My Queensland - Peril magazine

As a part of our collaborative edition with the Queensland Poetry Festival, we are thrilled to share this series of photographs by Queensland-born artist, William Yang. Well-known for his photography and narrative monologues, here he shares a beautiful folio of images that express his relationship to his home state, figured beautifully through the lenses of family, place and identity.

This series of images is best enjoyed by clicking on the first thumbnail image below, which will launch a slideshow of individual images.

I was born at Mareeba on the Atherton Tableland and grew up in Dimbulah a nearby town. Dimbulah didn’t have a hospital.

“Your father was a very dashing man in his day,” my mother told me. “He played saxophone in a dance band and he wore silk shirts. He used to iron them himself, I couldn’t iron them good enough. He wasn’t like you knew him.”

My mother had already met my father in Cairns. He then went to Dimbulah to start a new shop. He’d been here a year when he proposed to my mother and she accepted. “He wanted someone to help him with the shop,” she said. But she also told me she was madly in love with him. I think my mother was in two worlds here: in the traditional Chinese world marriage was an economic contract, but my mother had seen Hollywood movies and she allowed herself the luxury of romance.

When I was about six years old, one of the kids at school called me “Ching Chong Chinaman, Born in a jar, Christened in a teapot, Ha ha ha.” I had no idea what he was talking about but I knew from his expression he was being horrible to me. So I went home to my mother and said, “Mum, I’m not Chinese, am I?” and my mother said to me very sternly, “Yes you are.” Her tone was hard and it shocked me. I knew in this moment that being Chinese was like a terrible curse and I could not rely on my mother for help. Or my brother who was four years older than me, very much more experienced in the world, he chimed in, “And you’d better get used to it.”

My sister, my brother and I would ride our bikes to school along this track. Little did I realize then how much this dry, sparse landscape was seeping, indelibly, into my consciousness.

My parents got a tobacco farm. I hated getting up early in the morning and picking the cold wet leaves during harvest, but fortunately everyone agreed my future was not in tobacco.

There were good years and my parents built their dream home. They were very proud of this house but it wasn’t designed for the climate and would retain the heat from the fierce, summer sun.

Twice a year we’d come down to Cairns to visit my mother’s eldest sister, Aunt Bessie. Her house was always family headquarters. In the living room was a piano, embroidered Chinese art works, a large cut and frosted glass mirror depicting a pond scene, and a grandfather clock, ticking loudly. Yet the house had a solemn atmosphere as Bessie was often sick.

I remember sleeping on my Aunt’s veranda and being woken by heavy drops of rain. Dimbulah was hot and dry, but Cairns on the coast was hot and humid, and when it rained it just poured down. The clouds were so low I felt I could touch them.

My brother Alan on the right was attending the boarding school in Herberton, my sister Frances was a nurse in Mareeba hospital. I’d never much been out of Dimbulah, except to visit my relatives in Cairns.

At high school I suffered the torment of those who are other. I looked like an alien, but worse I was invisibly different, I knew I was gay. I didn’t quite know what that meant, but I knew I was different.

I studied Architecture at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. I liked university and bonded with my colleagues. Here I directed the Architecture revues, wrote plays and joined the Brisbane Arts Society.

My parents sold the farm and brought a house in Graceville, Brisbane. They’d come because my brother Alan and I were living in Brisbane at the time. My father wanted us to move back home and live under the same roof, Chinese style, but I thought the idea was a complete joke. I was off to the brighter lights of Sydney. Alan, however, moved back home.

My sister Frances visited from the USA. She’d married a Japanese American and brought her two sons, William and Robert to meet the grandparents.

I lived in Sydney and I’d dropped out of Architecture so there was quite a lot of parental pressure on me to return to the profession. I resisted and this caused tensions. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, or rather I knew that I wanted to be an artist but didn’t know how to make a living from it. My father died shortly after this photo was taken

After my father died, Alan’s art collection started appearing on the walls at Graceville and he changed the furniture.

I would come back to the house at Graceville to visit my mother and brother at Christmas. I faithfully performed this ritual for 17 years.

I started to do performance pieces with slide projection in the theatre – autobiographical stories. These productions were successful and I did one about my childhood in North Queensland, “The North”.

I wanted to claim my Chinese Heritage that had been for so long denied and unacknowledged. In Atherton I discovered this beautiful Chinese Joss House with delicate, corregated iron cladding. Of course it had been there for years but we had never stopped to see it when we drove my brother to and from the boarding school in Herberton.

My mother had a dignity that came, I think, from a position of humility. The relationship between me and my mother was complex enough for me not to see it while she was alive.

My sister visited from the USA. We all went up to North Queensland for a holiday. My mother saw old friends and visited places from the past. She had a wonderful time. Shortly after she returned to Brisbane she died suddenly.

My brother rang me to tell me about my mother’s death and I went up to Brisbane to help him with the funeral arrangements. The hardest thing was walking into this room, home, and she wasn’t there.

I returned to the University of Queensland, my Alma Mater, to receive an honorary degree for my services to photography. Perhaps I needed to leave Queensland to be recognized.

My sister Frances, from the USA, visited Australia. She brought the whole family, her three sons, (my beloved nephews), their two wives and the three grandchildren. We had fun at Steve Irwin’s Zoo. She hadn’t visited Australia for 17 years.

In Brisbane everyone stayed at Alan’s place, although I stayed with Scott, my boyfriend (with the beard). He saw a lot of the family as we would often eat at Graceville. He got along well with everyone and my nephew Robert invited him over to San Francisco. I was pleased. I want most of all to be accepted by my own family.

My brother went to hospital for blood tests. A bad reaction to a blood transfusion caused his main heart valve to fail. There were operations, but he never recovered. Over that week I was his main carer. It happened suddenly, everyone was in a state of shock. I can honestly say I never once found the task onerous or wished I was somewhere else. It is a privilege to be with someone when they die.

Alan’s wake was the last gathering we had at the house in Graceville.

I go back to Dimbulah, but each time I return I recognize less of the place. It was in Thornborough, an old gold mining town, where I’d never been, that I found the Dimbulah I remembered from my childhood. These places still hold me, but I move around these hills like a ghost. It is the land from which I came, which formed and nourished me, but to which I can never return.

I mainly come to Queensland now to see Scott. He lives in a place at Buderim on the Sunshine Coast. It used to be a farm owned by his late, Great Uncle Frank Grimmett. The Grimmetts were an old pioneering family of the district. Outside the dining room windows there’s a strand of majestic flooded gums that Uncle Frank planted to stop the land from sliding into the gully. As I see more of Scott, I guess I am appropriating his family’s history.

Author: William Yang

William Yang was born in North Queensland, Australia. He moved to Sydney in 1969 and worked as a freelance photographer documenting Sydney’s social life which included the glamorous, celebrity set and the hedonistic, sub-cultural, gay community.In 1989 he integrated his skills as a writer and a visual artist. He began to perform monologues with slide projection in the theatre. These slide shows have become the main expression of his work. They tell personal stories and explore issues of identity. He has done eleven full-length works and most of them have toured the world. Sadness, his most successful piece, was made into an award winning film by Tony Ayres in 1999.William’s current work is photo based, doing performances in theatres and exhibitions in galleries. He is converting some of his live performance pieces into film at the University of NSW. “My Generation” and “Friends of Dorothy” have already screened and have been broadcast on ABC1. “Blood Links” is nearly completed. William also conducts workshops in story telling, so he is helping other people tell their story. View all posts by William Yang

Share this:

Like this:

Author: William Yang