Author Archives: Sarah Jane Moore

The oysters lie in my studio, waiting for stories.

I fill them up; fill them to brimming with questions; with searching; with encounter.

I talk to them. In whispers. I talk them. About them. Through them. With them.

I dream them.

And they dream me.

Piled in front of me like glistening sea Country

At times they overwhelm.

Overwhelm me with their volume, their abundance, their noise, their need.

I think through them. With them.

They form piles on the blankets.

I contemplate the inside for I am pearl. I am smooth. I am skin. Flesh.

I trace the outside with my fingers, my thumbs.

I line them up. Stack them.

I count them and find ways to connect them, to reconnect them to each other, to themselves and to me. I try to make them whole.

I wash them; over and over. I turn them. I turn.

I wash.

I am oyster. I am skin. I am shell; torn and wet.

My hands rub barnacles. I am clinging. Clinging on.

I know where oysters lie.

They lie inside and nourish me and I filter them.

They fill me with song.

Miss-heard.

Misunderstood.

Missed.

Oyster.

Oyster girl.

Oyster song.

Oyster skin.

I know where oysters lie.

I will be facilitating a Baludarri Reef Making Project during the UNSW Sydney 2019 Diversity Fest that will run over 5 days from Monday 23rd of September to Friday 27th. The reef building will take place each day between 11.30-1.30 for the length of the festival and everyone is welcome to join in!

Each day of the festival a team of volunteers and I will set up in the Quad and the project involves straw bales, Shoalhaven river mud,  oyster shells, clay, imagination, creativity and play.

What does the building the reef project involve?

Throughout the festival lunch times I am inviting participants to encounter the clay and oyster shells, to respond to them and to make an art work with me. Students, staff and visitors can engage with the project through making, discussing, photographing and viewing. This event is specifically designed to provide the UNSW Community with the opportunity to engage in co creating a piece of eco-friendly art that honours the Baludarri, the Sydney Rock Oyster, its shell, its histories and its stories. Oysters filter and feed, and together we will filter negativity and feed inclusivity, positivity, integration and well-being.Through the reef I want to affirm the essential role the humble oyster plays in the health of our Sea Country and the well-being of our communities. Time on Country and nature-based play and encounter is an essential aspect of our well-being. Each oyster shell, like each human is unique and in this work each person’s contribution is valued and equal. The clay will sun dry and harden over the five days in an emerging and organic way.

Working with clay can be mediative, it can heal. Art making can lift the spirits and engage the heart in healing and this work is enacted Reconciliation practise where the UNSW Festival community has the opportunity to come together and co create an oyster reef; a reef of hope, a bed of support for each other and our mother earth.

Together, we will build positive ecosystems and manifestations of a healthy community.

I invited UNSW Diversity Festival Director Fergus Grealy into the studio this week to share his festival vision.

Fergus told me that Diversity Fest was week-long celebration at UNSW Sydney from 23 – 27 September 2019 which aims to bring students and staff together to embrace the diversity of the UNSW community and ignite broader conversations on creating an inclusive society, where everyone can participate. He said ‘There will be over 20 events held on campus during the week, including panel discussions, film screenings, concerts, art exhibitions and social gatherings. The events program will highlight the intersectionality of our diverse groups and have a greater emphasis on creating participatory experiences.’

Fergus and I connected over our shared love of creativities and transformations and sat on the blanket art works that I have been preparing for  participants to sit on and during the art making on the Quad lawn. As we talked, we moulded clay and began the oyster shell and spat dialogues. Together, we seeded the work and  we spoke about the project inclusion into the festival and its deep and embedded approach to fostering health and well being through shared purpose. Hands on, hands with, the human print marks the clay and the shell provides the safe harbour for ideas to grow.

During our studio based conversation and art making, Fergus explained to me  ‘It is for these reasons that The Baludarri Bed Making Project has been included in Diversity Fest; the project is  primarily informed by Indigenous knowledge and practice, but it also touches on environmental issues, mental well-being and it might even reveal the gender non-conformity of the oyster for a portion of their lifecycle. The project will be formed by community participation and the process will organically allow for this transference of knowledge.’

During NAIDOC Week I observed oysters under a microscope for the first time. Like little time capsules with so much possibility, the oyster can be male or female but never both at the same time. Once the spawning has occurred, eggs and sperm are released into the water to be fertilized. Adult females can release as many as 5 to 8 million eggs at one time.  Once the eggs are fertilized in the water, the developing larvae float around until they are ready to attach to a resting spot. At first the oysters move freely and have an eye and a foot. At this point, the oyster searches for a surface and can attach to any hard substrate, including rocks, driftwood and  piers. In time, the young oysters (spat) will develop their hard shells for protection and grow in size. In time they will shape and form and filter.

