The Mildura Palimpsest Biennale

Before Palimpsest: the Sculpture Triennials

Mildura's place in Australian contemporary art was established well before the biennale. The Mildara Prize for Sculpture, sponsored by the Mildara winery from 1961, became the Mildura Sculpture Triennial, a series that ran until 1988. The Biennial Foundation has described the triennials as a platform for post-object work, performance, earthworks, and environmental, feminist and collaborative practice. Their long-time director Tom McCullough went on to be artistic director of the second Biennale of Sydney in 1976.

The idea of the palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript scraped clean and written over, with traces of the earlier text still showing. Applied to the country around Mildura, the term described a landscape reworked physically by irrigation and farming and reinterpreted by successive cultures. Artists were invited to respond to the natural and cultural environment of the Mildura and Murray Darling region, often away from gallery walls.

The event went by slightly different names over time, including Murray Darling Palimpsest and Mildura Palimpsest, and it was run by Arts Mildura. An early Artlink account noted that the event was uncurated to the point of including all comers; later editions took a more directed form.

Later editions

The record is fullest for the last two editions we could confirm. Palimpsest #9 in October 2013 was curated by Helen Vivian, ran over four days at venues in and around Mildura, and commissioned 45 new works from Australian and international artists. RealTime referred to the event by the nickname 'Biennale of the Bush'.

Palimpsest #10, held in 2015 under the theme 'everywhere all at once…here', involved more than 70 artists, among them Yhonnie Scarce. We found no record of an eleventh edition.

Where the record survives

Published programs, Artlink essays, RealTime reviews and the Victorian Collections story on Palimpsest #5 are the best remaining accounts. Older pages about individual artists and sites no longer exist, and we have not tried to reconstruct them from memory.