In art, we often speak of the coherence of an artwork or an exhibition, by which we mean the clarity with which the work combines or connects its various dimensions, parts, qualities, and affects to create a unified “coherent” experience. The exhibition, still waters run deep at Firstdraft, coheres not around a theme but a place, curator Hester Lyon explains in the accompanying catalogue. It is both an unassuming and intriguing proposition: to gather together artworks not because they address a common concept but because they all come from the same place. In this instance, that place is Wilyakali and Barkindji Country of the lower Baaka (Darling River). This place is also called Broken Hill and Menindee.

What, then, is the coherence of an exhibition that is drawn together from the material of a place? This is not a random collection of objects that happen to show up in a particular place, like things in a bag. Instead, their presence and interconnection is the product of people who live and have lived in that place. These objects are expressions of a relationship to place, and through this relationship they become expressions of their relationship to each other. How, then, do we connect and speak to one another of their common country?

I ask this question because my first impression, upon entering the gallery, was a sense of fragmentation. What do these objects have to do with each other? Perhaps this fragmentation is a representation of the place of Broken Hill, arguably the birthplace of the modern extractive industry, a place littered with contradictions, a beautiful country with a tragic legacy of conflict, invasion, and extraction. Is it this discord I recognise here? Or are the connections between these works and artists simply too distant from where I stand to experience them. Am I like a stranger considering a faraway country, the customs, history, and people of which I am ignorant? Perhaps what I am feeling is merely the absence of the usual thematic coherence I am used to experiencing in a gallery.

The centre of the exhibition is held by Palirika Barka Kiira (2024), an installation that pays no attention to all this. Its form describes a river landscape, created by traditional custodian Aunty Barbara Quayle. It peacefully snakes across the floor in three different coloured sands from her country. The banks of the river are littered with shells and delicate organic matter. Twigs, leaves, seeds, and other natural objects, sometimes cast out of silver and other metals, sometimes not, are preserved and made into tokens of care and reverence through Barbara’s jewellery practice. These objects also hang suspended on traditionally spun strings above the landscape. This landscape is quite literally the land itself, and at the same time it is a representation of the land. The sand has travelled from Broken Hill to sit in the gallery for several weeks, representing the beauty, the power, the magic of the country from which it comes, and to which it will return once the exhibition is over.

On the wall above this landscape, five linocut prints by Tannya Quale, Barbara’s niece, overlook the landscape, each holding a story that is thousands of years old, stories connected to this landscape. The row of linocuts combines traditional hatching and patterns with the simple forms of organic life, echoing the organic objects within Barbara’s landscape and connecting the deep history held in the former with the land represented in the latter. These two bodies of work have a kind of stillness about them as though engaged in a silent dialogue, the meaning of which I cannot know. But I can still sense in the air between them the quality of reverence, of love, and care. I feel a little foolish to go on describing them, as though this would somehow yield me their meaning.

The other three artworks in the exhibition exist on another scale. There is an oddly monstered tent, a series of primitive looking necklaces, and an iron drum containing a TV monitor. These objects sit on the three remaining sides of the landscape, observing it from their different perspectives. They exist on a more human scale, inhabiting the gallery as things you might encounter within the environment, rather than the environment itself. These objects are also more conflicted and anxious than the works described above.

Verity Nunan’s tent is a strange patchwork of experience and consideration that wanders across the landscape and through the life of the artist, into which she projects an array of disparate ideas. This tent was destroyed in an act of senseless violence by the artist’s own dog and was then lovingly repaired by a community of people hundreds of kilometres away. The tent returned to Broken Hill, where it was further embellished by the youth of the area. A tent is at once public and private; it shelters but exposes; it can be a home, and yet is impermanent. The artist draws together the loose threads of the tent’s journey, connecting the contradictions through which it has travelled. Its journey has the quality of a series of almost random events that happened to occur along its timeline. Yet, at the same time, this object connects all these elements together in the way only a story can. It represents the chaos and contradictions of public space, as it would be experienced in Broken Hill, in which the hostility of those you disagree with is folded into the space of community in which we look after one another. The tent is no cathedral; it offers shelter, but also reminds you how vulnerable you are.

Blake Griffiths transitions from Verity’s consideration of public space to a consideration of public trust, or public office. He recreates the ceremonial livery worn by the local mayor in the skin and scales of the European Carp, a noxious pest that infests and degrades the Baaka. The livery is a large necklace usually adorned with ornate precious stones and metals drawn from the earth through the destructive practices that have made Broken Hill into the place it is today. The subversive gesture of this act does not hide in the usual irony of such statements, but instead serves as a support for further dimensions of meaning. This elevation of organic waste, the product of attempts to exterminate an introduced species, creates a beautiful object, far more dignified than the gaudy jewellery worn by mayors. It reminds us that whatever we might think of the achievements of modernity, they are not necessarily the advancements they are claimed to be, nor are they improvements on the forms they meant to transcend.

The last object in the gallery, the work of Dan Schulz, is a steel drum, placed on a stack of black slag, the waste product of silver smelting in Broken Hill. Inside the drum, a television monitor plays a documentary. The flickering light inside the barrel creates the illusion of a fire. The video presents footage of the town and its surrounding landscape, overlaid with the voice of a local person talking about the complexities of their relationship to the place. Horror at the destruction of the natural environment is interspersed with pride and love for the community. Shulz’s video references historical industrial struggles in Broken Hill during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which resulted in the improvement of working conditions across Australia. This is expressed alongside a wounded regret for what this industry has done to the land. As with Griffiths and Nunan, this artwork contains a conflicted relationship to land, expressing painful outrage and despair at its desecration. It does so not as an absolute moral position, held aloft from the lived conditions of the people who are both responsible for—and dependent upon—this violence for their lives and livelihood. It is this sense of an actual place, full of unresolvable contradictions, that still waters communicates the reality of the place from which it comes.

But let us step back and look at the exhibition as a whole. Barbara and Tannya Quayle’s works take a distant view over the others, presenting country with the patience of deep time. In these works, the painful moment of the present dissolves in the sands of sixty thousand years. This exhibition is hopeful, not because it offers solutions, but because it shifts our relationship to one another, and to the land, of how we view and approach the contradictions underpinning Broken Hill. In my experience, it demonstrates a humanity that is rare, an alteration in the fabric of our anger, our determination and our capacity for conciliation. It is the tension between these two perspectives that creates a distance between them and thus the sense of fragmentation; but it also marks their influence on one another, and thus their connectedness.

Aunty Barbara said as much when she closed the artist talks. She turned to the audience and said, quite casually, “when we go to the river, we set up camp with a tent or a swag. Then we go fishing. We come back in the evening and light a fire sit and yarn, sharing stories. It all happens on country, whether by the lakes or by the river. It’s a time for family, friends and coming together.” She understands the imperfect coherence of place.