The scale of the oyster spawning plays on my mind.

I think often of the moon.

I eat their milky flesh in the sun.

The shells protect me.

They provide safe harbour for my imaginative self.

Safe.

Sacred.

Self.

I wait for the oysters to grow.

I wait.

I wait for the reef to form

My shells of understanding emerge.

I am melancholy.

The loss weighs on my mind.

Loss of spawnings.

Loss of wild.

Loss of blue.

The ghostly shapes haunt me and visit my sleep.

Fluttering and seeking, searching with their feet, their eyes.

They seek me out.

Prod me to move.

Prod me to move on and flutter and find my own drift wood, my rock.

I wait.

I heard them, their clicks and they called me.

Called me from the shore.

Lapped at my consciousness and pricked and clicked my ears, my mind.

For it was under the microscope they came alive.

Resurrected.

Amplified.

Blue.

For it is sitting within the crosshatch

that the oysters lie

They lie

They lie.

There lies my learning.

I wait.

I look.

I listen.

Click.

Last week I visited Worimi Country and worked with my research partner and a group of twenty five pre-school aged children and their educators. As an intergenerational, diverse learning community we committed time to explore our knowing and worlding of the oyster. Together, we developed understandings of the importance of the Baludarri. We played with the shells and storied them as valued and valuable. We sang songs about them and observed them in tanks. We questioned. We pondered. We were curious. We entered an imaginative space of fire and midden.

Laura Parker set up a small tank with some precious oysters within. She introduced them. She described their role as filter feeders and explained to the children that we may see a change occur in the water soon if we took the time to look and listen and learn. She asked children to feed the oysters with algae and to observe them in the water. The children listened and learned deeply. They discussed, questioned and shared.

I gifted each child a shell and a piece of clay and each child created their own unique oyster art work. The children shared their own stories of how they had come to know the Baludarri, They explored the shells with their hands and their play was slow and structured. The oysters were sacred.

We worked outside in the wintery sun and the children worked with clay and shells to build, create and form. Cooperatively we curated an oyster reef on the rocks of their sand pit. Embedded in their nature based play area, on the large rocks we built our reef.  Children gathered. They fossicked, pushed, patterned and placed the shells in different configurations. The unfamiliar became familiar as the oysters joined their play.

The oysters are now part of the ongoing play story of the children of the Bay. Hands will scoop, shells will fill with water. Shells will scoop the sand and be worn. They will tell stories of gathering. They will re-story and create opportunity for nature based ocean dialogues and conversations about Sea Country.

I like to think of the oyster reef that we built that day. How will it respond to rain? How will it change? How will it iterate and re-iterate as children flow through the space? What stories will be told?  The oysters provide the tools for thinking, for imagining and reimagining.Deep in the sand will shells be lost? Hidden? Taken?

I know where oysters lie.

UNSW Environmental Scientist and science student Jieyu Liu visited Sarah Jane’s studio for the first time in July. Sarah Jane wanted to interview Jieyu in order to gain an understanding of her interface with the Sydney Rock Oyster. Together they wrote this blog ‘Tales from an Environmental Scientist and Sydney Oyster Girl’.

Jieyu brought her first paper back full of carefully cleaned oyster shells in a brown paper bag. It was May and the sun was shining and the shells were handed over like an offering. I was excited. The first donated shells of the project! I was thrilled. I peered in the crumpled bag and carried them to my studio. I laid them out on the bench. I played with them, I made patterns with them and imagined them as carriers fo stories. The oysters had made a journey to me across Sydney. They were a remnant of a celebration, a get together. I imagined the folk that had had eaten them, the hands that had touched them and tracked back, back to the hands that had grown and harvested them. There were many hands. I wanted to harvest the stories of these shells, to mine the connections, to drill down into the reefs, the communities the peoples who consumed them, who cherished them, whose slithery and slippery slide journeyed to me. To my hands. Like a modern midden, the shells are mounting. I like the complexities and the stories associated with their journey to me.

The second time that Jieyu offers up her shells to the project there are hundreds! I am overwhelmed. They make a wonderful sound when Jieyu pours them in and through my open hands. I scurry to my studio. I wash. Sort. Clean. File.

