In 2020, Stuart Town Railway Station celebrated 140 years of arrivals and departures and freight
movements throughout the Central West and beyond.
To commemorate this rail heritage and it's significance to the town and the wider region,
a public artwork was commissioned for Stuart Town station.
This is it's story.
Have you seen the bush by moonlight from the train go running by.
Blackened log and stump and sapling, ghostly trees all dead and dry.
Historically the rail network was the only way to access goods and freight services as
well as customer services and postal services from across the far and central west into
the city.
Now of course we use rail mostly for visiting our relatives and visiting our loved ones,
being able to access health services and also being able to commute to and from work.
I'm Louise Austin and we're in Wellington.
I'm a graphic designer and photographer.
The train line that runs through the artwork, it has the three lines which represent the
train line, the songlines and also the roads which come from Sydney and through all the
communities.
Around the train stations are the people sitting around the train stations which represent
the meeting place that they've become.
Here a patch of glassy water, there a patch of mystic sky.
Have you heard the still voice calling, yet so warm and yet so cold.
I'm the mother bush that bore you, come to me when you are old.
I'm Tim Winters, I'm a visual artist and designer and we're currently in my studio at Stuart
Town which is called Kinkara Studios.
I've been reinterpreting an old building that was called The Lamp Room and it was demolished
in 2015.
I'm reinterpreting it as a three-dimensional visual experience.
Sort of combining poetry, history and architecture.
The idea was that The Lamp Room held the kerosene for the kerosene lamps for the signals.
So I knew a little bit about the history of the building.
What I wanted to do was try and incorporate that - the history of the building.
I thought it would be quite a good idea to build or design a ghost of the building so
that we've got the memory of what it was like.
Then because I had travelled on The Night Train which was quite important, the western
rail from Sydney to Dubbo and further west, there was a Henry Lawson poem called 'On The
Night Train' which he wrote in 1922.
So then I asked my friend Ian Marr who's a letter cutter to inscribe a stone with the
poem on it.
So that sort of resonates with - it brings back the memories about being on the train
when you read the poem.
Then it's all framed within this skeleton of the former building.
Did you see the bush below you sweeping darkly to the range, all unchanged and all unchanging,
yet so very old and strange.
Because it's The Night Train, there's a sense of loneliness and mystery.
It's that contrast between the engineering and mechanical and the dark nature outside.
I just thing that the artwork that is on site there at Stuart Town is really quite unique
in that it demonstrates what used to be there and connects history with what's current.
But it also allows us to connect european settlement with indigenous nations and bring
that pride that existed in Australia across the eons of time into the future and with
us now.