Hobart’s rag and bone memories get melted down and turned into new candles, fertiliser, and soap here. Things aren’t properly haunted until we’ve sat with them alone, in the dark, and truly considered their quickness in a dusky light. Some ghosts are still breathing, after a fashion. And what is a haunting but an unwillingness of a dead past to, in fact, stay dead? The Rag and Bone Man is a mystery happening, partly an art-installation with The People's Library, partly a spoken word performance art piece that spun out from that, a book, a devil’s well porthole, being haunted by an alive ghost. He works away at making curtains of rags, the rag and bone man, broken jewellery, strings, bones, cups ,and playing cards. He is not sure what he’s weaving. A fabric of recollection, bits and pieces of people gone, a silent testament?
Come and find me.
“The first thing that happens when we begin to play the game is the rag and bone man. You’ll see him coming up the street when it’s barely light, collecting the town’s refuse, rags of out-moded thoughts, bones of old loves… Hair and teeth of past lovers that someone has long slept coddled up to, but just this very morning when your voyeur-eye is present, with a sudden lightness of being, exposes them to the sun’s purifying kiss. That is what he does, or should I say, what I do, -feed on the carrion of dreams. Just as the cheap candles are bulked up with the fat boiled off from the leavings of Hobart Town, so is my voice powered. It’s how I am still talking, -the carrion. I take the dreams that polish up all right for a second go-round, others will need be melted down for fat to make soap, their sadness pulled out and carded to spin words, their soft regret rubbed into my cello strings as rosin.”
“This story is my rag and bone collection, the flotsam that washes up on my shores when my mind, like beach rubble, is being taken apart and melted down for the knife handles and candle sticks of Hobart Town. I was born in the age of public hangings and convict labour, and I am skimming the cream off your latte as we speak. So be warned this story won’t stay neatly in the past. You will follow the sound of my voice and move towards it in the dark. I’m speaking. You’re listening, yet you’re listening in the present, which is ever skittering forward, accumulating history behind it, so that’s where the story plays out, not in my time, but always on the cutting edge of the-breathing-now.”
“Time bites its own tail in this unique friendship that’s about to begin between you and me. Everything is now. So I suppose this is an invitation… Follow my voice through the dark? Collapse time with me? Everything must happen when the rag and bone man comes back to town. Bring out your bones! Bring out your dead! Bring out your momento mori’s and your dolls with missing eyes! Bring out the abortions of your life history! The bits that didn’t fit together properly. The essential parts of yourself you put up for sale when desperate, but have never stopped trying to buy back.
At the bottom of the world, Van Diemen’s Land still lurks underneath Tasmania, where the creaking bones of stirring giants contort up from the icebergs of the frozen south in winter, when the gas lamps flicker low an Other god rules here who knows nothing of church bell or steeple. Hobart Town is the devil’s playground, his dark park, his stomping ground. But under the surface oh this is a beautiful dirty place, this secret little town of ours…”