The publication of this conversation on the The Wishing Well, an exhibition held last year by Tamsen Hopkinson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Kāi Tahu, Irish/English Pākehā), is prompted by Tamsen and et al’s new public artwork Whakakite/Whakakore (2025) — a tabloid newspaper currently circulating across Australia and Aotearoa. Like The Wishing Well, Whakakite/Whakakore is a layered exploration of language in service of colonisation, genocide and, at the same time, solidarity and Māori sovereignty. The Wishing Well draws out what is heard and what is made silent in the English language and Te Reo Māori.

Rosie

There is an AM/FM radio in the back wall of The Wishing Well producing white noise – a sound that means or intends nothing, a fuzz that is the opposite of language or speech. Tamsen told us that white noise is produced by playing all audible frequencies together. Hearing everything, it becomes nothing. Sound evacuated of meaning.

Briony

The attention to hearing is different from listening. Hearing is a sensory phenomenon, whereas listening is about understanding, a step towards meaning-making. In The Wishing Well, hearing the white noise isn’t about understanding it or listening to it.

Is it possible to listen to white noise? Every night my toddler sleeps with white noise on. It’s the kind of static that sounds like a waterfall. When I fall asleep in his room, my thoughts and dreams are often scrambled. The maternal sleep health nurse says it replicates the sound of the womb, and it blocks out all other sounds. When we sleep the night elsewhere, we take the noise machine in an attempt to make every room sound the same. Every room does not sound the same but his machine attempts to evacuate the specificness of a place.

Perhaps white noise is like the haze in Waanyi author Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (2023):

Hate place was a monument of the moment for some of the poorest people on Earth. A hard bit of magic grown from a corpus of ancient stories that had scattered into mystery by broken spirits creating hell fires. All those endlessly wandering fragments of ancient words were coming together, and forming the lines of stories entombed in smoke clouds circumnavigating the planet.

The white noise in hate place is something involuntary and constructed, fragmented, relaxing, violent, sleep-inducing. It is also where ancient stories are, permeating everything materially and atmospherically. Is white noise a kind of haze?

Rosie

I’m writing in my studio at the property boundary, bordering what was, until recently, an empty block. It is now a building site for four townhouses. I’m writing to the noise of whirring tools, intermittent bangs and builders talking about the consistency of cement.

Over the last two years, meaning has been consistently inverted for political ends, not least to suppress the discussion of Palestine. The Wishing Well reveals the pliability of meaning. The unstable, fickle, mutable nature of language is one of its most beautiful and powerful qualities. This mutability can also be used politically — to say what you don’t mean, or to take meaning and redeploy it elsewhere (where it doesn’t mean anything.) Repeated often enough, words accrue the posture of meaning. The mistranslation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, Aotearoa New Zealand’s founding treaty, is central to The Wishing Well. The prefix “mis” tells of the settlers’ insistence on meaning that suited their ends. Repeat it, and it can become true.

When Tamsen spoke to us about The Wishing Well, she told us about the influence of the Fitzroy Town Hall (where Conners Conners is sited) and her complex feelings about working in such a loaded colonial building. In that context, the white noise does not erase the space (it’s extremely present in the work), it makes space, spatialises the possibility of thinking within it. The sound is a way to stay with the complexity, the multiplicity of meaning, despite the insistent colonial singularity.

Briony

After the Creative Australia board pulled Khaled Sabsabi from the Venice Biennale, I watched the clips of Claire Chandler asking Penny Wong about it in the Senate. It’s so grim — just the mention of images of Hassan Nasrallah and aeroplanes hitting the Twin Towers, combined with Sabsabi’s Lebanese heritage, was enough to create alarm. You can feel it from both Chandler and Wong. Any slipperiness or potential for meaning-making is completely removed. It is as though language and images have no capacity for illegibility, ambiguity, strength or critique.

The colonial legal language of the treaty attempts to pin down the meaning of each word, but words mean multiple things at once, they change with context. It is devastating when words are stripped of this quality, when they become framed or planted as “evidence”, as precedent, as the letter of the law.

I now see the construction site next door to you connected to the Fitzroy Town Hall. The lighting rack, lowered below the white MDF gallery walls, produced a visual buzz. The language of the gallery and its transitoriness contrasts to the fixedness of the bluestone, the heritage colours. Moving the lighting rack undid some of the space. It made the Town Hall seem flimsy.

