones, Some they landed right in the middle of the magic bush forest (c. 1969) and ‘Let’s go and find the witches letter’ (c. 1969) from her series The Witches’ Letter, also depict three children in bushland, yet differ as Ford’s three girls are captured at play. The young girls’ collective thrill and freedom is palpable, exaggerating the sense of excursion rather than familiarity, uninhibited and seemingly unsupervised. The low-angle perspective exaggerates their physical power; the girls appear invulnerable. Giantesses in placeless scrubland, safe in their joy, they seem unconcerned with the foreign environment that surrounds them.
In the upper half of the images, Ford’s gum trees dissolve against the exposure of sky, losing their readable signposts of place. Unlike Jones’ active, mutually sustaining landscape, Ford’s landscape appears available; the girls can move through and occupy it, without needing to understand it. This difference probes the question of belonging: which children are safe? What does it mean to move freely through a landscape? Which landscapes become meaningful through relationship(s)? Which ones become mere scenery? The photographs do not answer these questions, but their tension makes them difficult to avoid circuitously contemplating.
On level two, Barkandji artist Nici Cumpston’s Ringbarked II, Nookamka Lake (2011/2016) approaches the same questions from another direction, the red ochre and charcoal gallery titled ‘Sick Country,’ interrogating the histories and ongoing consequences of deforestation. Cumpston engages her knowledge of Country to locate and document natural sites of ongoing Aboriginal occupation, asserting their enduring cultural significance. The monolithic black-and-white image initially resembles architectural photography: the tree is monumentalised, its scale and singularity made almost sublime, yet Cumpston’s attention to its location prevents the tree from becoming an isolated monument. She further inscribes the photograph with personal markers, hand-colouring the image with watercolours and crayons. The image evidences a relationship, becoming neither purely documentary nor photographic, yet something in between.
I briefly return to the ground floor, where Cumpston’s Barka shelter (2025), a large-scale landscape inkjet print on paper, mounted on aluminium, is installed in the gallery ‘Always’. Honouring the unceded, multigenerational relationships between First Nations peoples and native flora, the curatorial scope of the space recognises trees as crucial archival repositories of cultural memory. Encountered earlier in the exhibition, Barka shelter now offers me a point of return through which Cumpston’s photographic practice can be understood across the exhibition’s shifting curatorial contexts. Similar to Ringbarked II, Nookamka Lake, Barka shelter centres a tree of cultural importance along the Barka River in Kinchega National Park. The river red gum’s trunk rises from the lower centre of the image, unfolding into a sprawling network of branches. Beyond the canopy, the overexposed sky distances the outside world, creating a marked sense of shelter, location and intimacy. The bark is textured with undulating grooves, each ripple and scar evoking a fingerprint that lends the tree a sense of personhood while simultaneously establishing it as an embodied obelisk and site of collective memory. The tree is singular not because it has been isolated from its surroundings, but because its particularities make it inseparable from them.
Continuing back upward through the building’s stepped architecture, I arrive at ‘Of the Gum,’ the fraught measure of the gum tree as ‘plant’ versus ‘entity’ coming into sharper focus in Russell Grimwade’s Eucalypt Studies (1919–1930). In the corner, two modest, window-mounted frames hold six-image suites of Grimwade’s carbon photographs of eucalyptus varietals, the wall opening to its left permitting a glimpse of Ford’s works in the adjoining gallery. The vertical alignment of Grimwade’s work offers a compressed account of the artist’s propagation practice, in which plants cultivated in his Toorak garden became photographic subjects at maturity. Stripped of situated landscape, Grimwade’s studio studies are rendered instead as images readily available to taxonomy and possession, not unlike Ford’s treatment of the bush as exotic spectacle, or the alienated shields of ‘Witness’ that stand in for so much devastating collateral dispossession of cultural objects through colonisation. Against blank backdrops and under carefully controlled light, Grimwade’s photographs similarly isolate the plant from the conditions that might otherwise locate it — rendering it as specimen rather than situated organism; a mode of abstraction the exhibition itself at times risks reproducing.
Sharing the discreet corner beside Grimwade’s Eucalypt Studies is Jane E. Brown’s 1,8-Cineole (2026), returning to Grimwade’s photographic practice in the contemporary. Brown and Grimwade’s works face each other at 90 degrees, the proximating walls becoming a site of interlocution between past and present. Brown’s research into Grimwade’s glass plate negatives and carbon prints culminated in a series of four black-and-white kaleidoscopic photographs of gum blossoms and gumnuts, additionally designing a photo developing process incorporating eucalyptus oil. Botanical forms are captured and reflected until recognition warps: flower heads resemble eyes; radial stamens become eyelashes or halos; mirrored blossoms begin to resemble mechanical structures or posthuman life forms. The plants are no longer specimens but beyond specimens, uncanny in their reconfiguration and returned to an optic condition of unknowing.
Significantly, Brown’s use of eucalyptus oil renders the gum both subject and material, disrupting the archival logic that fixes the tree as a coherent, captive object and instead reinscribing its agency through biological trace. While compositionally, Brown’s explicit parley with Grinwade’s work doubles as a self-conscious visual representation of how recreation toward understanding something may only become less legible the more closely it is studied: dissecting, reconfiguring, and hoping the fractured image might somehow resolve the fractured object. The gum is doubly photographed, yet also unwittingly participates in the making of the photograph, folding the extractive logic back upon itself. The displaced subject is fixed within cultural memory, suspended in irresolution, echoing the paradoxical conditions of settler nationalism and, not dissimilarly, grief.
Outside, the Lygon Street municipal gum remains packed into concrete where I left it, yet it is harder now to consider that this pairing is incidental. To frame is to select, to isolate, to produce a subject by removing it from the conditions that constitute it. The photographic image is implicated in this contradiction, negotiating between the authority of the real and the constructedness of its mediation, where truth is less a given than something continuously produced and reimagined. Across Ngarn Wa’ngal, this operation is variously exposed, resisted and reconfigured, and finally left necessarily suspended in a space of productive non-closure and possibility.
[1] Alisa Bunbury and Sophie Gerhard, eds., Ngarn Wa’ngal: Art of the Gum Tree, xi (Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 2026). (Accessed 13 August 2026).