20th Biennale of Sydney: The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed

Commissioned for the 20th Biennale of Sydney in 2016 and presented in the Royal Botanic Garden as part of Stephanie Rosenthal’s exhibition The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed, Archie Moore’s A Home Away from Home (Bennelong/Vera’s Hut) brought together two homes separated by almost two centuries into a single architectural form.

Prompted by Rosenthal’s framing of the Biennale venues as ‘embassies’, Moore turned to senior Wangal man Woollarawarre Bennelong (c. 1764 – 3 January 1813) as an early cultural intermediary who navigated the fraught diplomatic space between the Eora and the British colony.

Assisted by First Nations architect Kevin O’Brien, Moore reconstructed the exterior of the brick hut built for Bennelong in 1790 at his request to Governor Arthur Phillip on the site now known as Bennelong Point, the current site of the Sydney Opera House. While the exterior recalled the colonial dwelling, the interior shifted in time and place, recreating the dirt floor and corrugated iron walls of the modest home of Moore’s maternal grandmother, Vera Cleven, where she lived in the late twentieth century Queensland.

A Home Away From Home (Bennelong/Vera’s Hut) collapsed historical distance, connecting Bennelong’s negotiated accommodation within the colonial settlement to the enduring realities of Aboriginal dispossession experienced by Moore’s own family generations later. As Toni Ross observes, the installation’s power resided not simply in reconstructing physical spaces but in activating the personal and historical narratives they contain. Moore created an architecture of memory in which colonial history, family history and contemporary Australia coexist, inviting viewers to reflect on the unfinished legacies of colonisation and the complex possibilities of empathy across time.

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This project was made possible with assistance from Neil Hobbs and Karina Harris, and Kevin O’Brien.