We All Go Together
"It starts with the totem, mine is the Yellowbelly (Golden Perch) - its the totem that we've been given, and each family would have been given a totem."
"The yellowbelly is in the river, and he has to keep swimming forwards, he can't go backwards, or his gills will fill up and he will not be able to breath, he'll die."
"What this tells me is that I also can't go back, I have to keep moving forward. In my life here in this town, I need to keep moving forward like the yellowbelly in the river, but there are many other fish in the river. There's the Cod, the Black-Bream, the Silver-Perch, just like there are many other peoples and cultures in Bourke, where there are over 20 different language groups represented ... there's even the European Carp"
“We are all the same, we all need to keep moving forward, no matter what kind of fish we are, what kind of person we are, we all need to move forwards.”
“Sometimes, when the water is low, there are more obstacles, things which slow us down, so we turn and move in circles, we bump in to each other. In trying to keep moving forward we get confused and have to learn how to share each other’s space.”
“But the river rises, the obstacles fade away, and we get a chance to move forward, upstream again. But we all have to go together, all the different fish in the river, all the different people in Bourke, we all have to move forward together”
Phillip Sullivan
Ngemba
Polished Stainless Steel
Designed by Andrew Hull
Fabricated by Wangstone Studio