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Wild Flowers

In transparent specimen bags, arranged in a circle, float Lemon Myrtle, Warrigal Greens, and Red Bottle Brush. Alongside, flora incarnate, coil dancers Yara Xu, Benjamin Garret, and Montana Ruben. But it is more than skin deep. The flowers are the dancers, and the dancers are the flowers. Zeak Tass is Kangaroo Paw, Emily Flannery is Red Waratah, Kassidy Waters is Flowering Gum, and Elijah Trevitt is Red Banksia. On the opening night of the world premiere of Frances Rings’s “Flora,” a collaboration between the Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre, at the Regent Theatre in Melbourne/Naarm, specimens have been uprooted and are being dried, and in the process, they are becoming artefacts. The living is being collected, the harm of which is forever felt.

Performance

The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Ballet: “Flora” by Frances Rings

Place

The Regent Theatre, Melbourne/Naarm, Australia, March 12, 2026

Words

Gracia Haby

The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre in “Flora” by Frances Rings. Photograph by Kate Longley

“10 Days” references the specimens collected by Sir Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, from which botanical illustrator, Sydney Parkinson, completed 674 detailed drawings, with notes on their colour, and 269 watercolour illustrations. Banks collected specimens over several months in 1770 during Lieutenant James Cooks’ first voyage to Australia from England. 1400 flora specimens were “ripped from their native Story and their cultural home.”[1] Like the fauna collected alongside the flora, such collections today reveal a loss of diversity. Revealing the process of Banks and Solander’s ‘discovery’ in this manner, the separation of First Nations meaning, and Indigenous knowledge systems, the collection burns beneath the spotlight. For these specimens were first removed from place and then separated from meaning. On a stage white like the parchment of the page, Tass and Waters duck and weave, as they search for the breeze that once circled their forms, and the sun overhead that once enabled them to photosynthesise. As the specimen sleeves are removed, their rectangular silhouettes remain illuminated on the stage with a tomb-like quality. Only this time, importantly, the ten flora specimens have been selected for their particular significance to First Nations peoples. 

The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre in “Flora” by Frances Rings. Photograph by Kate Longley

The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre in “Flora” by Frances Rings. Photograph by Kate Longley

Once collected, specimens were given names that pertained to the ‘discoverer’—the genus Banksia is named after Banks—and placed according to a Western taxonomic system. Trevitt as Red Banksia attempts to resist this classification as they extend the stem of their arm overhead. As if to say, this way of recording does not include the medicinal nor edible role of plants, nor the ceremonial neither, Ruben as Red Bottle Brush gives one last holistic shake. The hierarchical framework does not include a plant’s vital resources for shelter, clothing, and tools, in the enmeshed kin-ship of flora. Some plants are passage markers, others, place markers, and all, one way or another, are friends, in our collective role as stewards for tomorrow. Instead, in the Western classification of species, some were named after their appearance, or Western-ascribed usage, like the Sydney Golden Wattle (Acacia Longifolia) named ‘wattle’ as in “to weave” after the ‘wattle and daub’ buildings constructed by settlers using interwoven rods of wattle plastered with mud (daub). The “Dharawal people call [this plant] namaraag. When the flowers appear it means burri burri (whales) are on the move and mullet are ready to be caught. When the trees are heavily in flower, tailor fish are ready to catch. Wattle seeds [in turn] can be prepared and crushed to add to other seeds for flavouring damper.”[2] 

Jill Ogai as Golden Wattle announces seasonal change and jubilation “when the pollinators arrive and when ants feed on nectar.”[3] She shines accordingly, before being cloaked in a black dress, which descends from the rafters and conceals her radiant spirit. A spray of fluffy wattle blossoms in her hair, a bright marker of resilience. “Golden Wattle” addresses the disconnect between being declared an emblem of Australia and Section 127 of the Constitution which, prior to the 1967 Referendum, stated that “in reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.”[4] 

The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre in “Flora” by Frances Rings. Photograph by Kate Longley

The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre in “Flora” by Frances Rings. Photograph by Kate Longley

In the first full-length collaboration, commissioned by the Australian Ballet, everything flows in a custodianship about renewal and balance.[5] In an ecological timeline bigger than you or me, beneath the cracked clay in “Sleeping Yams,” perspective is also altered. The stage reveals itself to be a cross-section of a subterranean world of interconnected roots and ancestral songlines. Overhead, five sleeping yams, Tamara Bouman, Brett Chynoweth, Adam Elmes, Trevitt, and Callum Linnane, awaken. One by one, they extend an arm, rotate their head, and huddle. Suspended by cables, they gently unfurl, and it is magical to behold that which is typically hidden from my view. Whether in ribbon-like extension or folded like a teardrop with legs raised overhead, tucked in the warmth of the earth, both songlines and plant matter. “Plants are Country through songlines and story, carrying knowledge about how to keep our lands and seas healthy.”[6] And like all good collaborations, where one company ends, and the other begins, is impossible to say, such is the successful entanglement. 

The “Bush Flowers,” at the close of “Flora,” chime to colourful, hopeful bloom, with thanks to William Barton’s layered and original score, sprung from the flexibility, the dual strength and fragility, of the sinews of a kangaroo. The pleated vibrancy of bush flowers, in exquisite costumes by Grace Lillian Lee, is shown in a new context: in place, returned. Courtney Radford’s Regeneration solo crackles as the fire cools and new growth sparks, a beacon of what is possible. A luminosity, rooted to the earth and “in perpetuity. For a living relationship with native plants supports not just survival but [signals a] commitment to hope, healing, and the building of a healthy and sustainable future.”[7] Plants guide us all, if we let them.

Gracia Haby

Using an armoury of play and poetry as a lure, Gracia Haby is an artist besotted with paper. Her limited edition artists’ books, and other works hard to pin down, are often made collaboratively with fellow artist, Louise Jennison. Their work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia and state libraries throughout Australia to the Tate (UK). Gracia Haby is known to collage with words as well as paper.

footnotes

  1. “Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) removes hundreds of species from their natural environment . . . Banks’ ‘discovery’ is the largest collection of its kind at the time.” “Flora” printed synopsis, The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre, Melbourne/Naarm, 2026.
  2. “Knowing Plants,” a project by the National Museum of Australia in collaboration with the Eastern Zone Gujaga Aboriginal Corporation, National Museum Australia, https://nma.gov.au/av/endeavour/plants/#Plant, accessed March 13, 2026. 
  3. “Golden Wattle,” “Flora” printed synopsis, The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre, Melbourne/Naarm, 2026.
  4. Though the Constitution is “a living document,—which continues to shape Australia—[it] is notoriously difficult to change. Since 1901, 19 referendums have proposed 44 changes to the Constitution; only eight changes have been agreed to.” ‘The 1967 Referendum’, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/1967-referendum, accessed March 13, 2026.
  5. “Flora” marks the fourth major collaboration between the companies and the first under their current artistic directors. Building on nearly three decades of shared creative history, from “Rites” (1997) to “Warumuk — in the dark night” (2012), “Flora” signals a new era in the relationship between two of Australia’s most influential cultural institutions. The Australian Ballet media release, January 22, 2026.
  6. “Time, Knowledge, People, Story,” The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre “Flora” programme, 2026, 15.
  7. “Bush Flowers,” “Flora” printed synopsis, The Australian Ballet and Bangarra Dance Theatre, Melbourne/Naarm, 2026.

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