IN THE TERMITE COLONY
by Rex Butler
It is a productive and thought-provoking metaphor. In 2020, as her father was dying, Liss Fenwick fed a bunch of his books to the termites she knew were living in a shed at the back of their family home in Humpty Doo in the Northern Territory. Among the first she fed them was a series her family had subscribed to when she was a child. It was The Australians by the British historical romance writer William Stuart Long, made up of some twelve volumes written from 1979 to 1990. Actually, Long was a woman, Violet Vivian Stuart, who chose to write under a male pseudonym back in the day for obvious reasons.
The Australians was a huge popular success, fusing Barbara Cartland-like romantic melodrama with tales of the British colonising Australia and becoming “Australian”. Thus we have, for instance, The Explorers (1982) and The Patriots (1986), which Fenwick has shown in previous exhibitions, while here we have The Colonists (1984), The Empire Builders (1987) and The Seafarers (1988), each mounted open and upright in its own transparent box. On the backside, we have their lurid but now fading covers and facing us we have a complicated and coagulated mess, with termite trails leading through the pages and only occasional passages of the original prose still readable.
So the termites are eating away at our past and who we thought we were, or at least who we were taught to be. And who are these termites? That’s when these objects become art. They are first of all maybe the pallbearers for her father’s life and the childhood Fenwick spent with her family, reading these books together. Then they’re all the threats to Australia’s future, from climate change to the over-exploitation of its natural resources (yes, why not see these termites as analogous to the effectively unregulated strip mining that has removed vast swathes of the Northern Territory?). But then, finally, we might also suggest that these termites are the original inhabitants of this country, and Fenwick in discussion of her work draws attention to the fact that the Meat Ant or Munyukulunju is one of the ceremonial animals of the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land.
One day it would be absolutely fitting to put one of Fenwick’s termite-eaten books or maybe one of her videos of the termites eating them next to Anmatyerre artist Andrea Martin Nungarrayi’s Pingirri Jukukurrpa or Meat Ant Dreaming (2010), which in a similar way shows a kind of wavering chasm opening up in the red earth, a chasm not of an open-cut mine but of termites burrowing into the ground and making their nest. And this brings us to the second of the works Fenwick is showing here: the photographic prints of a series of termite nests from around Humpty Doo and Larrakia Country entitled Termitarium. However, two things need to be noted about these works for those seeing them for the first time. One: the termites that make them are different from the ones that eat the books because they live above the ground and not below. And two: the particular mounds that Fenwick photographs are ones that have originally been attacked by humans and then rebuilt by their inhabitants.
Is it too much to suggest that Aboriginal people are both kinds of termite or Mastotermes Dawiniensus in Fenwick’s work? They hollow out the colonialist narratives our parents have told us while keeping the covers intact. And they still continue to survive, despite all of our efforts to knock them down and destroy where they live. Fenwick has noted that the introduction of the cane toad, originally imported to kill the native beetles that were affecting our fledgling sugar industry, once posed a threat to the termite’s existence. Recently though, it has been observed that with the native whistling kite learning to eat only the toad’s tongue and the Torresian crow to flip the toad over and eat only its stomach, thus avoiding being poisoned, their numbers are increasing. Maybe, ultimately, these termites are only my conscience eating away at me and everything I believe, forcing me to swallow my words, as it were.
However we are to understand them, the species Mastotermes Darwiniensus is indigenous to Australia, the last of the original genus still surviving in our polluted, over-exploited and climatically warming world. It is with these termites that all “Australians” should identify and not those absurd romantic tales of patriots and empire builders, all those walls of words that come between us. Maybe all of us today should try to imagine ourselves as living in a termite colony, except one day – hopefully – without a king and queen.