Rosie

Another quote from Praiseworthy:

This donkey was imprinted on his brain. It was the colour of platinum with a patina. It was bedazzled, more flamboyant than say, the acute dullness of cold dishwasher greyness, or gun-metal grey, but more an illuminated grey that stood out in the grey hues of the bush, like a grey-white moon-coloured beacon calling him to its spirit.

I’m collecting objects from The Wishing Well in my mind. I am not making a collection like in a museum or library, they are collecting there, like bits of twigs, leaves, debris at the end of a stormwater drain. The objects are misty, housed in Wright’s haze. The objects dance together in a silver-grey slow cyclone.

There are the coins — in the exhibition, they lie still on top of the painting, where they fell from visitors’ hands — in my mind, they are constantly flipping, neither heads nor tails. There are the piercing strips of white light, the waterfall of white noise. There’s the field of silver paint marked with chalk lines, the axes of graphs, timelines, diagrams. There are lists of English silent letters, those letters written but not pronounced. There are English and Māori phrases written in the same white chalk. Some of these have been struck through.

for us in our
inexperienced
statehood

Huihui ki te runanga
Ti Waitangi e te

Sent to the
KING
Of ENGLAND

Te-tohu-o-te-whenua

Transmitter       Radiowaves       Receiver       Antenna

As I describe them, I’m noticing, in my mind, these objects are all moving, even if in the show they were static. What does this movement mean? Why are they moving?

Right now, I’m stuck on the flipping coin. It is the indeterminacy of the flip. The refusal of resolution. Usually, a coin is exemplary of a binary — yes or no, statistically half and half. But it won’t end, won’t fall heads up, it won’t say this or that, it won’t decide either way. I’m riffling back through my notes from our conversation with Tamsen, I find this, talking about white noise created by tuning between two radio stations: “that’s how I feel” and “walls hissing” and “I don’t want to become one with Pākehā” and then “psychoanalysis — becoming one as an act of violence.”

The builders are playing thumping house music. It makes me laugh because they are building houses and listening to house. They are taking me back to building, to the Town Hall, and the importance of property in the translation of the treaty.

The work has been with me for a while. It is spinning in its disorderly, collected, hazy jumble. It won’t settle clearly into meaning. It might just continue to flip forever.

If languages are one way we come to know, what do certain languages allow you to know or to think? What thought or understanding does English allow? What does Te Reo Māori?

Briony

The chalk text is written in various orientations, I needed to move around the painting to read and reading rarely made sense. I stumbled in my head as I read aloud. I didn’t understand it. On my phone, Google Translate flicked through multiple languages as it struggled to filter the diagrammatic forms, Te Reo Māori, English, making new indecipherable words.

I’m reading pākehā historian Ruth Miriam Ross Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Texts and Translations (1972). Through historical records Ross recounts how te Tiriti was written.

Ross outlines that there were five English versions of the Treaty with various differences in wording one from the other. She argues that none of the extant English versions are the one translated into Māori by Revd. Henry Williams. The story of the drafting is incomplete — missing documents, sparse diaristic records. But Ross asserts that the document signed at Waitangi on 6th February 1840 was in Māori.

The fact that Te Tiriti o Waitangi was an agreement in the Māori language is ignored to this day.

Ross argues that the drafting and translation “suggests a considerable degree of carelessness, or cynicism in the whole process”.

Rosie

Ross refers to the Māori language of Te Tiriti as mihinare Māori or Protestant Māori, the language of Protestant missionaries. This is clearest when she describes the origin of the word kawanatanga meaning governance, from kawana “a transliteration of ‘governor’.” The meaning of words is grounded in shared concepts and can only ever describe the world of the writer or speaker. Of course, languages can adopt new concepts or new worlds, but it complicates what meaning is and where it comes from.

Tamsen told us that it is “all based in ideas of property and private ownership.” It’s an apt summary of the treaty framers’ worldview, whether it is in English or Māori. There is an attempt not only to colonise by preventing people from speaking Te Reo Māori but also to colonise the language itself with Protestantism and European property law. Can a concept like “property” alter how a language means?

Briony

In The Treaty of Waitangi (1983), Ranginui Walker (Whakatōhea) writes:

The word kawanatanga confuses the issue because it is a missionary translation of governance, a word which appears in the order of the morning service, i.e. “That all our doings be ordered by thy governance”. Thus the word kawanatanga used in the missionary language of prayer appeared to be a harmless benign term when what it really stood for is mana.

