DEMONS LAND is a shape-shifting, mixed media project – including film, text, sculpture, paintings, theatre, music, dance – that explores the dreams, crimes, and legacies of colonialism. It is an equal collaboration between Indigenous Australian and non-indigenous artists, practitioners, and scholars (from Australia and the UK).
Its skeleton is perhaps the greatest, guiltiest single poem in English: Edmund Spenser’s epic, THE FAERIE QUEENE (1590-96), a seminal expression of the imperialist mindset, underpinning both the building of Great Britain and the takeover of distant lands.
DEMONS LAND wants to recover histories lost on the way.
To that end the team travelled across Australia in November 2019, talking about the poem and the project with their indigenous hosts - who immediately recognised the affinities between the poem and their own stories. The poem tells the tales of various knights who enter a strange unbuilt Fairyland. They do not understand the land they have entered. Every place is a challenge - mysterious caves, empty deserts, treacherous cliffs, seductive bowers, jewelled beaches. The rules of the place are baffling. There are magic mirrors, spells, strange ceremonies. The knights want to banish mystery, and to level everything fit for mining or building. Their only answer is faith in their mission, and violence.
The current iteration of DEMONS LAND focuses on the history of Queensland. Together we are exploring the experience of land and home: belonging to a home, trying to make a home, losing or recovering or longing for a home. We will unflinchingly enter the experience of both indigenous owners and white invaders – and their experience of each other.
Our project both relives and critiques the poem; our contributors variously repeat it, write over it, erase it, or replace it with their own stories, new and old.
To make the future, we must enter the past.