Belonging
Introduction to Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens
It’s a huge task creating a new landscape like the Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens – Australia’s newest Botanic Garden, at the Lagoons Reserve. It’s a site well known to many West Mackay children, who used the Lagoons as their own secret playground. Playing and riding bicycles through the maze of guava and lantana that had overgrown the slopes once tilled as an acclimatisation garden for trials with crops of sugarcane and fruit trees offers memories of a childhood uncomplicated and safe. Prior, the local gentry built large plantation homesteads in the 1800’s surrounded with beautiful gardens, tennis courts and croquet lawns and used the Lagoons for Sunday afternoon boating. It was always a place at the center of peoples working lives and leisure – a place that said you had arrived from the wilds and had come to the fledgling town of Mackay.
Very little is left today of all of this history, except for a few tokens and photographs. Just those memories remain.
Taking the bare grassy slopes of the Lagoons today and creating that sense of place again seems fraught with failure. Anyone can build an amazing looking park or structure or garden. But how do you create that emotive link that residents – long term and new and even visitors to the Mackay find that special ‘link’ with – a synergy that connects the individual to the place and has relevance?
Landscapes and vistas will eventually mature and delight, and items appearing on the site – like the historic Mackay Pier Wharf pylons, create that sense of history and place.
But right now – this relevance is being created with those people using the Botanic Gardens.
It seems this synergy of site and people, was already in the background. There was something special about this raw landscape being transformed into a Regional Botanic Garden from a bare and degraded area, where over 95% of all flora and fauna species has vanished from the Lagoons area since European settlement.
In 2002 when the Gardens Visitors Centre was a building that you could see for a kilometre in either direction, and the botanic plant collection were just seedlings newly planted, the local population came to the site and said “This is our place, we want to get involved”. The volunteer Gardens Friends group began and locals came along and helped plant the new gardens and forests of the botanic collection.
Soon after opening to the public officially in 2003, the local arts community discovered the fledgling site and saw something there. They approached the Botanic Gardens and said, “We want to get involved too”.
The building shell that was the unrealized interpretation gardens gallery became the Lagoons Gallery. Local artists began to use this public space to display their thoughts and feelings towards Mackay’s environment, our heritage and culture of this city.
Ann Williams-Fitzgerald was one of the very first artists to approach the Botanic Gardens and held the first complete exhibition with the contemporary Vizions Photo Club. This sparked further interest from the arts community who began to use the site Plein air and to exhibit in the Lagoons Gallery. Visitation to the Gardens grew – many coming to exhibition launches and viewing and discovering the growing gardens in the process. The Lagoons Gallery became a focus to rediscover the lagoons site, and then tempt visitors outside into the new Botanic Gardens with flashes of green and blue against the contrasting quiet of the space’s charcoal grey walls.
Now in 2007, the transformation of the Botanic Gardens continues. And it seems the Botanic Gardens and the Lagoons Gallery’s relevance to the local community and the opportunities created still grows.
“RAW 07 – Belonging” takes the Botanic Garden’s message full circle: women artists explaining through their work what the idea of belonging means to them.
It’s a fitting location and a fitting time in our fast paced lives to experience this exhibition and the Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens, to discover what ‘belonging’ means to us all.
Dale Arvidsson
Acting Curator
Mackay City Council
© Copyright 2007. All images contained within this website are protected under Australian Copyright Law,
and as such may not, under any circumstances be copied, used, or reproduced without permission. For
further information regarding the copyright restrictions of these images contact Auz Vizions Photographics.
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