Julian Meagher The fatal shore (island life)

I grew up around Berry Island on Sydney’s foreshore and have been visiting this area ever since. This work is part of a series I have been working on looking into both our individual and collective inherited histories. How does our past inhabit our present?

At the end of the headland there is a ten-metre Aboriginal rock carving from the time of the Cammeraygal people, thought to depict a stingray inside a whale or sea creature.

Beneath this carving down on the water’s edge I came across this rowing boat sitting up high in the rocks, shipwrecked it seemed on an island of Sydney sandstone. Sometimes powerful poetic images are right in front of us.

- Julian Meagher, 2015