PROJECT BACKGROUND - In 2008 I was invited to attend a postgraduate artist's four-day residency on Moreton Bay's historic site, Peel Island. Peel Island had been used as a quarantine station, asylum for inebriates and a leprosarium for patients with Hansen's disease (more commonly known as leprosy).
The result of attending the residency culminated in several, experimental short films; the Tzaraath, Shadows and Refractions, Four Tribes, Aquarium, and Aquarium 2 - Cut Glass. Of these, Aquarium 2 - Cut Glass emerged as the most highly personal account. Although most of the images and the history pertained to Peel, it was simultaneously a document about tightly bound personal experiences, and an investigation about the ways in which these overlap with material documenting the emotional encounters of some of the patients of Peel. The haunting residue of human suffering and illness experienced by patients sent to live in the lazaret community of Peel Island remains, utterly palpable, frozen in the dilapidation.
The abandoned buildings of the historic lazaret, the collapsing shells that housed people rejected by the mainland, created a potent symbol of social abhorrence, a standard of ignorance and prejudice, and I recognised it as a profound theatre-space for my own healing and inner reflection.
As a Thalidomide-effected person, in my childhood and youth, I had sustained similar themes of rejection and painful prejudice. Outcast...leper, unclean. The residency allowed me to experiment further with ideas of narrative collaboration, drawing from impressions felt in the space, and allowing my own histories to speak, thereby aligning visually with emotional accounts and depictions drawn from Peter Ludlow's book Paradise or Prison, and subsequent readings from the Liddell report and other anecdotal accounts of patients on Peel. The readings were fascinating and opened a vast range of responses in me. Possibly the most surprising and lingering impression came from a patient's description of a deep and profound feeling of calm that came over her after being diagnosed with Hansen's disease and arriving on Peel Island. She described the feeling as a tremendous relief at her own worldly obliteration, her retirement from the expectations and pressures of society ...and I wanted that.
I set out to reference Peel Island in an ordered, observational documentary style, however the experience evoked so many other chaotic internal and emotional responses that I put aside more standard methods of documenting Peel's story, and just scrambled around in the haunting twilight of the island. In reviewing my captured footage, I was intrigued by the multitude of decayed surfaces, fungal, blistered and rusted planes, and my research led me to make a link between the rot that naturally occurs from exposure to elements, and our furious, human obsession to eradicate all signs of warts, infection, mould, decay.
My readings brought me fairly quickly in contact with biblical references to leprosy, and intriguingly with an affliction known as Tzaraath. Tzaraath was an old Testament curse described in the Tanach and other Jewish sources, starting in Leviticus (chapters 13-14). Although the term is commonly mistranslated as leprosy, Tzaraath was not leprosy. It affected primarily the afflicted person's skin, but sometimes the afflicted person's clothes and house. It is traditionally believed to have come not through natural means but as a punishment for sin. The biblical text also describes Tzaraath as infecting the walls of houses, the symptoms it describes are coloured depressions in the wall which spread over a period of seven days. My first brief film, titled Tzaraath, was a simple sketch intended for deeper reflection and future development, however it's construction conceptually yielded a thematic, visual framework for me to see the island as a microcosm of affliction.
The second piece, Shadows and Refractions focused on aspects of the landscape and interiors where the play of flickering light illuminated the surface of things. In many of the shots there's a sense of erosion, or corrosion, a pitting and the breaking away of surfaces, facades, masks, identities. The short films titled Aquarium 1 and 2 resulted from moving into more deeply personal reflections, where I felt the island offered me a powerful context for me to voice my own story. I composed and recorded the music for Aquarium in a piece titled Lorelei of Moreton which alludes to the whispered songs of sorrow from an imagined echo of hundreds of voices drifting out on the tides and sea-mists, from deep inside the huts and the sheds on Peel...songs of yearning from the broken hearts of people deprived of touch, of affection, of love.
…historically, Peel island was a holding tank, an experimental observation station for the socially dangerous. The emotional challenge for me was simply deciding whether to creatively read the environment as an occupant or observer.