Walker problematises the selection of this word because it translates a concept from an English Christian tradition and had only been in use in mihinare Māori for approximately seven years, in Christian services and translations of the bible. As such, it doesn’t have the same power as mana, sovereignty. Tamsen has said this about the English language: It’s “a composite language with lots of silent letters… actual letters that are pointing to a history but also maintain that history by us using it”. She has described the English language “as the Town Hall”.

The “English language as the Town Hall” marks a space of governance, not a space of sovereignty. In its current form, the Fitzroy Town Hall — used for queer dances by old people, for community festivals, for wedding photography, as an artist-run space, a library — maintains civic functions, albeit different ones from its former life with council offices and chambers.

Rosie

A few years ago, I did some research into the standardisation of English orthography. One early example of standardisation was “The Chancery Standard” of the early 15th century, a set of spelling rules for the King’s Chancery clerks based mostly on the East Midlands dialect. At the time, English was spelt variously, phonetically and official documents were written in Latin or French.

One rule of the Chancery Standard was to use “I” rather than “ich” for the first-person pronoun. In English Renaissance poetry it’s also written “Y”. This history has a relationship to the beginnings of the British Empire. By the sixteenth century, when England started to colonise beyond Ireland, Scotland and Wales, orthographic standardisation would have been gaining steam. The system of rules governing writing and the ideas of property/ownership/cessation inherent to colonialism are held in the letterform or spellings of words. This is something The Wishing Well is telling us to think about.

Some silent letters are vestigial, some are errors reproduced by the early English printing press, while others are pointers to the word’s etymology. In The Wishing Well there is a sense of these silent letters as what isn’t spoken overtly in the treaty. English is weighted with misinformation and deception. At the same time, these letters are also a way to understand where the words come from, clues to their origin.

Briony

Some chalk notations in the painting are crossed out. Underneath, you can still read the word. No word has been made illegible — lines hover on the surface.

I think here, too, about the temporary nature of the Conners Conners gallery space. The walls don’t touch the Town Hall walls, the lighting track is suspended. The gallery is this thing inside the Town Hall, barely touching it, hovering awkwardly, groundless.

In our conversations with Tamsen, she talked about how Māori used to break off the silver fern and use it to reflect the moon as a navigation device. Moving around the silver painting on the floor and the gallery space itself, there is this sense of dissection, mistranslation, things butting against each other, cancelling or revealing each other, but there is also a glow. The silent letters, finding a way to navigate, a surface that is also described as depth, a relationship between what is written and who and how I, and we, understand or misunderstand it.

Rosie

The Town Hall is English. English is governance. The Town Hall is governance. Governance is a prayer. The Town Hall is a prayer. A prayer is English. English is missionary. The Town Hall is missionary. The Town Hall is a mistranslation. A mistranslation is English. The Town Hall is a wish. A wish is governance.

What happens when you draw an equivalence in meaning? To say, against definitional accuracy, that something means something else. To insist on the truth of a mistranslation. There is potential in that. Of course, in the case of the treaty, mistranslation is the basis of dispossession. The framers were at the very least indifferent to mistranslation, more likely they were employing it cynically for their own ends. In Tamsen’s work there is a use of equivalence that is powerful in some other direction. The work isn’t just about revealing or unveiling historical injustice. It is producing something new through translation, by drawing lines of equivalence between materials, social and historical forms.

A radio is a translation.

White noise is a cover for other sounds, a kind of auditory erasure. I got new headphones and I experience the noise cancellation as a pressure in my ear drum, I slowly acclimatise, but in the first few moments I am deeply aware of false neutrality. I can’t hear what is happening around me, but it isn’t silent either, I can feel the equal and opposite frequencies cancelling out the world’s noise even if I can’t “hear” it. In those moments, I become aware of what I’m not hearing.

