Our land holds our stories.
Soil becomes the keeper of memory.
Every ancestor, all material and spiritual aspect of our culture, enacted here over unending generations,
are part of what this soil holds.

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Even in extremely colonised landscapes
a colonial garden, a landscape transformed.
Designed in opposition to the true nature of the place.
Even here, there remains memory and story for us.

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Archaeological notes from excavations of the gardens, speak of five grindstones. 
Taken from this landscape.
Grindstones that speak to this place as one witness
to generations of ceremony and life.
A living place shaped by our old people.

With layers of shell, right down deep.
Serving as reminders.

Markers to the memory of this living place.
An oak tree, planted atop, draws nourishment from shell,
allowing it grow tall
as its roots crush site, our stories.

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If the old oak tree can find nourishment here,
well so can we.

Our roots are deep enough to allow reconnection and recollection always.

In this place of hurt and superimposed European seasons,
we too can draw from what remains,
Draw from what our old people left for us here.
Draw from the soil what we need to sustain us.

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Here we can still find a safe and private space
to connect to the truth of this landscape.

The work on display is not the process but the remnants,
the evidence of something that has already taken place.