In a time when artists are battling each other for grants, everyone is competing for jobs and the GFC has hit things pretty hard;  I have decided to sell my original exhibition prints from 2008-2010 in hope of making a bit of $$ to create some new work and pay the rent. These works are from the series’ ; Autonomies; Portraits of the NT Intervention, Homelands; photographing place across Australia, Sajeen/Prisoner; a state imprisoned inside and out, The Sound of Jets; images of overt and hidden violence in Palestine/Israel, The Bottom of the Lake; A village funeral procession in rural Mozambique, Running away from home; portraits of Tanzanian women talking about Female Genital Mutilation, &  I was born; Portraits of Gazan youth.

These images have travelled with me from house to house and I would much rather see them unrolled and up on peoples walls. All of the images below are available for purchase; selling prices are labelled or nearest offer, they are unframed and AS IS (i.e. some pin marks in the corner of the borders).

If there are any other images on my website: jessieboylan.com that you like that aren’t shown here, I would be more than happy to get them printed for you.

In solidarity,
Jessie

See: http://jessieboylan.wordpress.com/print-sales/ – for the images

while it pours springs last days
down the gutter, drains, tunnels to the sea

we make a home for ourselves here
pulling up 35 years of other peoples lives

the last spring days have gone, a new flood flows now…

the outback backyard has stories of its own. im yearning to learn them,
one by one by one,

06 september;

The landfill fire. The tip worker showed me where it started in the Little Sisters town camp> “there’s probably a track in there, where they go scavenging at night, but I wouldn’t leave your car here and I wouldn’t go walking around on your own…” – He’s referring to the community that lives just 200m away from the landfill, just south of the Gap in Alice Springs. So, the fire starts in the town camp, then seeps into the landfill, then shoots toxic fumes back over the camp….

–
Later we go to Margie Lynch’s country. Her, her sister Pamela and their family set up a protest camp 40km north on the Stuart Highway at the Two Sisters dreaming site; ngkwerenenehe, telling the CLC (Central Land Council) to get fucked – they’ve been ignored/bypassed in consultation processes for mining exploration. They’re going straight to the top, to Gillard, they say.

“…the struggle has been going for 27 years, or longer if you really look into it,” – a struggle to protect the land, “our father and mother always said no to mining, we have to carry out that wish” “Land rights is there to protect the land, not sell it off for mining.” It makes people fight against their own families, splits it right down the middle, and while people are doing that, the companies and govt are looking around the land for the good shit, the minerals to send them sky-high.

Why is it that the same story has to be told so many times?

Tyrone, Pamela’s son, puts on his akubra and drives us down to the dam after the others have gone to bed, he’d fixed up the battered two-wheel drive not long ago, let the tires down enough for the sand, you don’t even feel the corrugation. Bloomers climbs a tree for kindling, and we light a fire, crack a few beers then Tyrone tells us about his mustering jobs, and near deaths-by-bull, and his dislocated knee. Down in south australia where he’s been working, there’s a fella who owns about 29 farms across the country; “he’s a billionaire,” must be, sitting somewhere in the city while the others work.

“…a lot of people don’t know how to work hard. Or even how to work. I’ve been coming out here all my life, to this country, and been fixing the fences for the cattle farms over there,” he points north. “I’ve been helping with lots of things, they told me I can go and get meat whenever I want, but I said, can you just let me shoot one when I want… so my friends in the back think i’m stealing cattle… and they let me, so that’s what I do.” he laughs.

He talks about the old spirits, walking this land, walking past him when he’s in bed laughing and carrying on, and he says “shh, keep going, i’m sleeping.” – We all laugh.

Whenever one of us slips off to go for a piss, he asked if we heard them when we went away from the fire, going ‘oooooh’ and talking, breezing by your head, maybe you wouldn’t even notice” – he’s trying to irk us.

“I used to sit in the river and drink too, until they started putting acid in peoples drinks, you’d turn away to talk to someone and they’d do it while you weren’t looking. It would burn peoples guts out. – some people would kill another man for a tin of tobacco.”

I walk away for a piss, and hear the tall grass whistle in the wind, and i’m damn sure I can hear the spirits laughing.

The road trains look more impressive at night, 3, 4, 5 carriages long, their lights evenly spaced, shooting down the highway, like a plane about to take off.

