The Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary
‘Overwintering’ --to avoid the perils of winter by spending those months in a more hospitable
climate, e.g. ‘many birds overwinter in equatorial regions’.
Knowing your animals and plants, your environment, is knowing your home and yourself.
Wanta Jampijinpa, Warlpiri Elder.
climate, e.g. ‘many birds overwinter in equatorial regions’.
Knowing your animals and plants, your environment, is knowing your home and yourself.
Wanta Jampijinpa, Warlpiri Elder.
In the Overwintering Project I am asking artists to find, visit and then hopefully create a genuine connection with their local migratory shorebird habitat - this is why site visits are critical to the Overwintering Project. This is then the artist's 'site', and the rationale is that the only way we can ensure the future of our migratory shorebirds is through the responsible stewardship of habitat, to which we are connected and for which we care.
I'm asking artists to then create their print or prints in response to their 'site' - so they may or may not be images of shorebirds, but rather any aspect they connect to in their site. The broader the depiction of sites, plants and animals, the more we create a picture of the interdependence of migratory shorebirds and other flora and fauna and of the biodiversity found around our shores.
my site
My site is Westernport Bay, a globally significant, unique environment. This is recognised through the heritage and custodianship of its traditional owners, the Boonwurring people, and its national and international ecological significance as a Ramsar site (or wetland of international importance; a BirdLife Australia Key Biodiversity Area and a UNESCO Biosphere, protected and recognised by numerous international treaties. One of Victoria’s 11 Ramsar sites, the Western Port Ramsar site is located 60 km se of Melbourne and covers 59,955 ha. The site is a large bay connected to Bass Strait by a wide channel between Flinders and Phillip Island and a narrow channel between San Remo and Phillip Island. French Island lies in the middle of Western Port.
I have a long personal connection with Phillip Island and, as a result, since mid-2017 I have focused on imagery based on the species of animal and plant found in the Bay and have been experimenting with techniques that will make my work more ‘of place.’ The technique I have found the most satisfying is eco-printing, where you use the local plant matter and water to create unique prints and embossings on paper. It is immensely satisfying as the colours, images and even the smell of the eco-printed paper is literally embedded with characteristics of the site. So far I’ve been printing linocuts on the eco-prints, but I feel that I will discover more ways to collaborate with the eco-printing process to make prints and other works on paper.
I'm asking artists to then create their print or prints in response to their 'site' - so they may or may not be images of shorebirds, but rather any aspect they connect to in their site. The broader the depiction of sites, plants and animals, the more we create a picture of the interdependence of migratory shorebirds and other flora and fauna and of the biodiversity found around our shores.
my site
My site is Westernport Bay, a globally significant, unique environment. This is recognised through the heritage and custodianship of its traditional owners, the Boonwurring people, and its national and international ecological significance as a Ramsar site (or wetland of international importance; a BirdLife Australia Key Biodiversity Area and a UNESCO Biosphere, protected and recognised by numerous international treaties. One of Victoria’s 11 Ramsar sites, the Western Port Ramsar site is located 60 km se of Melbourne and covers 59,955 ha. The site is a large bay connected to Bass Strait by a wide channel between Flinders and Phillip Island and a narrow channel between San Remo and Phillip Island. French Island lies in the middle of Western Port.
I have a long personal connection with Phillip Island and, as a result, since mid-2017 I have focused on imagery based on the species of animal and plant found in the Bay and have been experimenting with techniques that will make my work more ‘of place.’ The technique I have found the most satisfying is eco-printing, where you use the local plant matter and water to create unique prints and embossings on paper. It is immensely satisfying as the colours, images and even the smell of the eco-printed paper is literally embedded with characteristics of the site. So far I’ve been printing linocuts on the eco-prints, but I feel that I will discover more ways to collaborate with the eco-printing process to make prints and other works on paper.
Catalogue essay for the Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary
Wyndham Art Gallery, Victoria, 2018
introduction
The Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary is an environmental art project inviting artists from Australia and New Zealand to visit, research, and respond to the unique nature of their local migratory shorebird habitat. Australia and New Zealand have over 100 internationally important shorebird overwintering sites. These sites are not interchangeable: each possesses a unique combination of physical and biological features that make it the perfect sanctuary for migratory shorebirds to return to year after year.
