Palm Tree Love

Palm Tree Love

Palm Tree Love gathers 11 Gippsland artists, alongside works from the Latrobe Regional Gallery collection, each responding to the poetics, memories and interpersonal and inventive relationships formed around regional landmarks. Across an array of sculpture, painting, text, photography, mural and sound the exhibition explores how these artists have witnessed and interpreted change across the Latrobe Valley, Gippsland and regional Australia. Each of the works imaginatively explores township and the vessels of a landmark’s identity and character. Some landmarks are iconic and widely known; others are niche, held only in generational memory or passed down through communal stories and limited texts.

At the centre of Palm Tree Love stands the story of the Twin Palm Trees of Morwell; a Morwell landmark composed of two iconic figures once rising proudly from the ridge above Morwell Butter Factory (circa 1890). Their silhouettes marking a place where industry, community and farm landscapes once intertwined. Furthermore, featured within works from the LRG collection – Bill Young’s Spirit of Morwell (1990), Colin Suggett’s Greetings from Electric Valley (1979) and Geoff Robinson’s Turn Right at the Palm Trees (2015).

For generations, these palms became familiar companions. Locals recall seeing them from the road leading up the ridge from the butter factory near the factory’s manager’s quarters – associating their presence with the past. The factory was active until its abrupt and tragic end by fire in circa 1929, with the manager’s residence lost in around 1944. Yet the palms remained steadfast, unburnt and unaffected by the shifting fortunes around them. In 2014, one of the palms was vandalised and felled, leaving a single palm to stand alone.

This communal tragedy was met by a monumental commemoration and tribute by the people who grew up with these trees. The remaining palm tree now overlooks the M1 Princes Freeway on one side and the train tracks on the other. It remains a witness to Morwell’s changing identity; a landmark shaped as much by endurance as by loss.

At its core, Palm Tree Love asks what a landmark is, how it is perceived across time, and how politics of space shape its meaning. It considers how towns shift through politics, gentrification, social pressures, industrial development and the evolving lives of the people who inhabit them. Rather than inviting grief or nostalgia, the exhibition reflects on how we persevere through change—how we map out place, identify points of interest and cultivate belonging.

Bill Young,Spirit of Morwell, 1990, Acrylic on board, 183 x 480 cm, Latrobe Regional Gallery Collection, commissioned by the City of Morwell, 1990.