ROSS GIBSON November 27, 1956 - March 2, 2023
By Deane Williams, with input from Kathryn Bird. Sydney Morning Herald, March 29, 2023
Ross Gibson: writer, filmmaker, multimedia artist, poet, cultural adviser, curator and teacher
Born in Brisbane, Ross Gibson was a prodigiously talented writer, filmmaker, multimedia artist, poet, cultural adviser, curator and teacher. For the many of us who were deeply affected by the uncommon breath of his knowledge and the depth of his creative engagement, his lasting legacy can’t be summed up by a CV of achievements. He was a creative catalyst, the most generous of mentors and the best of listeners. He took seriously the art and impact of conversation.
From the outset Gibson’s scholarly interests and capacities were cross disciplinary and multi-dimensional. After completing a BA with first class honours at the University of Queensland in 1977, Gibson undertook his PhD and an AKC in philosophy and theology at King’s College, London 1978-81, all the while completing a postgraduate diploma in film studies at what was then the Polytechnic of Central London (now University of Westminster). The PhD resulted in his first book The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perception of Australia (1984), the first major reconsideration of the journals of convict painter Thomas Watling, travel writer William Dampier, first fleet analyst David Collins, explorers Charles Sturt, Thomas Mitchell, and Edward Eyre and novelist Patrick White.
Returning to Sydney, Gibson brought with him an approach that for many aligned with what was now understood as cultural studies and set about making his mark among the plethora of “little magazines” of 1980s Sydney.
He wrote art, photography, and film criticism, crafting a distinctive measured yet poetic and engaging authorial voice in publications such as Meanjin, Photofile, Filmnews, Filmviews, Art and Australia, UTS Review, Art Monthly Australia, Antithesis and many more, including catalogue essays, including what we used to term “multimedia” such as installation and emergent digital works.
His essay, Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films, from 1983 is one of the most influential and enduring works in Australian film studies, subsequently republished many times in different fora. In 1985, Gibson teamed up with producer John Cruthers to refashion this article into the 32-minute, experimental essay film Camera Natura that critiqued the white Australian preponderance with landscape imagery in writing, painting, photography, cinema and television. Gibson’s first film revelled in the burgeoning Australian experimental film culture that saw the emergence of such important works as Helen Grace’s Serious Undertakings (1983) and Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1986), winning the Australian Teachers of Media Jury Award.
Among his prodigious cultural criticism, Gibson was to direct his feature narrative Dead to the World (1991), employing an ensemble cast including Richard Roxburgh, Lynette Curren and John Doyle in a narrative concerning inner-city real estate developers, multiculturalism, political power, and crime. Four years later Gibson based his next film, a documentary simply entitled Wild (1993), on Eric Rolls’ 1981 book A Million Wild Acres: 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest, concerning the histories and stories that weave in and out of the Pilliga forest in north-central NSW Gibson’s documentary employs the forest as a proposal for non-indigenous society to rethink its relationship to the land.
Around this time Gibson also published the book South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia (1992), a rewritten collection of Gibson’s essays. Graeme Turner wrote: “Gibson writes like no other Australian cultural critic … the range of knowledge deployed in dealing with his subject makes his writing distinctive and exciting.”
Gibson managed this remarkable tranche of cultural work while teaching and supervising a litany of PhD students at University of Technology, Sydney, until 2008, as research professor of new media & digital culture at University of Sydney (208-2013) and as centenary professor in creative and cultural research at the University of Canberra (2014-2023).
Gibson’s guidance in establishing landmark public cultural institutions is another measure of his engagement with institutions as a mentor and establishing enduring institutional philosophies and practices; firstly, with the Museum of Sydney where he acted as consultant producer, a role involving researching, writing, directing and producing immersive storytelling works using new technologies, most notably a work of speculative monologues called The Bond Store.
Gibson brought to his Museum of Sydney role a storehouse of skills born of a critical disposition concerned with colonialism, environmental consciousness, storytelling, and audio-visual intelligence. His second major role was as the founding creative director of Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) at Federation Square in 2001. Gibson worked extensively in collaborative arrangements with everyone from existing Cinemedia staff who were to shift into roles at ACMI, to Lab Architecture Studio, the architects of Federation Square, and a variety of stakeholders to envision a cutting-edge audio-visual cultural institution at the heart of Melbourne’s vital internationally regarded screen culture.
Gibson created and curated work in a range of media, particularly in interactive and immersive digital artworks and installations as well as curating Persistence of Vision and Reverberation, major international exhibitions at ACMI in 2003. In a measure of the esteem with which he is held, and as a kind of homecoming, in 2021 ACMI hosted an in-conversation between Gibson and Maria Tumarkin to accompany his head_phone_film_poems on-line exhibition. The Museum of Sydney and ACMI are only two of numerous institutions where Gibson has had a signal influence.
In the late 2000s, Gibson supplemented his cultural criticism in books such as The Summer Exercises (2008), 26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788 – 1791 (2012), Changescapes: complexity, mutability, aesthetics (2015), Memoryscopes: remnants, forensics, aesthetics (2015) and Basalt (2017) with the poetry collections Stone Grown Cold (2015), The Criminal Re-Register (2017) and reDact (2017). He was still publishing new works right until his death, releasing in 2023 the book of poetry Flooded Canyon, and the preface to the catalogue for The Sydney Modern Project, where he was delighted to have had a modest role as conversationalist and informal mentor to some of the creative team at AGNSW as they were developing a vision for what Sydney’s exciting new gallery could be.
Across this enormously engaged and generative lifestyle, Gibson and life-partner, collagist and writer, Kathryn Bird established a home-based hub of creativity and bonhomie in Alexandria, inner Sydney, the affectionately titled the Gibsonian Institute and Bird Museum, welcoming visitors, friends and colleagues into a hothouse of intellectual lifeways. Kathryn is collecting his prodigious and far-ranging works into a recombinatory online archive, which will also allow posthumous collaboration with Ross, such that his generous conversations can continue into the future. The archive will be housed and supported by the AGNSW, which was also the site of his extraordinary 2008 work Conversations II, where he sat in a purpose-built small three-sided room in the main concourse of the gallery and conversed on any topic, with anyone – for 80 straight days.
