Dyerren Dyerren Dragon Tree

The Rainbow Serpent of Indigenous Australia, the Taniwha of the Maori, the Naga of India and Southeast Asia, the Chinese Dragon, the European Dragons; these and many other dragon serpents worldwide are associated with water, often dwelling under lakes or rivers, controlling its flow, or ascending into the sky where they send storms or replenishing rains. Benevolent life force or violent power, the Dragon demands human respect. 

From root to twig-tips, an entire native Cypress tree snakes across the gallery. Salvaged from the devastating Green Wattle Creek Bushfire of 2019/20 that killed it, the tree's sectioned trunk is carefully rejoined with hand-wrought steel curvatures.

Each unique piece is fitted, riveted, chiselled in, bolted tight. Above us, like a cyclonic weather system, a swirl of the smaller branches and twigs climbs the wall, many small structures twirling in its force; the lash of the Dragon’s tail. Its head lies hidden beneath the root.

" From root to twig-tips, an entire native Cypress tree snakes across the gallery. "

Materials: native Cypress tree salvaged from the 2019-20 bushfires, steel, soundtrack and sound system, wool, Cypress benches, community participation.

Threatened native species of the area are named by the Bankstown World Music Choir, in English and in Latin. Sydney Aboriginal man, Matthew Doyle, (Muruwari & Eora), enunciates the names of trees in Dharug, and Dharawal local languages, (languages also threatened and now re-emerging), also the names of dragons, skinks and snakes, along with words that describe a deep Indigenous connection to trees and wood –  specific words like birragu, a hollow tree, bulbi, a leaning tree, bulu, the shadow of a tree, djurduralang, the tree bark for making fishing lines.

Musicians from diverse cultures and traditions were invited to contribute to a composition, a deep, sonorous drone that throbs and rumbles through the Dyerren Dyerren Dragon Tree – from horsehead fiddle, to bass gaida, horn, and tanpura. Voices and instruments emanate from speaker-houses made from the twigs of the tree, and from sound-speakers emerging from beneath its root. The wiring, red as sap or blood, connects the parts, meandering from the root, like fungal mycelium.  Listen to the whole soundtrack

Visitors were invited to sit, on benches made from the same kind of Cypress tree, to contemplate, to listen, and to make their own sculptures from the twigs of the tree. During the exhibition, more and more of their model houses were installed to whirl across the wall, as if caught in the centrifugal force of the Dragon’s tail.