Spending afternoons in the robotic milking shed, patiently waiting and sitting with the very pregnant cows, hoping to witness a birth, watching their swollen bodies and shallow breaths in the bright light and heat, made me reflect on the geographical distribution of animals—cattle were brought to Australia by English settlers during the eighteenth century²—and of their role as working migrants and mothers in this foreign climate and landscape. I later discovered that significant studies into the fields of cattle genetics for the future of climate change adaptation and heat stress resilience is a leading research area of dairying at Dookie for this reason.³ As the cows walked themselves through the sheds and milking took place via machine, the rhythm of their labour moving to and from the fields made the extraction purely transactional. Due to this, viewing cattle as currency was never far from mind and the continuation of such transactions through the production of artworks was not lost on me. Cows as commodities, I discovered, are closer to the arts than one might assume—for example, the first arts grant in Australia was paid in livestock, when nineteenth century poet Michael Massey Robinson was granted two cows from the government for his services as poet laureate.⁴ Yet, as I watched the herd gather around an external water source, calming and licking their newborns and each other clean, the cold cut, black and white commodification of animals felt like an incongruous cognitive distortion that is as callous as it appears strange to me.  

The delicate challenge of continuing to create amidst precarious global environmental crises underscored my engagement with the community and how I chose to make. My attempts at a cross-species cultural exchange through endurance performance brings the sheer absurdity of such an endeavour into focus. The residue of these moments is temporally suspended on film where I search with frantic energy through fields, becoming lost, mud-covered, attempting to move forward and find a way through. As I demonstrate to several calves how to play the harp with their tongues—a self-soothing activity—a quote from the German auteur Werner Herzog circulates my memory. On considering the value of film, he states that ‘it doesn’t cause revolutions but can change our perspective on things… but there is a lot of absurdity as well. It makes me into a clown… and that happens to everyone.'⁵ He then proceeds to dine on his leather footwear as a result of losing a bet to a fellow filmmaker, all in the spirit of finding the courage to continue to create. Similarly, the cartography of the conversations that this residency continues to foster has bridged the realms of imagination with the tangible surroundings of the campus to establish a stage where the sites themselves became both backdrop and essence of the subsequent art encounters.

To engage in a residency is to engage in a community. At first you are a visitor, with receptors wide open, ready to embrace any serendipitous offerings that may present themselves. Once the initial wave of stimuli has settled you become a documenter, taking note of minutiae, spelunking, finding metaphors and meaning through new-found connections between people, beings and place. However, one must tread lightly and with reverence. To be invited in is not an invitation to glean or to mine resources, cultural content and the labour of others. No. Rather, the invitation is to engage with genuine interest and a desire to form new ideas generously with the intention to appreciate the exploration together. Navigating the choppy seas of taking too much time from others in the quest to understand the findings that the nets thrown have touched upon is part of the exchange. The fundamental condensation that these conversational waters catch is not to be perversely ‘give-and-take’ appropriated into art-making material, but rather formed into the foundation of something other which carries the essence of the experience holistically. Without knowing the effects of my time at the Dookie campus in their entirety, such principles were paramount to my engagement with the campus.