strangerlands 1

Fern fever, or pteridomania, was a 19th- century passion for all things fern-related. Beginning in England, it spread as far as the Australian colonies, where majestic tree fern groves became subjects of fascination. Martin King invokes this obsession in strangerlands 1, in which a tall copse of ferns humming with nocturnal life is illustrated in an open book. Rendered in part as a negative image, the scene brims with fantastic and haunting details.

By conjuring the tree fern’s fragile ecology in this storybook format, King prefigures its potential loss and mythologised remembrance. He links this to patterns of erasure and memorialisation in Australia’s colonial history by placing the book over a partial rendering of John Glover’s painting The River Nile, Van Diemen’'s Land, from Mr Glover’'s farm 1837 (National Gallery of Victoria). Glover’s Tasmanian arcadia populated by Aboriginal people was an imagined scene, having been painted after remaining Aboriginal communities were exiled to Flinders Island.