$60,000 goanna sculpture all paid-up with nowhere to go

A DISAGREEMENT over the site for a $60,000 Lismore City Council art project has left the finished work virtually abandoned on a Tabulam property for five years.

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE: Artist Keith Cameron, pictured at his South Tabulam property. Picture: Patrick Gorbunovs

A DISAGREEMENT over the site for a $60,000 Lismore City Council heritage art project has left the finished work virtually abandoned on a Tabulam property for five years.

The five-metre goanna sculpture constructed by Tabulam artist Keith Cameron was commissioned in 2008 in consultation with the local Aboriginal community and half-funded with a NSW Aboriginal Heritage grant.

Mr Cameron was paid $17,000 for the sculpture, but it was never collected, apparently due to an unresolved dispute within the local Bundjalung Elders Council.

Its intended home was the strip of parkland outside Lismore Tourist Information Centre.

But Mr Cameron said one of the elders had strongly disagreed with the goanna being installed with Lismore because of its totemic connection to Evans Head.

Part of the $60,000 included funds for consultation with Aboriginal elders and historians, lighting, installation and information panels.

The goanna is sitting in Mr Cameron's hilltop sculpture park at South Tabulam.

Mr Cameron said he had never heard back from the council after notifying them the work was ready for installation. "I've had no contact from council at all, not a letter, not a phone call. Nothing," Mr Cameron said.

"If they bought a car off me and hadn't come and picked it up someone would be jumping up and down, wouldn't they?"

Lismore mayor Jenny Dowell said she first learnt of the disagreement in the Elders Council in 2008 after the work had already been completed.

"That's when a couple of the Aboriginal elders raised the whole issue that it should not be in Lismore because the totem of the goanna is closely linked with the people of Evans Head," she said.

"Council had previously worked with members of the local Aboriginal people in Lismore and understood that everything was okay.

"Shortly after that the general manager of the time (Paul O'Sullivan) and I went to Bundjalung Elders Council… and said 'we have a problem and we want your advice'.

"Within the elders council there were very different views."