Welcome
Eliza Tree – Artist and Expeditioner,
Community activist and Environmentalist.
I combine my creative passion, historical research, and deep concern for the climate crisis to explore Culture, ecology, and landscape. My visual arts practice is of multi-disciplinary enquiry, drawing upon diverse historical documents, contemporary sources, images, maps, and journals, to question and re-evaluate the meta-narrative(s) of Colonialism in early Australia.
OPEN STUDIO • CASTLEMAINE FRINGE FESTIVAL • 2025
As an Artist and Expeditioner, I travel through maps and text, space and time, exploring ideas and realms – seeking to understand the Colonial Invasion of Australia, via Botany Bay.
‘Discovery’ of Australia, via Botany Bay Who knew……? Paintings, Images, Maps and Text
This exhibition represents the latest chapter in a fascinating journey towards addressing Colonial Denialism, instead, looking towards revisionist Truth Telling.
From Captain Cooks ‘secret instructions’, to the deliberate denial of first nations cultures, and cultivation of country.
Throughout many Arts Open, Fringe and Castlemaine State Festival Exhibitions, I have evolved my thoughts, knowledge, images and ideas, in the process of re-interpriting and understanding the myriad of lies and obfuscations, which have been delivered to us, through ‘primary source documents’, Official Journals, public gazettes, etc. – in a fabricated ‘narrative’ of “peaceful settlement”, in ‘unoccupied’ land.
Re-evaluating other perspectives, voices and silences. Public Narrative or Private Correspondence.
Making the Invisible Visible.
Studio: 137 Mostyn St Castlemaine
11-4 pm Sat & Sun :22 March -6 April 2025 or by appointment
elizatree@castlemaine.net
Acknowledgment of Country
I wish to acknowledge that I live and work on Djaara Country, the homelands of the Dja Dja Wurrung Peoples, who have owned, lived on and cared for this Country since time immemorial. I pay respect to their elders past, present and emerging. I respect and appreciate the Peoples and ancestors, their lands and water, birds, plants and animals who have lived in harmony for millennia. We will continue to respect and protect. Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
