Image 1 | 2 |   There are Warnings of Gales, Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney, 1997. The installation (sited in a listed historic building) merged aspects of early colonial history with Sims' own relocation to an antipodean context. Its focal point was a large pile of unhewn, native timber logs positioned hazardously in the centre of the library to support a stereo ghetto blaster. With its cases of stuffed birds, heavy wooden furniture and large rugs, the room became a counterpoint to an edited soundscape of Australian bird and insect life overdubbed with extracts from BBC radio weather forecasts to shipping. These reports notify mariners of meteorological conditions for thirty-one marine localities around the British Isles.

The title is derived from an often repeated phrase heard during these radio broadcasts - a modern day echo of enlightenment thinking which extolled clear definition and systematic classification in the experience of new and exotic sights and sounds. The rude presence of obdurate and intractable lumber in the midst of a space reserved for concentrated thought and quiet disquisition complemented an acoustic imposition on the space.

THERE ARE WARNINGS OF GALES (Catalogue Notes)

Regular bulletins for shipping are broadcast by BBC radio 4 to provide forecasts of meteorological conditions in sea areas around the British Isles. Going to air four times in every 24 hours these reports list such essential information as barometric pressure, wind velocity and the state of the sea for thirty one marine locations. Read in a strict format and unwaveringly calm style, these announcements are a model of logical order and systematic knowledge cast like a net over the phenomenal world. As a radiophonic experience they represent redoubtable certainty and subtly permeate the listening public's consciousness. Concerned with the business of prediction these forecasts are themselves predictable, reliable and instantly recognisable for their seemingly arcane codes and ciphers enunciated with measured, liturgical grace. My memories of these broadcasts often evince intense reveries of a place I have left.

The politics of displacement always means that we carry with us to the new place of arrival a version of what we have left behind. No doubt Alexander Macleay's Britain was not the same place that I removed from and now recall. However, there is perhaps a legacy of enlightenment thinking still retained by the ambition for the weather forecasts to shipping in their attention to detail and periodic assessment of the physical world. At the time Macleay started to build Elizabeth Bay House, Charles Darwin accompanied Captain Robert Fitzroy, commander of HMS Beagle, on voyages of exploration off the coasts of South America. Fitzroy was later to become the first head of the meteorological office in England. It is this climate of thinking about the natural world that propelled Macleay and others from old world certitude into consuming activities of scientific taxonomy and reticulation amongst the exotic flora and fauna of the great south land.

Audio recordings are disembodied sound and those played back here give us impressions only of what happened at other times and places. It is probable that the birds and insects I have recorded emit the same sounds now as they did when Macleay's ornithology and entomology sought to classify them. My first impressions of this place, some 160 years after Macleay, were of bird calls and the smooth barked, visceral character of trees that were their natural habitat. Although recordings of the shipping forecasts are a poignant personal reminder of other spaces they do not quell the turbulence of the seas described any more than Macleay's science and cases of stuffed birds silence the spaces of their enduring calls. Both are sonic encounters providing coordinates in the complex navigation of private experience and collective histories colliding in unknown territory.

Martin Sims August 1997