The obvious manipulation of antisemitism that circles or underpins the language of “social cohesion” is related to cynical mistranslation. There is an equivalence drawn between a political position (anti-zionist, pro-Palestinian) and antisemitism. In the case of Sabsabi, there is an equivalence drawn between being an Arab-Australian artist (which entails for him making work about the experience of Arabs in the West post 9/11) and antisemitism. These blatant, obvious, glaring mistranslations are mobilised in the service of silence. They are the equal and opposite frequencies of my headphones, played so that all that can be heard is “Israel’s right to self-defense” or “Jewish safety on campus”. The falsity of these claims doesn’t seem to matter — people have been desperately trying to make the distinction clear. The thing is, there is no desire to hear it. The mistranslation is in service of a status quo. The mistranslation protects it.

A fern is a compass. A fern is a well. A fern is a painting. A painting is a well. A well is English. A well is Irish. A well is Te Reo Māori. A wish is a coin. A coin is a fern. A coin is a mistranslation.

Briony

In πO’s Fitzroy the biography there’s a poem about a meeting at the Town Hall that plays with translation and mistranslation in spoken and written civic forms. The Town Hall and its authority is unsettled. The poem describes a committee meeting where a council worker, standing in for someone else, reads a document and then a petition is signed. It’s not clear that the audience, — or let’s call them the “community in consultation” — knows why they’re there or what the documents mean, or who this stand-in is. In the poem, the line breaks interrupt how the space is meant to imbue deference and order.  

On the wall (at the front of the Hall) (just above
the varnished-table, with a jug of water
on it) was a picture of the Queen;
A coat-of-arms (of some
description) and the Australian flag.

At first, I found this description direct and no-nonsense. When I read the poem again, though, everything seemed off kilter and funny. Suddenly, the picture of the Queen is on the jug of water and the coat-of-arms is undermined by the italics. The flag loses its symbolic power. Everything that is absolute, is interrupted.

There are Greek, Turkish and English phrases in the poem. I can’t understand most of it, like the character of “a bloke” who says “The layf iz in tha henz but… yung pipol iz in tha pentz”. I have no idea what the first phrase means, but the second might be about young people in Pentridge. Or in a Penthouse? It’s cultural and contextual and at the end of the poem I still don’t know what the council worker said. The document, read allowed by the stand-in, goes on and on until “he alienated everybody successfully”. It’s funny and terribly grim, defined by forms of speech and politics that rely on mistranslation and work completely differently to the spoken language of the crowd and their proximity and energy.

Rosie

When you describe not understanding phrases in The Meeting, the confusion, yours/ours, it is important to ask: where has the context gone? That version of the Town Hall? Of Fitzroy?

πO transcribes words exactly as they sound rather than as they are spelled — they are read directly from the mouths of the speakers in his poems. There are no silent letters here.

πO, the Town Hall, Fitzroy, made me go and find an interview I did with Meriam Ku-Ku Yalangi artist John Harding for 3CR in 2020. We spoke about The Dirty Mile, the play he co-wrote for Illbijerri Theatre Company that was performed in Gertrude Street in 2006. Rereading that transcript, it brought up so much of what Tamsen spoke about, how aware she was of Aboriginal Fitzroy when making The Wishing Well. One thing John talked about was the theme of “dispersal” running through the play. The way that colonisation continues to disperse Aboriginal people, the dispersal of communities from Fitzroy/Collingwood. He used an image of a puddle evaporating:

I just always visualise water on a footpath on a hot summer day. And it just, you watch it slowly dr[y] up and it gets to a tiny little puddle and then it just evaporates when it’s small enough. And that’s what I, that’s how I picture what happened to us in my mind when I was writing the play.

I noticed the choice of the word “dispersal”. In my question, I had used “displacement” and “dispossession”, but “dispersal” implies separating out parts of something. It also conjures images of the dispersed coins on the well/painting, or the silent letters dispersed through English words.

In part of the interview, he is talking about what it meant to do the play there, on Gertrude Street, with the Parkies as marshals, with Elders speaking to place in place “When Denise Lovett told them her story and they’re standing on her, her special spot, while she’s telling them.”

Tamsen shared an essay by Carl Te Hira Mika (Tūhourangi and Ngāti Whanaunga), titled “WORLDED OBJECT AND ITS PRESENTATION: A Māori philosophy of language”. Mika elaborates how Māori language is always in relationship with other people, places, objects and phenomena.

When we speak, we hence utter the totality of the world, not simply a description of whatever it is we wish to discuss. Language therefore presents the all within whatever is our concern, and our concern is only there because of the all in language.

