Pip McManus is an Alice Springs based ceramic artist who has lived and worked in the NT since 1981. (See her website; see also Helen Light's opening speech).

In the 1940s Critchley Parker junior, a wealthy eccentric with an abiding passion for the development of the Tasmanian frontier, proposed a fanciful scheme for a major re-settlement of Jewish refugees in the wild country around Port Davey. A deluded romantic bent on fulfilling his own neo-biblical prophesies of a ‘New Jerusalem’, Parker disregarded the advice and aspirations of his colleagues, and perished, as the result of his own obsessive failings, in the heart of the Tasmanian wilderness. However well-intentioned, Parker’s plans to create a safe homeland for his Jewish refugees, devoid of conservationist values and more suited to a script from a reality TV survivor program, were doomed, as indeed contemporary Jewish attempts to peacefully settle the Holy Land appear to be. ‘Unpromised Land’ reflects on the links between these two tragic narratives.

Pip McManus 2002

I once lived for a year in a town on the edge of the Suez Canal, close to the apocryphal site where Moses threw back the waters of the Red Sea so as to lead his people out of enslavement under Pharaoh. Just across the narrow waters of the canal lay Sinai, the forbidding wilderness of the forty years wandering. The Old Testament books of Exodus and Ezekiel are heavy with recurrent invocations against polluting oneself by false worship and transgressions against the Mosaic Decalogue. Only by strict observance of the Law shall the people of Israel be delivered from trial and punishment into the Promised Land.

The ‘Holy Land’ today appears less and less able to offer a safe homeland for any of its residents. Sacred land cannot miraculously deliver refuge as long as shared histories and common needs are not acknowledged by all parties.

‘…you cannot have security without good neighbours and we have good neighbours now. We don’t want to see this destroyed’.[1]

In the 1940s Critchley Parker Junior, a wealthy eccentric with an abiding passion for the development of the Tasmanian frontier, proposed a fanciful scheme for a major re-settlement of Jewish refugees in the wild country around Port Davey. A deluded romantic bent on fulfilling his own neo-biblical prophesies of a ‘New Jerusalem’, Parker disregarded the advice and aspirations of his colleagues, and perished, as the result of his own obsessive failings, in the heart of the Tasmanian wilderness. However well-intentioned, Parker’s plans to create a safe homeland for his Jewish refugees, devoid of conservationist values and more suited to a script from a reality TV survivor program, were doomed, as indeed contemporary Jewish attempts to peacefully settle the Holy Land appear to be. ‘Unpromised Land’ reflects on the links between these two tragic narratives.

Thanks to Qug McKendrick King, Lesley Savage, Karina Menkhorst and Helen Collins