My experience and impressions of the culture and art of Australia have been mediated by the works of John Davis, a sculptor living in Melbourne. His work, like those of many other Australian artists, is much influenced by the unique qualities of the land itself. Art critic Ken Scarllet, also of Melbourne, sees a number of qualities as characteristic of the work of Australian artists, but cites the landscape if he were to name just one.

Certainly, the unique evolutionary forms of animals and plant life in Australia cannot fail to have a strong impact on visitors, as does views of the red desert that makes up more than 90% of the country. Our views of this natural environment are indirectly influenced by the culture of the native people of Australia, usually known as the aborigines. The mystic quality of dreamtime, their unique cosmology which is now quite widely known, seems to contribute a special meaning to the Australian landscape.

Most of John Davis' works basically consist of a form constructed of small branches of eucalyptus, a tree native to Australia. Heavy toilet paper and cheap cotton fabric are added, then natural tar, partly to prevent deterioration. The works evoke a myriad of images suggested by the form and the way the tar is applied.

Some of these works are single compositions that stand alone, but most often, installation in groups renders Davis' works all the more characteristic. One can imagine clouds or the moon from the irregular forms and the three-dimensional groupings might suggest the image of a primitive aboriginal settlement. A grouping of something that looks like a fish and another form like a kitchen table brings to mind the paintings our predecessors etched on rock faces or on the ground and invested with supernatural meaning.

Needless to say, it is the impression of the whole when the parts are collectively installed, visible in the light of a certain space and at a certain point in time that is more important than each individual form. In Davis' consciousness or perception, each of the pieces and works become identical to words to be written into the medium of space. This is why John Davis' works (the overall impression of them) resemble narratives.

The narrativity of his works suggests the landscape of Australia and with good reason, for central to Davis' point of view is his admiration for and observations of aboriginal culture for which the landscape is an integral element.

I have once described Davis' constructions of eucalyptus branches and tar painting that make up the basis of his works as "perspective sculpture," likening it to the "perspective drawings" of the aborigines. Davis' works clearly incorporate a narrative perspective similar to that which figures so largely in aboriginal culture, and his exacting installation suggests the influence of the sand painting practised by the northern aborigines.

Davis' works are a fusion of the present and the past, and of European and aboriginal cultures. Davis' stance may have been most clearly expressed in his first private exhibition in Japan (1983/ INAX Gallery/Tokyo). For this exhibition, he created a work shaped like a large boat, titled "A Long Journey." Half of the structure was composed of Australian eucalyptus branches and the heavy toilet paper he always uses and other half of small pieces of bamboo and wood that we had picked up on the seashore in the small ceramics-producing town of Tokoname.

What we saw in this work was not only the idea of using distinctly Australian and Japanese materials for half of the work each. There was a latent objective of evoking from the materials the memories of cultural qualities distinct to each, to be expressed through one work. I do not know where this work is now, but I regard it as one of the best, certainly among John Davis' works and even in the wider context of modern Australian sculpture.

Through a number of Davis' works, I gradually became fascinated by the world of the Australian aborigines. I went to Kakadu National Part in Arnhem Land to see the perspective drawings with their animal and human motifs and even asked a curator to bring works of circle and dot paintings out of storage in central Australia so that I might see them. Totems which were being made as spiritual forms in the Tiwi region of northern Australia until about two hundred years ago are not significant in themselves, but I can recall even today the excitement I felt when I learned that they acquire ceremonial meaning according to their arrangement.

I have also seen some interesting implements for daily life as well as for ceremonies, but they are not very different from those used in the region stretching from Polynesia to Micronesia and further into the cultural spheres of Southeast Asia and New Guinea. I would venture to conclude that the characteristics of Australian aboriginal culture are best represented by their drawings and sculpture (totems) and sand pictures.

I cannot explain each of these in detail here, but I can state with certainty that most of them are created due to narratives, the "dreamtime stories" of the aborigines. To us in the present day and especially to those of us from other cultures, they might be regarded as "just pictures." To the aborigines, however, they are important records (stories) handing down the narratives of their forefathers (the dreamtime stories). In other words, the key to understanding aboriginal culture lies in their cosmology which is represented by the expression "dreamtime." It is this unique cosmology more than anything else that has drawn me to aboriginal culture.

Without dragging out Freud and Jung, we know that our dreams are linked on a subconscious level to our deepest emotions. Dreams may be premonitory, and even when we dream some unimaginable scene, we can guess that it arose from random couplings of our various experiences with our desires. In addition to what we have sensed with our eyes and ears and sense of touch, instinctive qualities and subtle psychological influences from climatic or seasonal conditions as well as the natural environment all become countless fragments of memory that may appear in our "dreams."

If we postulate that dreams are the antithesis of the theorem which we call reality, the position of dreams in modern society might be described as that of something excluded from the mechanisms that govern reality, the reality which functions according to theorems and is itself a theorem. Of course, dreams have been accepted as useful in self-analysis, but as a moving force behind the mechanisms of society in a practical sense, dreams have been excluded as all too personal and irrational.

However, the aborigine people have taken dreams, these anti-theorems, and applied them to the reality of their everyday lives. To express it in a different way, dreams and reality exist side by side, for the aboriginal concept of time seems to me as if it is made up of two different times, that of reality and that of dreams. Yet, they are elements with the same qualities, both having to do with experience, so that the past and the future, both present in dreams, intermingle with present reality.

The aborigines do not have a linear sense of time in which the past is linked to the present and continues on into the future. Rather, it seems as though their sense of time consists of a past, present and future within the same circle. The element uniting this circular sense of time is their dreamtime. It is a narrative sense of time.

D. Geld穎u of the Uilta tribe sought to relate to me a northern cosmology through the narrative of his tribe, and David Grupprill, an Australian aborigine, imparted to me through his voice and dances a cosmology of the southern hemisphere. Both cosmologies with their acute sensitivity of time are lacking in the Tokyo I now live in.

It only happens that I encountered them through the temporal art of performance and my physical being within it. And their mini cosmos simply passed by me like a breeze. However, several seeds of memory were carried on these breezes and were implanted in imperceptible wounds in my invisible cells.

Before I knew it, the wounds began to fester and the seeds are now beginning to sprout, nourished by my blood. The northern seed holds memory as it might hold nectar, and the seed of the southern hemisphere is left as a presentiment of natural life, like salt. The feeling of anticipation seems to be tugging at me, trying to carry me even further into the unknown.