Fabulous Retroactivity: Time and Colonialism in Gordon Bennett’s Possession Island

Abstract

Introduction Before his untimely death in 2014, not yet aged sixty, Gordon Bennett produced a body of work that must surely count among the most careful and comprehensive reflections on the colonial project undertaken by an Australian artist. His paintings unpack the complex temporal logic that underpinned Australian colonialism, focusing on the central role played by images in colonialism’s construction and legitimation. Unlike, for example, several Australian prime ministers I could mention, Bennett refuses to consign these events to the past, to some concluded historical moment. He demonstrates how the images and visual tropes of colonial representation still form, on some imaginary or subconscious level, a fundamental backdrop to the legitimacy of the Australian legal and political order. In his Home D ecor series (1995–2010), in Terra Nullius (Teaching Aid) As Far as the Eye Can See (1993), and, as we will see, in several versions of Possession Island (fig. 1) painted in 1991, Bennett’s art explores tropes of the colonial imaginary without letting the viewer off the hook. He represents, satirises, and critiques the colonial past’s fantasies of whiteness and blackness, and the crucial role they played in the construction of the Australian state and Australian identity. But we are not permitted to indulge our voyeuristic or nostalgic urges about that past under the protective alibi of our supposed distance from it. That distance he radically foreshortens. Several major contemporary Indigenous artists—Judy Watson and Fiona Foley, among others—describe their art practice in terms of truth-telling or historical research: ‘History’, says Foley, ‘is a weapon’. Bennett approached the problem of Australian memory differently. He chose to excavate not ‘Aboriginal history’ as ‘facts’, but rather representations of that history in the visual archive of Australian colonialism. His raw materials are paintings, drawings, stamps, old newspapers, and school textbooks, a host of fantasies and delusions that nourished and