Sanctuary in the Dandenongs

Yesterday I went to the Rickett's Sanctuary. At the Dandenongs, a mountain range outside of Melbourne covered in huge stands of eucalyptus trees, is a natural reserve where William Rickett used to live. Although he wasn't an Aborigine, he experienced kinship with the Aborigines and incorporated much of the Aboriginal iconography and symbology into his carvings and sculptures. Around the forest area near his house he carved stumps into faces and people. He also employed a gigantic kiln for the use of making giant clay sculptures -- self-portraits, aboriginal children and old men, and strange and absurd displays of people sometimes with possums and sometimes with guns or crosses or swirls. He would blend Christian symbology with Aboriginal symbology and, in one instance, a sculpture featured a white man with a hat of bullets and bearing rifles. Below the war-like man were two crosses etched in aboriginal swirls; on one cross was an aboriginal man crucified, and on the other was William Rickett himself. William Rickett was a strange and unique man, and I was alternately awestruck by his use of poetry and dumbfounded by his use of absurdity.

In each corner and cranny, you could see a sculpture or engraving. Here's a sampling, including my trite picture of a furled fern.

To melt and become
As the living waters
Running and singing
A flow of life in
My Dreaming



This collection of children's faces reminds me of a sculpture I gave my mom after attending university.


Trite picture of a furled fern:


A gum tree is a eucalyptus tree. The website Aboriginal Art Online describes the Dreaming: "The Dreaming is a term used by Aborigines to describe the relations and balance between the spiritual, natural and moral elements of the world. It is an English word but its meaning goes beyond any suggestion of a spiritual or dream-related state. Rather, the Dreaming relates to a period from the origin of the universe to a time before living memory or experience -- a time of creator ancestors and supernatural beings."

I raise my eyes to the gums overhead
They filter the sun's golden gleaming
And I think once again of a friend
I once had
Who's part of my Bushland
Dreaming