Donato launched into the cave with nary any apparent doubt. In his Adelaide childhood home he had built a papier-mache cave under the house. A womb or tomb, essentially a safe place that was his own. At the initial museum meeting calling for artistic input, Donato stepped straight in and couldn’t wait to start. We envisaged the cave as the end of a journey. The inner sanctum, you know it, what we are all looking for, peace, love.
Donato used coloured sand from around Broken Hill he’d collected on a recent road trip home to Adelaide. He just threw it on the fresh paint over the layers of newspaper glued to the wire frame work. There were holes left in the cave walls to look through into other realities. We had a shop full of history and pictures to choose from.
The cave has had several incarnations since then, the papier-mache also had “high tearability” and has an annual patching job to this day if we get it together. Burri did a major job one year building in layers of history with skeletal remains poking out of the cave walls like an anthropological dig. He platypustically wired together several skeletons into one creature which created it’s own urban myth of ancient local lifeforms.
One vision is to look through some of the cave holes into a Bundjalung campsite pre white man. Its still on the agenda.
The cave has a blue light and Donatos stalagmites are remarkably still visible after all these years. Like any popular cave, the art is constantly changing and reflecting the times.
There was an old television in the second hand shop, we painted “GET REAL” on the screen and Donato fitted it into the cave wall. Without an aerial the screen is a kaleidoscope of colour behind the words, it’s barely been turned off since the museum began and sets a mood in the room that is quite memorable.
The Charles Blunt Memorial Seat in the cave was rescued from the tip. It used to be in the main street outside the Environment Centre and Bob Hopkins painted it after the famous election campaign that Helen Caldicott almost won and saw National Party Blunt lose his seat.
No thing is in the museum without a reason and purpose! Very few objects are labelled or catalogued but many things have obscure and infamous histories.
For example, the logs in the cave are from the camphor laurel tree that used to be in Allsop Park, Nimbins’ one tiny public park where the war memorial is, opposite the pub.
In it’s wisdom, Lismore City Council decided to cut down the one major shade tree in the park where people gathered daily. It was an 80 year old non native tree the subject of much controversy in the area.
Whilst the council workers were cutting up the tree the famous aboriginal activist Dennis Walker took a saw from the museum, walked over to the park and proceeded to theatrically saw at a workers overalled leg crying “How would you like it happening to you?”
The local sergeant was called. He was down at the Bowling Club resting his elbow at the bar, or so the story goes. He arrived to arrest Dennis who was in the back garden of the rainbow cafe, next door to the museum.
There was a scuffle and Dennis got the sergeants gun. He proceeded to hold court over a lunchtime crowd, firing off the first five bullets in between some educational raves for the white audience and the cowering cop.
The last bullet’s for you”, Dennis reputedly said, before aiming at the cop but firing over his head at the last moment.
He then surrendered for arrest having had his say. He got a number of years in jail and the cop retired hurt on a massive compo payout! Thus the camphor logs in the cave are a link to Nimbin history.
Follow the serpent to the next room in the tour
