ARCHIE MOORE
Archie Moore - Crop (Noun/Verb), 2016 | contour 556 | Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra

The Yam Daisy represents a point where western science and indigenous knowledge came into contact. Without any visible forms of what was known then as agriculture, (to the Europeans) the Yam Daisy was just a field of flowers and not a crop.

Aboriginal people had education, science, astronomy, trade routes, a legal system, villages etc. But this wasn’t visible due to the sense of racial superiority the occupiers brought with them. Some have said they didn’t even see any humans, just a vast land of flora and fauna. With only an oral language the wealth of indigenous knowledge was buried or ignored completely in school textbooks and academic writings, as history ‘written by the victors’.

This work quietly explores the intersections of indigenous and European society and the misunderstandings and assumptions that have been used to control, exploit and dispose indigenous people from their land. It is also a metaphor for the failure of reconciliation and the knowing or understanding of one another is a constant, vacillating disquietedness.

Archie Moore, 2016