National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | National Indigenous Art Triennial 07

A wonderland of truly wondrous things That nowhere else upon this Earth are found; Of reptiles rare, and birds that have no wings, And animals that live deep in the ground; And those poor simple children of the Earth, (A disappearing race you here may meet), Whom whites have driven from their land of birth To regions still untrod by booted feet.1 Danie Mellor’s (re)creation of this gleefully contrived never-never land is realised in his phantasmagorical tableau The contrivance of a vintage Wonderland (A magnificent flight of curious fancy for science buffs…a china ark of seductive whimsy…a divinely ordered special attraction…upheld in multifariousness) 2007, which is the kind of diorama that should have been on display in the social history museums of the past. Mellor’s magical installation conjures up flights of fancy that might have been the imaginations of those terrified and ignorant initial ‘boat people’. Mellor’s creatures are manufactured from an amalgam of the man-made and the natural: real macro