Eel Shoe

Eel Shoe explores the concept of "being careful where you put your feet" and the complex interface between Aboriginal and colonial cultures from my perspective as an Australian of settler-colonial descent living in Naarm/Melbourne, Victoria. This artwork brings together key ideas and concepts reflected upon during my experiences of Indigenous fieldwork on Boonwurrung, Woi Wurrung, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung country in March of 2022. The work primarily investigates how we as non-Indigenous people can respectfully navigate Indigenous cultural landscapes, and challenges some of the colonial mindsets associated with outdoor recreation in mainstream Australian society. In Eel Shoe, I also tie together themes around weaving, queerness, and migration in a format that, in its ostensible absurdity, reflects the change in thinking required for true reconciliation in this country. Inspiration for Eel Shoe comes from the weaving work of Auntie Bronwyn Razem and the whimsical work of queer soft sculpture artists including my dear friend Lil Longman. The work also visually references the work of designer Si Chan and follows the unconventional tradition of the soft sculpture medium.

This shoe aims to flip the colonial mentality of outdoor recreation on its head by playing with the concept of a technical outdoor shoe. We have shoes specifically made for hiking, rock climbing, and running… what if there was a shoe that could help the wearer negotiate an Indigenous cultural terrain? Eel Shoe encourages the wearer to engage in a more thoughtful mode of travel through the landscape. The wearer is, in a literal sense, forced to be more careful about where they put their feet due to the shoe’s clumsy nature. I think this clumsiness is perhaps indicative of the way non-Indigenous Australians navigate the interface with Indigenous peoples and cultures as we attempt to reconcile with the history of this colony. The shoe’s shape being the short-finned eel, or kooyang in the Gunditjmara languages, was chosen due to the animal’s importance to many Indigenous clans across south-eastern Australia. I see the eel as a kind of conduit between land and people, both in historical and contemporary contexts. To this point, the eel is not just a source of food and a resource for trade, but also the raison d’être for the cultural landscape at Budj Bim and a catalyst for the gatherings of people at Lake Bolac which continue even today. The migration of short-finned eels from freshwater rivers and lakes in south-eastern Australia to their breeding grounds in the Coral Sea is an additional concept explored in this artwork. This repeated route, to me, is suggestive of the songlines and trading routes followed by Indigenous Australians and even by Australians today via modern built highways (Crabtree et al. 2021). The Eel Shoe keeps the walker true to the route, as an eel might find its way across Country all the way back to the sea. Again, this shoe is for cultural terrain.

This artwork’s core concept comes from my experience walking through the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy with Bunurong elder Uncle Mik Edwards. Standing in Atherton Gardens, an important place in the Aboriginal history of Fitzroy, Uncle Mik told us - “be careful where you put your feet”. His statement speaks not only to the history of places like Fitzroy but the sacredness of land everywhere in Australia. Aboriginal histories are so old that there is virtually no piece of land on the continent that does not have a story attached to it. As Tim Winton says in his memoir Island Home, “we live on the most spiritually potent continent imaginable” (2015, p. 220), but as I reflected on during fieldwork, many non-Indigenous Australians do not treat the land as such. While visiting Bunjil’s Shelter and looking out towards the Gariwerd Range, I came to see the ongoing dispute between rock climbers and traditional owners surrounding rock climbing access in Gariwerd (Day & Gillett 2019) as an example of this lack of regard for what is sacred. From conversations with friends, I have observed that many climbers feel a sense of entitlement, not only to access rock climbing routes but also to be able to talk to Traditional Owners with whom they have no relationship. I would argue that this attitude plays into a broader sense of pioneering and discovery of ‘untouched wilderness’ which has been pervasive in outdoor recreation in Australia since colonization.