Diana Baker Smith
The Dust of this Place
Digital video
2026 (in development)

The Dust of this Place draws on the story of the Irish convict and settler Henry Browne Hayes, who in the early nineteenth century shipped more than a hundred tonnes of Irish peat, bog and soil to Sydney and laid it in a trench around his house at Vaucluse. Intended to repel snakes, this imported earth reveals how myth, belief and colonial anxieties became materially inscribed in the landscape.

The work brings together scenes filmed in the gardens of Vaucluse House with footage gathered along the coastline and surrounding landscape of County Cork, where Hayes was from and where the soil was likely shipped. Moving between the quiet, cyclical labour of gardeners, the ground and coastlines of Cork, and a folkloric voice-over retelling Hayes’s story, The Dust of this Place reflects on the movement of earth across oceans and the symbolic power attributed to land, where soil emerges as both material and metaphor, shaped by histories of memory, displacement and colonial attempts to control unfamiliar environments.

The Dust of this Place has been developed during the Vaucluse House Creative and Cultural Residency, Museums of History NSW (2025–26).