This is reminiscent of the overflowing nature of Tamsen’s work, our struggle to speak to it as a unified whole, our concern about constantly finding new tangents that appear excessive. The work, like the world, is too much to hold, describe and think. But Mika argues that to think with Māori, both as a language and as a worldview, is to always be accounting for the interrelation between things.

So this essay is helping me to draw a thread between The Wishing Well and πO’s poem and The Dirty Mile. The thread links the mistranslation of Te Tiriti to the silent letters in Tamsen’s painting. From there it hops over to the ‘loud’ letters in πO’s poem, transliterations of words that I sometimes do and sometimes don’t understand, depending on my own knowledge/ignorance/context. The thread links all the things that “Fitzroy” (with and without a Town Hall) is and has meant, to the dispersal that John describes and to the dispersal of frequencies in white noise.

Briony

I was taken with these ideas of dispersal and overflow. I had to go to the Fitzroy Police station yesterday, someone had found my wallet and handed it in there. There’s a sky blue laminex counter, one perspex window, tucked in behind the Town Hall, the station is like a little brother under the wing of a benign older sibling.

I saw The Dirty Mile in 2006. I remember Gertrude Street already felt “fancy” — there were a few trendy shops and cafes and art spaces, Gertrude and Seventh Gallery. I remember parts of the play so clearly. It started at the trees outside the exhibition building, at the top of Gertrude Street, an important meeting place for Aboriginal people taken from their families and land, coming into the city and looking for their relatives and community. Performers played multiple characters, and stories interwove.

In the play, Aboriginal community and storytelling did not feel dispersed. They felt everywhere and in everything. Every few shops, the group would stop and hear about the establishment of the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service, the Victorian Aboriginal Housing Co-op, the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service. The Parkies talked about what they were campaigning for — places to sit and meet without harassment and against public drunkenness laws.

That Fitzroy is gone, but it’s there in glimpses at parks, at events and markets, at the flats, in the way some teenagers chat to each other gathered around computers in the library using the free internet. I remember when that beautiful giant barber shop closed. It was run by a trader called Arthur Koniaras, who was always in the white coat watching the street. The second perfumery on Gertrude Street moved in.

Dispersal and overflow. They are striking figures of water. The dispersal of water and evaporation, then a huge deluge, storm water leaking down the sides of the Town Hall, staining the heritage colours, coins flooded out of the room, well wishes emptied with rushing mud. But that’s too easy. A biblical allegory of the flood. Again, a specific image to grasp, a motif on which to pin my thoughts. A dispersal.

Rosie

Through its engagement with place and material, The Wishing Well exceeds the confines of the English language to resonate with Audra Simpson’s (Kahnawake Mohawk) description of what cannot be heard by colonial power, she writes,

[T]he very notion of indigenous nationhood which demarcates identity and seizes tradition in ways that may be antagonistic to the encompassing frame of the state, may be simply unintelligible to the western and/or imperial ear.

Briony

The silver light, the flipping coin and the vibration at the back of the gallery walls. I had imagined our tangents as fragments, that made it difficult to see the whole of the work, as small glimmering moments, moving in and out of their contexts.

Mika writes about the word ako:

“‘Ako” indicates a particular vulnerability of the self in relation to the external world… it is not always such a straightforward indicator of “teach/learn”, even if they are simultaneous.

Mika explains how in Te Reo Māori, a word might contain “the material entity, its world, its shadows and mysteries”. It’s not that the word “teach” as in English, conjures what it isn”t “learn”. Ako, then, speaks to the way teaching is always learning, it is pushing against or towards the edges of the world and the way it feels vulnerable and at other times threatening or pointless.

Mika tells us, in Māori language and culture, philosophical knowledge and language aren’t just shells built around a thing.

*

Tamsen told us that she painted the silver of The Wishing Well, with her sister, over another work Te Kore — a black monochrome. “It was a way to move through our creation story. Now we are moving towards Te Ao Māama – the world of light.”

The Wishing Well picks apart the mistranslations in Te Tiriti/the Treaty, to make audible the dangerous mistranslations of our present. It remakes language, history and material phenomena into a shimmering web. It is a proposition that invites us into meaning-making. Not the fixed meaning of mistranslation or property boundaries, but a generative, unfurling, interrelated meaning.

Images of the work: Tamsen Hopkinson, The Wishing Well, Conners Conners (2024), photographed by Dane Lovett