From the vegetable garden 1872 2001
Lambda duratran light box, pencil on paper
dimensions variable
Collection: the artist
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Kim Donaldson
I like to really get inside things to find out all I can, to feel like I’m actually there. I do this to create a fiction that could be real. In this case, it’s about a vegetable garden that could have been in the grounds of Linden a couple of years after it was built. To make this work I had to pretend that I was a time traveller.
Melbourne was still a new frontier. The colonists were acclimatising themselves and brought with them not only a great diversity of vegetables (far greater than what it is available now) but also the sparrows, mainas, starlings and blackbirds that plague our gardens today. Domestic residences were like little farms. In the vegetable garden fertilisers were organic, pest control was by hand and everything was grown in season.
References
- Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, sixth annual report, Stillwell and Knight, Melbourne, 1868
- Beeton's All About Everything, Ward, Lock and Tyler, London, c.1870
- R. Diehl, La Pomme de Terre, Imprimerie Nationale, Paris, 1938
- W.S. Friend and Company, Catalogue of horticultural and garden tools, Sydney, 1949
- George Hyam, Vegetables in the home garden, Department of Agriculture, Victoria, fourth edition, 1951
- Thomas Lang and Companies, Special list of vegetable seeds, H. Cordell, Melbourne, 1869
- Yates' garden guide, Arthur Yates and Company, Sydney, 1949
- MM. Vilmorin-Andrieux, The Vegetable Garden, English edition, John Murray, London, 1885
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