Migratory shorebirds connect the world. Every year they migrate from the shores of Australia and New Zealand to their breeding grounds above the Arctic Circle in Siberia and Alaska. The remarkable annual circuit that they fly is called the East Asian-Australasian Flyway and it passes through 23 countries*. The pathways of their migrations bind skies, land and sea into a meaningful whole. Their journeys connect us through time and space, as they have been flying between the poles for more years than humans have walked the earth.
I believe that migratory shorebirds and the Flyways are important ideas for our time. They challenge our notions of what is precious – they are small, their plumage is modest, they do not sing and their habitat is often unremarkable. But they fly unimaginable distances, their biology is so finely tuned that they can fly eight days and nights without stopping to eat or drink, they can navigate featureless oceans to find the same tiny stretch of beach, and return to it, year after year after year. And, in an age where human migration is often viewed as a threat to borders and resources, these tiny birds also remind us that we are globally interdependent in a multitude of complex, subtle and ancient ways.
But time is running out. Migratory shorebirds are our most endangered, and possibly least known, group of birds. The Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary seeks to raise awareness for our migratory shorebirds and their habitat by inviting artists to help make them visible.
the birds
A contagion like telepathy
shivers through the flock:
it shudders altered light
and wind, a pectoral yearning
for the dot to dot of stars
and the mind’s magnet drawn
to the arctic. We lift…
From ‘Eastern Curlew’ by Sarah Day
Godwits, sandpipers, stints, plovers, whimbrels, curlews, snipe…thirty-six species of migratory shorebirds spend October to May on the coast of Australia and New Zealand. Come autumn, they head north. Their destination is their breeding grounds in northern China, Mongolia, Siberia and Alaska. Once they have bred they will head back south, completing an annual circuit of roughly 25,000 km. Over their lifetimes many of these birds, having completed this journey every year of their adult lives, will have flown more miles than from the earth to the moon.
Shorebirds can fly very fast, very high and very far. They have been recorded flying up to 70 kmph at heights of up to 6,000 m. A female Bar-tailed Godwit, named E7 by the scientists who were tracking her movements by satellite, holds the record for the longest non-stop flight ever made by a bird. Her flight confirmed that New Zealand birds fly to Alaska via China and that they can fly directly home from Alaska across the Pacific without stopping.
E7 began her migration with a record-breaking non-stop flight of 10,219 km from Miranda in New Zealand to the mouth of the Yalu River in Liaoning Province of NE China. But it was her return flight that truly stunned the world. According to the Pukorokoro Miranda Shorebird centre website she ‘…left Cape Avinof [in the vast Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta] early on the morning of 30 August…heading south towards the Alaska Peninsula. Not stopping, she flew on out over the Pacific, southeast toward Hawaii before turning southwest for a straight run down towards Fiji and on towards Cape Reing’. She arrived back at the Piako rivermouth on the Firth of Thames, the very spot she had left on March 17, on the night of Friday 7 September, after a flight of some 11,570 km and 8 days 12 hours of non-stop flying.
While shorebirds will take advantage of weather patterns and jetstreams to aid their journeys, they do not soar or glide, but flap all the way. Their feathers are not waterproofed and their feet are not webbed, so when crossing the vast distances across the Pacific they cannot rest on the water to feed but must fly until they reach land.
The smallest migratory shorebird, the Red-necked Stint, weighs as much as a tim-tam or two 50-cent pieces. Yet every year even these tiny birds will launch themselves skyward to follow the ancient call to breed in a land so different from ours, and so far away, that imagining their journeys may defy us.
the problem
Migratory shorebirds are the fastest declining group of birds in Australia largely because they rely on habitat in all 23 countries of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. These countries include the world’s fastest growing economies, and the development of land and industry correlates with habitat destruction, especially for species that rely on coastal habitat when the coast is of paramount importance to trade.
It is easy to shrug and ask what we can do in such circumstances. However, even in Australia, a relatively wealthy country, we continue to degrade our shorebird habitat at a great rate.