I tuck into my swag under a few drops of rain and listen to the sounds of the night out here, there’s a wind, and straps flap against the back of a car, and the dog scuffles around…

August 31;

Walatinna, home along the highway,
today, from outside Pt. Augusta to here,
our camp, an old railway workers camp, maybe
and the freight-trains country-song
rumbling past,
not much but the road this day,
how many times, I tried to count,
have I travelled this highway before

the owl on the side of the road, just before Marla,
just before the Walatinna turnoff,
reminded me of when Steve and I came out here
for the second time,
and the owl led us all the twenty-two kilometres
to the campsite at night
we’d sit on the porch
and drink light beers, and not talk
about the bomb, or what is was like
growing up out here

but instead, to talk about the time,
the talking clock
and the football
and the dogs
and the green green grass

how it is to feel so at home
in a place that’s so far away from
the day to day
but all the time spent here
listening, learning
what i’ve come to know
and remember

September 1st;

The ants had a trail here,
long before I arrived,
and kept their trail for long afterwards
just me, in between, with ants in my
book, hair, and bed,

the wasps and redbacks that
inhabit the toilet here
“lift the seat to check that you don’t get bitten”

the moving/shifting of the swag as the sun
arches the sky
to keep beneath the
humpy’s humble shade
an urge to connect with the world
outside of here, by technological
bytes, wavelengths and satellites
at least to tell my love I love her
but she knows this already.

An early morning walk before
this day spent avoiding the sun and
reading, writing, sipping water
and now a warm beer,

took me on the road to Marla
and lead to miles of surrounding scrubland;
I can almost envisage the black mist
billowing up all those years ago
and covering this land; and all those that
lived in it, untold, unprotected from the blasts.

I tried to jog this morning, my shadow limping about
from a strained sacrum,
sometimes I don’t recognise this shape,
like a reflection reflecting something different
to how you’d like to see yourself
and the wind, like cars,
or maybe it is a car,
or, a plane,
maybe i’ve flown over here before.

September 4th;

Here in Alice Springs now,
the embers of trails through this town
the renegade party in an undeveloped block
in the centre of alice springs

the cops swing by, tell us to “put out the fire,
or it’ll cost you thousands, and stop drinking,
it’s not allowed”

people walk past amazed, some baffled
by the ferals and shaved-head boot-wielding
dancers,
others want to join in, but feel the need to take the piss
and hover on the outside,
and just stare,
most people oblivious, or just don’t care,
fuck off, im dancing here,
on this common ground,

and the police return, to drag away one of the only
aboriginal people
and force her into the back of their paddy wagon,
“she’s passed out on the ground and no one is
looking after her, we’re doing a good thing,
taking her in to get sober,”
“we are looking after her, she’s free to be here” we say
“you dont know her, we know her,” they say,
“she’s like this all the time, we have to take her in”

and later they return to do the same thing,
to commit such
blatant
racism,

I wonder if that’s how they get trained
“chuck em in the back if they’re black”
“leave em sprawled on the ground,
freely intoxicated, if they’re white.”

they fuckin forced her in there,
she was screaming, fuck off, let me go,
those fuckers.

We walk home the 30 minutes through the industrial outskirts
of town, some warehouses thump with beats,
late into the night,
every fence barks along the railings,
and I crash into my swag under the big planet-sky
this little pocket of life, so neatly tucked away,
ready for a politicians PR stunt,
or a TV camera’s angle, of poverty and harshness
what a landscape, way to live, they think,
who made it this way, I wonder….

the escape just 10km out of town,
gotta know someone to get directions
to this waterhole-haven
colours like pastel sun-setting
yes, paint it like that,
kind of a landscape,
sell it for thousands and dont give them a cent

return to backyard couch,
redwine and sleepless nights
listening to the town
rocking out,
tripping out,
over some fences over there..

off the highway now, somewhere between pt. augusta and woomera
a road that led us to camp next to the railway tracks,
with the roaring trucks in the nearby distance
“no trains will come till tomorrow,”
but it felt like it was heading straight for us.

today, the veteran of all things talking,
avon hudson made soup, full of things like vegetables.
told us about how the russians defeated the germans in WWII
with their cunning wit and foresight, their technology
to build a thousand tanks and march with Stalin through Red Square
the others thinking the germans were coming.
no, really, they beat them down, he said,
but we in the west, choose to rewrite our history
or choose to believe what suits us best.

only to hide our own atrocities, here, on australian soils
and he’s talking about Woomera
Maralinga
Emu field.
of flying Lincolns through the fallout
only to loose their voices, throats, later.

this morning a slow deep breath before that road
we’ve seen before many times,
oh, and it looks
the same as before, 3 months ago
the routine wood collection, breaking mulga
branches burning hot

tonight this dusted floor to sleep,
all those peoples stories
driving past at 110km per hour
they don’t know we’re here.

our front door creaks; it’s early, am. 5am.
driving to alice springs

the dogs ready, the road in front of us..

the breath, left at home.

with me, a resistence to leave this time;
but for these places, faces, ready to remind me
of them days, these days here.
stories told,
tea drunk,
stars spotted falling into the dust.
i’ll seep into my skin again.

day 01 of this journey. – melbourne to adelaide.