Gallery Saint Phalle and Lake Mungo

Paul Mason: Lake Mungo, in Gallery Saint Phalle

In the back room of the Red Wheelbarrow on Lygon Street, Catherine has set up a beautiful little gallery. It is called Gallery Saint Phalle. They moved the bookshelves out and into Paul's shop, making the front room a kind of booklovers’ maze. You can stand there and not know who is on the other side. On a winter’s day like today, the lamp from his desk and the heater cast a dim warm light.


The back room however is the complete opposite: lightness.

On the shortest day of the year, Catherine opened “Solstice”, an exhibition of drawings by Paul Mason. They are perfect for the Gallery: gray lead drawings on white paper that defy dimension and create space through lines. One of them documents an epiphany that the artist had in a particular place. And as I had a couple of weeks’ break coming up, it gave me a destination: Lake Mungo.

So Vince and I did a small road trip up to Mildura and then joined a day tour from there to Lake Mungo, with local identity Graham. He turned out to be a person inhabiting two worlds: the culture of the Paakantji, and the Western academic study of archaeology. He was a wealth of knowledge and a huge personality. His favourite saying was: “Mother Nature writes the book of Time”, a kind of metaphor so mixed yet it somehow works.

 

As Paul Mason’s drawing shows, Mungo is an ancient lake bed covered in low shrubs, recovering from the cattle grazing that took place there for much of the twentieth century. However under the sands of the lunette lie ancient treasures and human remains. What really blew my mind is that the archaeologists are not “digging” for artefacts and bones, they know where they might be but wait for the wind and weather to uncover them, as it surely will.

 

The sands are continually shifting. There is another dimension out there. When we stand there, we stand where people stood 40,000 years ago. That is a beautiful feeling.

Human group seems small in the sands of time

 

Graeme drew his cosmology into the sands of the dry lake shore. Perhaps he does this for a different group of tourists each day, and yet it was as if it were uniquely for us. Circles within circles, quadrants within each circle. Science and magic, nature and spirits. They are all out there: Lake Mungo.

Paul Mason: Lake Mungo (detail)

My overexposed photo