As stewards of the habitat in which these birds spend the greatest portion of their migratory cycle, I believe that we in Australia and New Zealand have a particular responsibility to preserve our end of the Flyway, to maintain safe non-breeding grounds and to set a good example for other Flyway countries.
the challenge
You can’t ask people to savewhat they don’t know.To save migratory shorebirds we need everyone to learn about these birds. But not just to learn about them –to care about them, enough to sign a petition, donate money, join an organization, change their behaviour or even change their vote.
Bringing migratory shorebirds into the realms of general knowledge will not be the result of any single thing. It will be as gradual as the turning of the tide – and hopefully as inevitable. Shorebird scientists and their citizen volunteers have been providing information to governments, industries and the public for years. There is certainly a solid base of knowledge and passion out there, but the question is how to go beyond that bubble of interested parties. How do we reach those who may never have particularly considered birds at all? And how do we move them beyond obliviousness or passing interest to caring and having a sense of ownership of their local habitat?
I’m not alone in believing that the Arts can connect people and ideas in deep and resonant ways. A single photograph, Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River by photographer Peter Dombrovski is credited with saving the Franklin River in Tasmania from development. Maybe art can help bring a caring public to the aid of shorebirds.
Shorebirds suffer from being invisible –what does art do if not make things visible? Art can boldly go where science cannot –into the murky realms of metaphor, anthropomorphism and subjectivity. The act of making art about a subject is more engaging than merely being told about something, and art exhibitions of any kind, in any venue, can engage artists, friends, families, viewers, communities, people of all ages and races. And, importantly, art has the potential to engage a whole new group of people with migratory shorebirds and their habitat.
local habitat
Like many other cities, Melbourne was founded amongst marshes and swamps. The maps of the first explorers and early settlers noted their presence; later colonial chroniclers and municipal historians described them; and recent history retells their story. All of these observers across two centuries have seen these wetlands in terms of European landscape aesthetics and functionality, such as when they presented a clear sheet of beautiful water or were suitable for cattle grazing; otherwise they were denigrated.
Historian and academic, Rod Giblett
We are lucky in Melbourne to be surrounded by migratory shorebird habitat. Within about 60 km from the CBD we have three of wetlands of international significance to migratory shorebirds. To the west lies Port Phillip Bay (Western Shoreline) and the Bellarine Peninsula, and to the east lie the Edithvale-Seaford Wetlands and Western Port. Much of the Port Phillip habitat occurs here in Wyndham; the Western Treatment Plant alone is one of Australia’s most important sites for migratory shorebirds.
Other local areas where you can see these birds include Sandy Point in Newport; Rifle Range and Jawbone Reserve in Williamstown; Paisley Challis Wetlands in Williamstown; Truganina Parklands in Altona and Altona Coastal Park.
But don’t be fooled. Since European settlement much of Melbourne’s wetlands have been ‘reclaimed’ – filled in and the land developed. We are lucky to have these sites, but they remain as areas that cling to the edges of urban, farming and industrial landscapes, ironically preserved due to their perceived lack of usefulness and beauty (e.g. rifle ranges; military areas), or artificially created to serve our needs (e.g. sewage farms; saltworks).
Birds are bio-indicators. This is a bloodless term meaning that the presence of birds indicates a healthy environment. If shorebirds continue to decline at their current rate, and some species have declined by 80% over the last 30 years, it also means that the global environment of the Flyway is being seriously degraded. This of course also affects our health, wellbeing and ultimate survival. Looking after migratory shorebirds and the Flyway is another way of looking after ourselves. It is urgent and it is vital. But I would like to think we are doing it for them and all the other living things that depend on the global ecology, not only to save ourselves.
Kate Gorringe-Smith
Instigator and Co-ordinator of The Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary
*The East-Asian Australasian Flyway extends from Arctic Russia and North America to New Zealand and is used by over 50 million migratory waterbirds. The countries that comprise the East-Asian Australasian Flyway are: the USA (Alaska); Russia (Siberia); Mongolia; China; North Korea; South Korea; Japan; the Philippines; Vietnam; Laos; Thailand; Cambodia; Myanmar; Bangladesh; India; Malaysia; Singapore; Brunei; Indonesia; Timor; Papua New Guinea; Australia and New Zealand.
The Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary is an environmental art project inviting artists from Australia and New Zealand to visit, research, and respond to the unique nature of their local migratory shorebird habitat. Australia and New Zealand have over 100 internationally important shorebird overwintering sites. These sites are not interchangeable: each possesses a unique combination of physical and biological features that make it the perfect sanctuary for migratory shorebirds to return to year after year.
Migratory shorebirds connect the world. Every year they migrate from the shores of Australia and New Zealand to their breeding grounds above the Arctic Circle in Siberia and Alaska. The remarkable annual circuit that they fly is called the East Asian-Australasian Flyway and it passes through 23 countries*. The pathways of their migrations bind skies, land and sea into a meaningful whole. Their journeys connect us through time and space, as they have been flying between the poles for more years than humans have walked the earth.
I believe that migratory shorebirds and the Flyways are important ideas for our time. They challenge our notions of what is precious – they are small, their plumage is modest, they do not sing and their habitat is often unremarkable. But they fly unimaginable distances, their biology is so finely tuned that they can fly eight days and nights without stopping to eat or drink, they can navigate featureless oceans to find the same tiny stretch of beach, and return to it, year after year after year. And, in an age where human migration is often viewed as a threat to borders and resources, these tiny birds also remind us that we are globally interdependent in a multitude of complex, subtle and ancient ways.
But time is running out. Migratory shorebirds are our most endangered, and possibly least known, group of birds. The Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary seeks to raise awareness for our migratory shorebirds and their habitat by inviting artists to help make them visible.
the birds
A contagion like telepathy
shivers through the flock:
it shudders altered light
and wind, a pectoral yearning
for the dot to dot of stars
and the mind’s magnet drawn
to the arctic. We lift…
From ‘Eastern Curlew’ by Sarah Day
Godwits, sandpipers, stints, plovers, whimbrels, curlews, snipe…thirty-six species of migratory shorebirds spend October to May on the coast of Australia and New Zealand. Come autumn, they head north. Their destination is their breeding grounds in northern China, Mongolia, Siberia and Alaska. Once they have bred they will head back south, completing an annual circuit of roughly 25,000 km. Over their lifetimes many of these birds, having completed this journey every year of their adult lives, will have flown more miles than from the earth to the moon.
Shorebirds can fly very fast, very high and very far. They have been recorded flying up to 70 kmph at heights of up to 6,000 m. A female Bar-tailed Godwit, named E7 by the scientists who were tracking her movements by satellite, holds the record for the longest non-stop flight ever made by a bird. Her flight confirmed that New Zealand birds fly to Alaska via China and that they can fly directly home from Alaska across the Pacific without stopping.
E7 began her migration with a record-breaking non-stop flight of 10,219 km from Miranda in New Zealand to the mouth of the Yalu River in Liaoning Province of NE China. But it was her return flight that truly stunned the world. According to the Pukorokoro Miranda Shorebird centre website she ‘…left Cape Avinof [in the vast Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta] early on the morning of 30 August…heading south towards the Alaska Peninsula. Not stopping, she flew on out over the Pacific, southeast toward Hawaii before turning southwest for a straight run down towards Fiji and on towards Cape Reing’. She arrived back at the Piako rivermouth on the Firth of Thames, the very spot she had left on March 17, on the night of Friday 7 September, after a flight of some 11,570 km and 8 days 12 hours of non-stop flying.
While shorebirds will take advantage of weather patterns and jetstreams to aid their journeys, they do not soar or glide, but flap all the way. Their feathers are not waterproofed and their feet are not webbed, so when crossing the vast distances across the Pacific they cannot rest on the water to feed but must fly until they reach land.
The smallest migratory shorebird, the Red-necked Stint, weighs as much as a tim-tam or two 50-cent pieces. Yet every year even these tiny birds will launch themselves skyward to follow the ancient call to breed in a land so different from ours, and so far away, that imagining their journeys may defy us.
the problem
Migratory shorebirds are the fastest declining group of birds in Australia largely because they rely on habitat in all 23 countries of the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. These countries include the world’s fastest growing economies, and the development of land and industry correlates with habitat destruction, especially for species that rely on coastal habitat when the coast is of paramount importance to trade.
It is easy to shrug and ask what we can do in such circumstances. However, even in Australia, a relatively wealthy country, we continue to degrade our shorebird habitat at a great rate.
