Fishbones

The installation is monumental and marks Mackay's maritime history at the quay, on the Bluewater Trail along the Pioneer River. It is free and public.

Fish bones are a loaded form, and Foley does not choose imagery loosely. A skeleton is what is left after consumption; a monumental one on a wharf, in a sugar port with a difficult labour history, is doing more than decorating a riverfront. Mackay's cane industry was built substantially on South Sea Islander labour brought here under the practice known as blackbirding, and the region has one of the largest Australian South Sea Islander communities in the country.

This entry deliberately does not assign a meaning to the work. Foley's practice rewards close attention and resists summary, and the sources available describe the installation without interpreting it.

Mackay's other oversized objects – the banana at Nashy's, the Scrabble tiles, the cartoon figures at Mulherin Park, the bulldog at the junior league ground – belong to an entirely different tradition from this one.

Nothing available settles its scale, the materials and its age.