Surveyor, Woomera, South Australia

Narelle Jubelin is a Madrid-based Australian artist who has long worked in the medium of petit point, a fine, small-scale style of counted embroidery, popular in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Intimate in scale and highly labour-intensive, this technique is used by Jubelin to explore often-sinister images from Australian history. Using folk-art frames from the early twentieth century, she draws on historical domestic decorative arts to create works that belie the dark stories they depict.

For this work, Surveyor, Woomera, South Australia, 1989, Jubelin references a still from film footage of the bushman and surveyor Len Beadell. The image depicts Beadell surveying the landscape with his theodolite for the Australian and British government-led search in 1947 for a site suitable for rocket testing. For this purpose, Beadell selected the area now known as Woomera, situated on Kokatha Country, 450 kilometres from Adelaide. The area was subsequently used for the testing of British atomic bombs and caused disease and dispossession, devasting the lives of generations of Aboriginal peoples. The intensity and intimacy of Jubelin’s petit point memorialises and captures this dark side of Australian history.

Rebecca Evans, Curator of Decorative Arts & Design