二十八万步

280,000 Steps

On the road from Robe to Ballarat

I first encountered the idea of walking as an art practice when I was artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2018. At the time, I was quite interested in exploring different ways of making art and was inspired by a few of the artists who staged performances. I was particularly influenced by JeeYeun Lee, a Korean American artist, who has been doing long walks as her way of exploring issues of place and colonisation. 

While researching the history of Chinese people in Australia, I came across an account of Chinese gold miners in the 1850s walking from Robe to the Victorian goldfields to avoid the tax imposed by the Victorian government on Chinese immigrants. The idea of walking 400 km from Robe to Ballarat was starting to form, even though I had never done any kind of long distance walking in my life. In the end, I decided to walk the first and last 100 km of this journey.

In preparation for this walk, I trained for 19 weeks, covering a total of 870 km. Over 10 days in April 2019, I walked 200 km from Robe to Penola in South Australia, and then from Ararat to Ballarat in Victoria. My body moved through a great distance in space, but it was in my mind that I did most of my walking. Physically, I tried to walk the tracks taken by the Chinese miners, although not many historical traces had remained from this period. I trod on the land, smelt the plants, listened to the birds, felt the wind and encountered some of the forces of nature (now considerably tamed). At the same time, I traversed my mind, one small step at a time, picking up pebbles of thought, trickles of memory, and sudden rushes of insights. I completed the physical journey, only to find myself lost in the landscape of my mind. 

An exhibition of the artwork and poetry I made in response to the walk was shown in July 2021 at the AIRspace Project gallery. Three poems from this collection have been published in an anthology On the Road by The Poet magazine (2020).   

This is a video of my talk on the walk and the exhibition.

Here are some photos of the places I passed through during the walk.

These are some of the artwork I made in response to the walk.