ANCESTREE HEALING by tteerriitt

This image is the view from the Roundhouse prison, looking up High Street in Fremantle, Western Australia.

The water image I superimposed over that image is my visual attempt to symbolise a cleansing of any bad spirits or tragic trauma energy still lingering in the landscape and in our collective ancestral heritage.

This view would have originally been of native vegetation that would have been evolving in this harsh environment for thousands and thousands of years and slowly over the past 100 years it has slowly transformed into this view.

The Roundhouse prison, I have been told by an Indigenous leader, was built on top of one of the most significant sacred sites of the Indigenous Nyoongar people of this region.

When the Roundhouse prison could no longer keep up with the demands of the burgeoning new European colony their governing authorities sent their excess prisoners over the sea to an island that is off the coast directly behind this view and imprisoned them there.

This Island is now called Rottnest and was another sacred place to these same Nyoongar people and is now a holiday paradise for the wealthier inhabitants of Western Australia.

The Roundhouse prison was built from the very limestone rock that made up this sacred site and the prison was used to incarcerate these local Indigenous souls as well as the increasing convicts being imported from the over populated prisons in Great Britain.

The buildings you see flowing out down this avenue, captured in this image are also built out of the sacred limestone from the other sacred hills from around this area and the timber was from sacred ancient Jarrah, She Oak, Tuart, and Marri forests from nearby.

The Roundhouse prison was the first building constructed on the south side of the Swan River by the inhabitants of the new Western Australian Swan River Settlement. This Roundhouse prison was built by the father of the first wife of my great grandfather, Henry Jarvis.

His first wife’s father was a Duffield and had come out from England on one of the first ships that had come to this new settlement on the Northern side of the Swan River. Mr Duffield’s wife and living children joined him a year after he arrived and it was one of those children that eventually married my Great grandfather Henry Jarvis.

My great grandfather, Henry Jarvis was a Sapper in the British army and he was sent out from Great Britain on a ship carrying convicts to the fledgling Swan River settlement. Henry’s job was to teach the convicts the skills they would need to build some of the infrastructure for this part of Western Australia.

Some of that infrastructure he would have been involved with at that time was the construction of the large Fremantle Prison still standing on Hamilton Rd, the Asylum, and the original Fremantle Bridge.

This image is only one in a set crafted to create a sense of redress between my original ancestors from England, Scotland and the European Continent and their negative impact on the ancient peoples, their cultures and the sacred land, forests and animals that had all cohabitated together for who knows how long before the arrival of the first Westerners only a few hundred years ago.

After spending some years delving deeply into my mother’s family’s genealogical story I found myself amazed and very surprised with what I kept digging up. I had no idea how many relatives there were let alone what roles they had played in the original development of the first European settlements here in Western Australia.

Not only did truths slowly emerge up out of the mists of time as I waded through many free internet sites full of facts and figures relating directly to my connections to ancestral roots but also and just as profound was the large number of those relatives I had no idea existed or that their ancestors still lived locally and around the world that also had no idea of our ancestral root connections.

So many stories, so many people’s lives and families interconnected to my family’s story.

So many truths needing, even busting to be known and then demanding to be understood by being placed into their rightful context.

To find all these amazing family story’s has been an immense gift and a very freeing experience. Then there are all these beautiful people I have been so honoured to have met and connected with on many different levels who all have great stories of their own.
On top of all these wonderful experiences and enlightened truths there are other greater stories that just keep bubbling up to the surface wanting to be born into the realm of consciousness.

These greater stories have to be given a voice. This set of superimposed images is my humble attempt to give these story’s their first breaths into this world we all have come into to learn and understand about our collective oneness, we are all branches and leaves of the one family tree.

Added to each image is their part to this infant emerging story.