Mooramong Residency: Bonny Cassidy

Residencies are artist-driven and, travel restrictions allowing, take place at Mooramong, a working farm of 4,000 acres that was famously owned by horse racing magnet Donald ‘Scobie’ Mackinnon who remodelled it in 1938 for his movie star wife Claire Adams. Within this inspirational, multi-dimensional setting, invited artists develop a body of work or a site responsive project, and simply undergo a period of structured and intensive research to grow creatively.

The colonial history, architectural flavour, working farm and nature reserve offer a myriad of possibilities for tangential artistic engagement. BLINDSIDE and the National Trust are particularly interested in projects and research surrounding issues of conservation, sustainability, settlement histories and pre-colonial histories specific to the site.

This year we have invited composer Zoë Barry; writer Bonny Cassidy and visual artist Pia Johnson to undertake solo residencies at Mooramong. If unable to travel, residencies will be undertaken at the artists’ homes in regional Victoria.

This residency enabled me to sit up close to a theme at the periphery of my recent writing: the long legacy of squattocracy in the Western District, and its relationship to changing practices and understandings of land ownership, management and heritage in Victoria.

Mooramong is one of a set of stations in the district that represent the earliest phases of its colonisation. Its original owner and builder, squatter Alexander Anderson, reflects the predominantly Scottish identity of the men who stole vast measures of Wathaurong and Gunditjmara land in the 1830s.

The ‘elite’ landowner that supported the expropriation of the region continued to exist well into the twentieth century. The Mackinnons proudly displayed their Scottish family tree on the wall in the home, and continued to live in a style of mid-century privilege that was only modern in its aesthetic: from bedside maid-summoning buttons, to a room dedicated solely to flower-arranging, this was excess enabled entirely by class and largely by imported goods. It was colonial in every sense other than the epoch recognised by settlers.

Walk just a minute away from the homestead, and you see thousands of head of sheep. Much of the estate’s land was sold for independent sheep farming to help keep the house and the Mackinnon’s wildlife reserve intact. That exchange comes with a price: runoff, fertilisers, invasive flora and fauna. Surrounding the waterways, Wathaurong heritage sites can be found; only a small area has yet been surveyed amongst the vegetation of the reserve. The large amount of outbuildings and their contents are not heritage overlaid, and so they are in a state of ruin – a foreshadowing of the homestead’s fate, or just a reality of resourcing such a huge museum?

The property raises interesting questions: what is the value of built heritage? Whose ‘building’ do we recognise? Does its value remain unchanged as cultural attitudes and priorities shift? What will be considered the ‘jewel’ of the Mooramong property in ten or fifty years; of the various types of conservation happening on the property, what will be the one(s) that are best resourced and promoted then?

I approached this residency as an opportunity to deepen a body of work that has been developing for about two years. Specifically, working at Mooramong would give me an intimate glimpse into the remnants of a ‘ruling elite’ of colonial land ownership, and a wide- open look at its continuing impacts as well as its personal, ecological and cultural contexts. Personal, because a branch of my family came to work a wheat farm one hour from Mooramong, in the same basalt plains, on the western side of the Hopkins River.

Ecological, because the multi-uses of the Mooramong estate would seem to the visitor to be at cross-purposes but might also reflect an important period of change. And cultural, because what at first appears to be the main human heritage of Mooramong – the Mackinnon’s homestead – is challenged by the identification of Wathaurong cultural sites on the property, during an era of major First Nations language and heritage revival and growth in the region.

The residence and property encouraged self-sufficient and critical practice. With only bedrooms to work in, we needed to have a strong sense of how to interpret and respond to what we found. There are no guided walks or experiences at Mooramong, outside the homestead tour. However, there are endless points of interest once you stay for more than a day and begin to watch its workings. For us all, then, the residency encouraged a turn to what was going on outside the walls of the Mackinnon’s garden – just pick a service road and start walking. What became abundantly clear during the stay, was just how many stakeholders give Mooramong its current purpose – the National Trust being just one. The shearers at the south end, the shepherd driving the boundaries, the manager and gardener working to keep the house and garden presentable on a shoestring while coordinating everyone else, the bandicoot researchers up at the big lake, the Trust for Nature covenant management, and the ongoing Wathaurong survey of heritage. Oh, and a few artists.

With a background in poetry, the question for me was how to form up all of these layered histories and embodied intersections when standing in a place such as Mooramong. I could simply say, poetry isn’t adequate; but I think that misses the point of what I found in making this work. Seeking to name anything on this property in a singular, reduced way isn’t adequate. Just as a herd of farting, munching meat sheep and a meadow of thistles stand beside a patch of remnant grassland and riparian bird habitat, so I found that verse, prose, history, imagination, fact and fiction assembled together.

I wasn’t able to realise a more outward-facing outcome due to COVID-19 restrictions, but I also decided to consolidate the research and ideas I had brought with me and to sit with the daily life of the property, than range far afield and acquire more. I created a series of new drafts that will be added to a book manuscript under development and partly located in the Western District. The research, observation and conversation undertaken at the residency has pushed me to let go of formal constraints and an identification with consistent style, in favour of more durational, investigative, open-ended approaches to the shape and voice of my writing.

Bonny Cassidy, December 2020