I take a few  home in my hand bag. On the way home, I reach down and into my bag to hold one. I make it warm. I give it new life. I carry it with me like a scar.

I wait for Jieyu; for the offerings, the shells. 

I wait for her, my oyster girl.

I wait.

SJM

My name is Jieyu Liu, and I am an honours student in the Ferrari Lab from BABS school, UNSW. I am currently working on a bioremediation project at Casey station with Australian Antarctic Division.  I got to know Sarah Jane through Sally Crane, one of Ph.D candidates from the Ferrari lab. Sally is a member of the BEES and BABS Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee at UNSW and a passionate supporter of the arts and Sally let me know that Sarah Jane had gained funding to work with an Indigenous scientist and make art works using the Baludarri or Sydney Rock Oyster as a main theme. She let me know that Sarah Jane was trying to find people in the UNSW committee to co create oyster stories with her.

Outside of the lab, I work as a part-time oyster shucker in a company called Sydney Oyster Girls. In the seafood industry, Sydney rock oysters are the icons of Australia.

After learning that Dr. Moore was collecting Sydney Rock Oyster Shells for her art project, I sent her an email to her. I reached out and offered to help her with her art making through collecting the precious oyster shells and bringing them to her at the university. I emailed her and she immediately replied back with some pictures of her amazing art work. Her art work was made with oyster shells and she shared with me that she was working with an Indigenous scientist whose experiments were assisting knowledges about future proofing the Baludarri. I heard that there were many ancient stories about Sydney oysters and from then, I started collecting leftover oyster shells from my hospitality work.

Today, I was invited by Sarah Jane to her oyster studio, which is located in BEES school. As an environmental science student and an oyster lover, I can’t tell you all how happy I am when I see these food “waste” became a part of art that she has made.

From the perspective of my customers, fresh Sydney Rock Oysters are regarded as a luxury. I shuck them in five seconds. Once I open the shell they are still alive and I can’t see them moving. It looks beautiful. The meat is a creamy colour. If it is alive it will be juicy. After I shuck them I cut off the large muscle that connects it to the shell and I flip the meat around so ti shows the plumpest part of the oyster to the customer. I shuck 100 oysters in an hour. I use an oyster shucking sharp knife with a short blade. I squeeze a halved lemon onto the oyster meat and then I serve them. I serve them direct to the customer on a napkin. Some people don’t take a napkin but take the shells in their cupped hand. I giver them the oyster and they slurp it usually in one swallow.

Th customers say to me ‘It tastes beautiful’. They say ‘It tastes so fresh’.  Some of the customers, particularly the children do not like the taste and they spit in into the napkin.

Before I met Sarah Jane I thought of the shells as rubbish now I know that they are really valuable and truly beautiful.

Before I moved to Sydney in 2015 I had never tasted an oyster. I am from China and I am from a small inland city. We have rivers but no oysters. I tasted my first oyster in 2018 on my first shift at work. I am now totally hooked. I can eat a dozen oysters in one sitting. I love them. Especially Sydney Rock. They are beautiful. I have tried the Pacific Ocean oysters. They are much bigger, They are huge. They can be as big as my hand but they are not as soft in texture as the Baludarri.

I like my job. It connects me to the people of Sydney. I help people celebrate with the people they love. It is connecting.

Jieyu Liu, July, 2019

Hi, I’m Brett, a year 10 student at Moriah College.

I’ve been doing work experience here at BEES for a couple days now. Besides all the office and computer work I’ve been doing, I have had the opportunity to work with Dr Sarah Jane Moore on some of her artwork.

She got me started rasping some oyster shells, and I tried to be as careful as possible not to leave any sharp edges because little kids are going to be handling them. Next I washed them using the lab sink, and watched how the light reflected off shiny parts of the shells. I thought it would be very attractive if we could display those beauties in good lighting.

I’m rasping the shells. I’m actually left-handed, so holding the rasp in my right hand was a little awkward. Luckily it wasn’t for a long time.

At the same time, I was learning about nature based art-making practices, and Dr Sarah Jane even showed me how to detail an art piece using an echidna quill, which really gave the piece a more authentic feel. She got the quill from Georgia Badgery, an honours student studying ecology, specifically echidna diets and foraging. Georgia lived out in Fowler’s Gap for two months at the Arid Zone Research centre in Western NSW and tracked 7 echidnas, including one she named Snuffy.

Georgia gave Snuffy’s quill to Dr Sarah Jane to use in her artwork collection, which will displayed in at the entrance to the bioscience building at UNSW during NAIDOC week, right next to the cave bear skeleton.

