A sculpture about the clash between Western and Indigenous knowledge and what is “left out or discarded as not important or of having any value”, while also being a strike against “the myth” that the Aboriginal people had no agriculture.
“The yam daisy represents a point where Western science and indigenous knowledge came into contact,” says summit director and Canberra landscape architect Neil Hobbs.
The exhibition’s tagline is Interventions in the Landscape and one clear example of that was Brisbane artist Archie Moore’s Crop (Noun/Verb) in which he has half-buried 700kg of encyclopaedias as a border for a garden of yam daisies, next to the otherwise clean lines of Bowen Place.
He went on Gumtree and to op shops to source the Funk and Wagnalls and World Books and Britannicas, which were in surprising short supply.
“These books represent Western knowledge and are very America-centric,” he said. “When I looked up ‘yam’ there were ones grown in Florida and South-East Asia and China, but no mention of Australia.”
Moore, who is known for tackling issues related to Aboriginal identity, has selected 20 encyclopedias to be partly buried alongside the daisies, packed into one-metre-square boxes, in Bowen Pace in a symbolic gesture.