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Hollow Country

A tribute to the Illawarra.

The Sculpture ’Hollow Country’ is made to encapsulate the Illawarra as it  faces  the modern era of industrial relocation coupled with local issues that have dominated the community for the last 10 to 15 years.

The sculpture is constructed from locally grown or made materials with the exceptions of the machine heads, strings, and frets. The timbers are grown in the Illawarra, as is the steel manufactured in an Illawarra foundry. I have personally collected, milled and seasoned all of the timber for the sculpture, from log to what you see in the finished product with the exception of the Norfolk Island Pine soundboard that I purchased locally.

Continuing with the concept of local, all of the labour used to construct the sculpture is locally provided. Tom Brown of the Albion Park Men’s Shed, a retired fitter and turner and formally employed by BHP in the Illawarra, assisted in the engineering and welding of all the metal sections in the ‘hollow‘ of the body and peghead.  As a long time resident of Wollongong, I have designed and constructed the timber sections of the sculpture.

 The body of ‘Hollow Country’ is constructed in Australian Red Cedar to represent the earth that is being mined in the coal industry, which in turn is used in the steel production in the Illawarra. The metal framework that completes the ‘missing’ internals of the guitars body represents the steel that is made from the mining of local coal in the Illawarra steel industry. With so much coal and Iron ore being used in either the creation of materials sent overseas or sent as raw materials to foreign markets. I am highlighting the fact that we are removing the mineral wealth of the country, and sending it overseas, and as such, we are going to be left with a big hole, and a couple of bits of steel in return once all of these locally produced assets and resources are gone. We will be forced to import the materials we once had at our disposal. Are we getting what we need in the big picture of our country in return for all the assets that we are removing?

The fret board of the guitar is made of three sections in total. Two sections of Spalted Sally Wattle, with a small strip of Illawarra Flame Tree in the middle. Spalting is an effect in the timber as a result of the tree starting to break down and rotting away. I use this here to represent our local Wollongong City Council.

The Wollongong City Council was removed from office in March 2008 after being found to be corrupt by ICAC along with a number of building developers in the area for allowing buildings through Council that were not fitting into the building codes of the Wollongong City Council area. The middle section of Illawarra Flame Tree represents the period of administration that our Council was placed under to ‘clear the rot’. I am proposing the question ‘Has anything really changed? ‘With the sacking of Council, Administrators being appointed and then the granting of new elections by the NSW State Parliament after 3 plus year’s? The ‘illegal’ buildings still stand, the people in question whom had been found to be corrupt have had no real consequence to their actions, and the community has been left with a blight on their environment... What has changed?

The neck of the guitar is made of Black Butt, a timber knows for its gum veins. These are small to large tracks of sap that have solidified in the heartwood of the tree. Here I have used a section with a large gum vein to represent the unemployment in the Illawarra. With an unemployment rate nearly double the national average, we are finding ourselves with a community struggling to survive in an industrial city that is slowly dying from the demise of the steel industry on which it once grew.

This leads to the peghead of the sculpture. I have designed a peghead to highlight the fact that the Illawarra will need to find a future that will set a path for the long term employment and stability for the region. This may very well be in the development of the technology and research sectors that has already commenced. Things such as the 3D printer and the development of printing human stem cells and metals have been developed in the Illawarra Region. The fashion in which the peghead is spliced into the neck, or the ‘current industrial economy’, with the Australian Red Cedar, Earth, being bound to the steel that has lead us to where we are now, and the fashion in which the neck suddenly stops to take on a new form, or direction.  So too, the Black Butt neck that suddenly stops, and the industry of technology development takes over. The peghead of the sculpture looks like no peghead that has been before, just like the fact that the future of the economy of the Illawarra will be forced to break new ground for itself.

The sculpture is design to invoke conversation as to the plight of not just the Illawarra, but as to the  future of Australia as a whole, as we move into the changing era of the industrial and manufacturing world, having to face the new global changes of competition between manufacturing and standards of living, importing and a level self-reliance. What type of country do we want to become?

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