As stewards of the habitat in which these birds spend the greatest portion of their migratory cycle, I believe that we in Australia and New Zealand have a particular responsibility to preserve our end of the Flyway, to maintain safe non-breeding grounds and to set a good example for other Flyway countries.
the challenge
You can’t ask people to savewhat they don’t know.To save migratory shorebirds we need everyone to learn about these birds. But not just to learn about them –to care about them, enough to sign a petition, donate money, join an organization, change their behaviour or even change their vote.
Bringing migratory shorebirds into the realms of general knowledge will not be the result of any single thing. It will be as gradual as the turning of the tide – and hopefully as inevitable. Shorebird scientists and their citizen volunteers have been providing information to governments, industries and the public for years. There is certainly a solid base of knowledge and passion out there, but the question is how to go beyond that bubble of interested parties. How do we reach those who may never have particularly considered birds at all? And how do we move them beyond obliviousness or passing interest to caring and having a sense of ownership of their local habitat?
I’m not alone in believing that the Arts can connect people and ideas in deep and resonant ways. A single photograph, Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River by photographer Peter Dombrovski is credited with saving the Franklin River in Tasmania from development. Maybe art can help bring a caring public to the aid of shorebirds.
Shorebirds suffer from being invisible –what does art do if not make things visible? Art can boldly go where science cannot –into the murky realms of metaphor, anthropomorphism and subjectivity. The act of making art about a subject is more engaging than merely being told about something, and art exhibitions of any kind, in any venue, can engage artists, friends, families, viewers, communities, people of all ages and races. And, importantly, art has the potential to engage a whole new group of people with migratory shorebirds and their habitat.
local habitat
Like many other cities, Melbourne was founded amongst marshes and swamps. The maps of the first explorers and early settlers noted their presence; later colonial chroniclers and municipal historians described them; and recent history retells their story. All of these observers across two centuries have seen these wetlands in terms of European landscape aesthetics and functionality, such as when they presented a clear sheet of beautiful water or were suitable for cattle grazing; otherwise they were denigrated.
Historian and academic, Rod Giblett
We are lucky in Melbourne to be surrounded by migratory shorebird habitat. Within about 60 km from the CBD we have three of wetlands of international significance to migratory shorebirds. To the west lies Port Phillip Bay (Western Shoreline) and the Bellarine Peninsula, and to the east lie the Edithvale-Seaford Wetlands and Western Port. Much of the Port Phillip habitat occurs here in Wyndham; the Western Treatment Plant alone is one of Australia’s most important sites for migratory shorebirds.
Other local areas where you can see these birds include Sandy Point in Newport; Rifle Range and Jawbone Reserve in Williamstown; Paisley Challis Wetlands in Williamstown; Truganina Parklands in Altona and Altona Coastal Park.
But don’t be fooled. Since European settlement much of Melbourne’s wetlands have been ‘reclaimed’ – filled in and the land developed. We are lucky to have these sites, but they remain as areas that cling to the edges of urban, farming and industrial landscapes, ironically preserved due to their perceived lack of usefulness and beauty (e.g. rifle ranges; military areas), or artificially created to serve our needs (e.g. sewage farms; saltworks).
Birds are bio-indicators. This is a bloodless term meaning that the presence of birds indicates a healthy environment. If shorebirds continue to decline at their current rate, and some species have declined by 80% over the last 30 years, it also means that the global environment of the Flyway is being seriously degraded. This of course also affects our health, wellbeing and ultimate survival. Looking after migratory shorebirds and the Flyway is another way of looking after ourselves. It is urgent and it is vital. But I would like to think we are doing it for them and all the other living things that depend on the global ecology, not only to save ourselves.
Kate Gorringe-Smith
Instigator and Co-ordinator of The Overwintering Project: Mapping Sanctuary
*The East-Asian Australasian Flyway extends from Arctic Russia and North America to New Zealand and is used by over 50 million migratory waterbirds. The countries that comprise the East-Asian Australasian Flyway are: the USA (Alaska); Russia (Siberia); Mongolia; China; North Korea; South Korea; Japan; the Philippines; Vietnam; Laos; Thailand; Cambodia; Myanmar; Bangladesh; India; Malaysia; Singapore; Brunei; Indonesia; Timor; Papua New Guinea; Australia and New Zealand.