Jenna Lee: The life and growth of language

A La Trobe Library and La Trobe Art Institute co-commission

Heyward Library

Curator: Amelia Wallin

Celebrated for her work in transforming colonial texts into objects of cultural agency, artist Jenna Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and Karajarri Saltwater woman with Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian ancestry. With a driving interest in the restitution of language and the deconstruction of colonial narratives, Lee’s attentive practice builds on a foundation of her father’s teachings of culture and her mother’s traditions of papercraft. The colonial texts that are her source material are quite literally sliced or torn, deconstructed to be rebuilt anew. The pages are delicately woven into new cultural and ecological forms; sometimes a dilly bag, or a grass tree, but here, amongst the Sandhurst collection of rare books, as leaves and branches from a Eucalypt.

These leaves and branches are formed from pages of A.W.Reed’s Aboriginal Words and Place Names, a 1960’s compendium that homogenises over 250 diverse Indigenous languages. This cataloguing, as Lee has observed, erases the geographical and cultural significance of these languages.

Lee’s title is borrowed from American linguist William Dwight Whitney’s The life and growth of language published in 1875, a copy of which is held within the Sandhurst collection. Similarly to the other books in the collection, most of which are by English or American authors, there is no reference to the experiences or perspectives of First Nations Australians. As a free library on the Victorian goldfields, the Sandhurst collection represents the formal and self-education practices of the Victorian gold rush era. It also reflects the class, privilege and culture of those whom the library intended to serve.

In 1848 a young British pharmacist named Joseph Bosisto travelled to the goldfields to find his fortune. However, he later turned his attention to the distillation and extraction of Eucalypt oil, or liquid gold as it is also known. His distillery still stands in Richmond, and Bosisto Eucalyptus oil has become a household staple. The oil is contained and distributed within a recognisable amber bottle, an early version of which is present in this installation, supporting Lee’s paper branches. With this subtle intervention into the shelves of the collection, Lee weaves together desperate histories of extraction, uncovering the forces and commodities that have shaped the colony of Victoria. Through this poetic and incisive inclusion of the Eucalypt leaves dispersed amongst the books, Lee invites viewers to reconsider the archive — not as a fixed repository of colonial knowledge, but as a living site for reimagining history, sovereignty, and cultural continuity.

Image: Jenna Lee, The life and growth of language, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Mars Gallery.