A new public art project will re-imagine the forgotten 19th century Garden Palace of Sydney. Anna Frey Taylor and Michael Cathcart investigate how artist Jonathan Jones plans to exhume the bones of the historic building.

For three years during the late 1800s, Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens housed one of Australia's grandest buildings. Built in 1879, the colossal Garden Palace stood between the Mitchell Library and the Conservatorium of Music; its 64-metre high domed roof stretching majestically into the skyline. This feat of Victorian architecture was—for a brief moment—the pride of Sydney. How the building caught fire and quickly burned to the ground in 1882 remains a mystery.

I'm hoping that that story of loss, which is such a prevalent story in the world today—everyone is dealing with enormous cultural erasures—is something in this story which we probably all can connect to. Jonathan Jones, Indigenous artist

The history of the Garden Palace has inspired a new work of public art by Sydney-based Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones. Jones recently won the Your Very Good Idea prize, awarded by the Kaldor Public Art Project, for his initiative to re-imagine the historic Garden Palace.

While still in its formative stages, the project aims to ‘pull the bones of the building out of the ground’ in order to recreate its former site as an imperial ruin.

'The key element of this project will be activating that history and activating that space,' explains Jones. 'There are going to be ... performances and programs that will really try to bring back some of the grandeur, some of the stories, some of the entwined histories that are occupying, or still haunting, that space.'

The Garden Palace was purpose-built in 1879 to house the Sydney International Exhibition. The exhibition was a large fair designed to showcase new technologies and materials from Australia and the world. As the location for this major event, the palace communicated to the world that Sydney was a vibrant and successful modern city.

'Our world fair was really about announcing to the world that we had quite an important place within the British Empire,' says Jones. 'There was an enormous exhibition space dedicated to the states of Australia that showed their technologies, all their wares, wool, wheat and gold.'

Local Indigenous artefacts were also on display at the exhibition. The objects represented the cultures of around 50 different Aboriginal tribes from south-east Australia. Promoting the idea of the noble savage, the exhibits were curated to contrast the technological progress of the colony with the supposedly primitive Indigenous culture.

‘The display of Aboriginal material was really there as a backdrop to say, "Here were these sort of savages in the landscape, they were doing nothing with it ... look at what we've been able to do with this country",' says Jones.

The 1882 fire destroyed all the Aboriginal materials exhibited at the Garden Palace. Jones hopes to explore the parallels between the erasure of the objects in the fire with the erasure of Aboriginal presence in Australia's history more broadly.

'I'm hoping that that story of loss, which is such a prevalent story in the world today—everyone is dealing with enormous cultural erasures—is something in this story which we probably all can connect to,' he says.

To tell the story, Jones will be looking to the landscape of Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens. For him, memories of the Garden Palace as an imperial project remain embedded within the taxonomy of its plants.

'The garden, in a strange way, by collecting plants all around the world ... is still telling the story of the Garden Palace,' says Jones.

‘I think it’s a very Aboriginal story. You can't remove history from country, and that country will continue to tell those stories to you, if you choose to listen.'

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