Searching for Bon

On March 27, 1975 AC/DC took to the stage for two shows at Broadmeadows Town Hall.

Imbedded, dormant in the walls, lay the remnants of life and the stains of activity. So many touched these walls, walked these floors. Sounds bounce. Voices sang. Bodies moved. The traces lay finely dusted in memory.

It was here I began my search for Bon Scott - in the detritus and discarded.

Searching for Bon is a visual exploration of the consciousness of the human trace, and our collective forgetting and remembering. It’s a journey through time and space, fiction and reality, past and present.

Exploring memory - physical, historical, and psychological - is a significant characteristic in the way I investigate my work. Self-questioning and collective questioning of what we choose to hold onto, what we choose to forget or see as insignificant.

Searching for Bon was created for the Hume City Council and creates part of their online collection of artist’s responses to the history of Broadmeadows Town Hall.

The historical recorded and celebrated memory of Ol’ Broady’s Town Hall was selective. Broadmeadows through the 1960s and 1970s was a circuit gig for major national and international touring bands yet the historically celebrated events where the social dances, the Debutant proms, and the civic events. The considerable rich rock culture and history of the venue lay buried and unrecorded in the civic narrative. I saw this as a form of repressive erasure. Connerton, quoting Duncan and Wallach, 1980 who were referring to the museum or arts institution, states the “spatial script is overt in its acts of celebratory remembrance, covert in its acts of editing out and erasure. Here too the struggle of humanity against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting (Duncan and Wallach, 1980)”(Connerton, 2008).

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CONNERTON, P. 2008. MEMORY STUDIES, Seven types of forgetting. SAGE Publications Vol 1(1), 59-71.