I need to determine the eight best-looking shells out of 33. Only 24 of those are actually shown in the photo. There wasn’t enough space in the container.

The collection is titled ‘I know where Oysters Lie’, and it will also be shown at Culture At Work in the Accelerator Gallery at Pyrmont, 6-8 Scott Street. It will be displayed from the 6th until the 16th of November, and the opening night is on a Saturday, from 5-7pm.

Working with Dr Sarah Jane has been a great experience, and I’m looking forward to seeing the complete collection.

I’ll be involved with setting up the artwork tomorrow, which I’m very excited about.

See ya,

Brett.

In June I spent a week in lutruwita Tasmania and journeyed to lunawanna-alonnah Bruny Island. I stayed in a windswept old farm house on a hill. There were pine cones to collect from the pine forest, fires to build from wood dragged up from fallen trees and black cockatoos a plenty. I walked down to the cliffs at the end of the property and scampered down the sand stone to the rocks below. I collected oyster shells from the shore line and chipped off oysters to taste them. Live and salty they were soft to touch. I pocketed some shells and took them back to the house and lined them up on the deck. I called Laura to ask her what sort of oysters they were and she confirmed that these were the Pacific Oysters. 

I was shocked. The invaders! The colonising species. How different they were. How plentiful. How large! How they clinged on!

We discussed if I could bring them back to work on them and with them. I found them beautiful and so different from the Baludarri. On her advice, I collected the shells and placed them in a bucket of chlorinated water. 

It came to pass that I left them in the bottom of my friend’s garden. They would not travel with me.  I would not work with these shells nor share their stories. They needed to stay. 

On June 3 and June 25,  Educational Developer and Educational Media Manager at UNSW Brian Landrigan and Sarah Jane Moore met at the M2C Media Studios in Kensington Sydney to facilitate a song writing session with composer and musician Richard Starr. Richard dialled in from his home studio in Katherine, in the Northern Territory and Brian, Richard and Sarah Jane recorded and refined the song that Sarah Jane had written at the beginning of the project. Brian facilitated the session through his studio using VST Connect.

The genesis of the song emerged from a conversation between Sarah Jane Moore and research partner Laura Parker with microbiologists Dr Anne Galea, Dr Rebecca Le Bard, marine scientist Professor Alistair Poor and Vicki Sowry, Director Of the Australian Network for Art and Technology. During the conversation Alistair explained that Sydney’s white settlers destroyed sea Country in the early years of their occupation of the Indigenous sacred harbour lands. The settlers destroyed the oyster beds and changed the ways in which sea country and local peoples had existed in order to build roads and dwellings.

Richard and Sarah Jane have worked together as collaborators and friends since meeting in 1988 through their creative arts studies at the University of Wollongong.

Working via distance on iPhones, through Steinberg Studio Passes and through VST Connect, Richard and Sarah Jane record the song in the coming weeks. Brian Landigran will work as sound engineer on the song writing project.

Down the track Sarah Jane wants to create videography around the song that explores the Sea Countries and oyster beds that she imagines and creates.

Watch (and listen) to this (sea) space.

‘I Know Where Oysters Lie’ is a work of text, image and song that maps Sarah Jane’s research relationship with Laura Parker, an Indigenous Australian Scientist who has focussed her career on the impacts of climate change on marine molluscs, particularly the Baludarri (Sydney Rock Oyster). Laura’s research provides solutions to prevent the destruction of the Baludarri.

The ‘I Know Where Oysters Lie’ creative arts based series sets up an encounter with the Baludarri for the viewer, reader and the listener.  By telling the stories of the oysters that lie deep within the roads, the walls, the buildings of the early colony in Sydney the oysters come out of exile and are freed to live again. Through text, music, moving and still images the series asks how can we story the coloniser’s destruction of ancient reefs, stories and traditions in the early days of settlement at Sydney Cove? How we can we honour Sea Country? The encounter maps conversations between artist and scientist in a work that expresses resistance, survival and growth. 

The research conversation explores ways of encountering the remnant shell and presents memories, sounds and songs.  It ponders ways of connecting to the family line of the Baludarri through the embedding of treasured objects and textiles alongside the shells and within the surfaces of the art works.

Sarah Jane conjures Sea Country and in so doing she opens the possibilities for cultural links for Indigenous Australians to re encounter their traditional lands. 

The series sings up recovery, survival and revival.