What is Kandos Trace Garden?

Kandos Trace Garden is an infinitely-generating poem based on historical and contemporary texts from Kandos.

The poem works by accessing a hand-made database of text snippets from books, historical documents, field notes, interviews, museum information, and more that have been collected in Kandos. An algorithm then pulls individual words from this database into a poem, where you can click on sections to discover where they came from.

As long as you have this page open, new lines of the poem will continue to appear, creating an inter-textual reimagining of all the written material about Kandos. Like a collage of words, this poem aims to highlight surprising, entertaining and thought-provoking connections within the diverse contexts of the town and its wider relations.

We invite you to use this generator to create your own Kandos poetry. By going to the Make a poem page you can ‘favourite’ lines you like to build your own ode to Kandos and its history.

Trace Garden was created by Rory Green and Hannah Jenkins for Cementa, a bi-annual contemporary arts festival in Kandos NSW.

Wiradjuri Language in Trace Garden

This project is indebted to the North East Wiradjuri Cultural Centre in Kandos for their guidance, knowledge and resources concerning Aboriginal history and language in the area. The output of Kandos Trace Garden is written in English, a language that has been used to promote, enforce and justify colonial violence in many regions and continues to be used to obfuscate history and exclude Aboriginal perspectives from national narratives.

Wiradjuri, like many Australian Aboriginal languages, is a “free word order language”, which means that conceptions of the world, time and relationships, and the way they are communicated, are incompatible with Western languages (Grant & Rudder).

We have made the decision to include individual Wiradjuri words within the references of this poem, where possible and appropriate, as a way of acknowledging the significance of this language, instead of including them within the output of the poem where they would inevitably appear in incorrect configurations with English words.

This is intended to provide an opportunity for readers to begin or continue their own learning of Wiradjuri culture, history and language, and we encourage you to visit the North East Wiradjuri Cultural Centre in Kandos.