Opening speech by Her Excellency Ms Quentin Bryce, AC Governor of Queensland
going to the gums Exhibition, Redland Museum, 31 May 2007
Mayor Don Seccombe
President, RedlandMuseum Mrs Kath McNeilly
President, Friends of Peel Island Association Mr Harry Beiers
Dr Hugo Ree
PeelIsland’s many and loyal friends
I acknowledge:
- the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet;
- and their successors, the keepers of our heritage, whose knowledge, insights, and respectful and dedicated care are so evident here tonight,
- in this marvellous space, reserved for that which we hold and value in common, to be enjoyed by us as if collectively owned, and guarded as if in trust for those who come after.
Friends, I feel great privilege to be in a civic role at a time of growing awareness of the things:
- that represent our shared experience, gathered over generations of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians;
- and that together make up the fabric of who we are.
And I am honoured and delighted this evening to celebrate:
- the power of those things to teach and enlighten us;
- to reunite us;
- their accessibility;
- and their role in honestly and faithfully recording our past.
A past that, in the hundred years since the establishment of the Lazaret on Peel Island, has been revealed to us, often uncomfortably and shamefully, as a poignant reflection of the attitudes to race, disease, and criminality that prevailed in Queensland society, and beyond:
- the grim repute of islands as places of exile, much like how Australia once found itself;
- the banishment to such places, of those regarded as society’s outcasts;
- the racism and discrimination that was expressed in our laws and our nation’s White Australia Policy;
- the misguided passage of fear of contagion from ignorance to misdiagnosis, ostracism to culpability;
- and the liberation that comes with new understanding, other than of course for those already too damaged to be freed;
- and the decaying structures that still speak of the disfigured bodies and fragmented lives that suffered in their clutches.1
Author David Malouf has said:
We can easily, in choosing only what is significant, miss what is most humanly valuable, but also necessary to the wholeness of things…making a choice in favour of beauty, of wilderness, or historical importance, and thereby depriving ourselves of a real past that is dense with ordinary life and living like our own.2
It’s certainly true that the site of the former MoretonBayHospital is now:
- long and far remote from wretched affliction;
- its environs, exquisite;
- and its topography and shores, a welcome shelter for sea travellers in roaring south-easterlies.
But, in its ordinary life, in its real past, there were few signs of beauty.
Friends of PeelIsland, I sincerely thank you for helping us to see what is most humanly valuable, and for working to sustain that vision.
This exhibition belongs to a continuum, a broader and many-layered process:
- of evolving and unfolding;
- of separating and weaving the threads of our heritage;
- of hunting and gathering the values3 that seep through its ageing cracks,
- and coming to understand its meaning and consequence, and our place within it.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my great pleasure to declare open Going to the Gums — The Lazaret of Peel Island, and to welcome you to its story.
Footnotes
1. Based on a reading of Helen Gregory, “The Heritage of the Ultimate Outcast”, Heritage, History and Health, 1996, Proceedings of the 4th Biennial Conference of the Australian Society of the History of Medicine, pp 129-134
2. David Malouf, National Trust Heritage Lecture 2000, www.nsw.nationaltrust.org.au.
3. Reference to the words of Seamus Heaney in his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance address to the Stockholm Concert Hall, 1995: “poetry has the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values…”
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