“How else do you take stock of it - that it was our reality at all? I’d like to understand it better and in doing so maybe understand a little of why no-one has ever been held to account. It could have something to do with also holding your own family culpable for raising you in a dangerous environment. That’s an uncomfortable position to be in for many people.”

Dr. Sally Rees is an artist who works across both time-based and static forms. She is coming off the back of a ‘hit’ exhibition at MONA. Crone was an exploration of ageing women in society – why they are either invisible or being called witches and likely to be among the more vulnerable members of society.

Sally Rees - Hilltop Spook - video (2013) — Image from Hilltop Spook (video), 2013

“If being angry and speaking out makes you a witch, then I am proud to be one,” she told The Guardian in 2021. “I think we need to embrace being cranky and terrifying. There is power in anger.”

Sally grew up in the suburb of Parklands and provides a snapshot of herself as a twelve year old:

“Go to school. Overachieve. Be oversensitive about everything at the same time. Cry. Go home. Imagine things in my room until it was dinnertime.”

Academically, Sally struggled at Burnie High – a juxtaposition to the ‘overachiever’ narrative in her head. This led to some foggy years, the remedy being to throw herself into extracurricular activities. Sally has since discovered she is a “neuro diverse person.”

In 2014 she returned to Burnie High with her partner Matt Warren (a fellow Dream Burnie artist). Together they took part in a special artist residency.

“That was amazing and quite healing for both of us,” Sally says. “The place we went back to was not the place where we went to school. Everyone was happy. All the kids were smiling and friendly. It wasn’t like that when we were students. Everyone was a bit sulky and miserable. Anyone who had any kind of difficulty was a problem, as opposed to being seen as having a problem and maybe needing a little help.”

Matt and Sally came up with a collaborative video instillation called The Snowman comprising of visuals paired with an interview with a former Tioxide employee. They recreated the white dust that would coat the landscape (and the workers) of the Tioxide chemical plant, often dismissed as ‘harmless’ food-grade titanium dioxide.

The work stirs the curious nostalgia that Sally’s generation holds for the smoggy, polluted Burnie of the seventies and eighties. Time spent on the ‘Burnie Then and Now’ Facebook group reveals a smokestack of warmth for any mentions of the Pulp Mill and Tioxide.

“In my experience, the almost celebratory recollections of Burnie's polluted past strike me as being like people comparing their scars and injuries,” Sally says. “Obviously it would be better for an injury never to have occurred - but maybe what the boastfulness is doing is celebrating the strength in surviving something.”