They also seem to me to be both intimate and authentic. I imagine that they might be encoded with poignant fragments of history but it is more likely that in gathering them up – over three days – that I was merely taking possession of 145 variations of nothing.īut there is nothing that is merely nothing.įor me they isolate an aspect of beauty, in their minimalism, their obscurity, their variation and the sheer circumstance of their survival. These tableaux noir - not quite black, not quite blank – are for me, a mute correspondence with the past. In whatever condition the school remained it would be very unlikely to find anything – other than the essential architecture – that might be a fragment of that remote era, but amid the ruin I did find something or rather I found some things: one hundred and forty five little blackboards blackboards used then and subsequently by the junior grades chalkboards as held in the lap of the middle kid in the front row for the annual class photograph. The school has for several years been deregistered and is now a site of desolation and vandalism. In December of 2011 we revisited the suburb and the school. I attended this school in the company of two of my brothers Jamie and Mark and with my friend Peter Van Der Veer. From 1959 to 1961 I was a student at the newly opened Campmeadows Primary School. In the decade 1955 to 1964 I lived in the migrant suburb of Broadmeadows on the north west fringe of Melbourne. Tabula Rasa is the epistemological theory that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception…The term in Latin equates to the English ‘blank slate’ (or more accurately ‘erased slate’, which refers to writing on a slate sheet in chalk) but comes from the Roman tabula or wax tablet, used for notes, which was blanked by heating the wax and then smoothing it to give a tabula rasa.
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