Andrew Hazewinkel

Commissioned by the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, this 15 minute film was created as the centerpiece of the exhibition and accompanying publication What The Sea Never Told. At the invitation to develop a major work for solo presentation by the then gallery director Danny Lacy, Hazewinkel began to work with a local story that he had known since boyhood and that continues to haunt the seaside community that he grew up in, Morninton.

Conceived as a ephemeral monument, the artist considers the video a companion piece to the stone monument that overlooks the harbour, at the end of the township's Main Street. From the age of six, on his way to and from school, Hazewinkel walked past the marble monument that memorializes the lives of fifteen young men and boys who in 1892 lost their lives by drowning together in the waters that define the community which lives at its shore.

Hazewinkel  spent his boyhood, adolescence and emergent manhood living in Mornington. Through those formative years he swam at the same beaches and in the same creeks, walked the same cliff paths, snorkelled the same reefs, climbed some of the same trees and sailed the same waters as the fifteen drowned young men. In this way he has always felt a special kind of kinship with them and this is from where his impulse to make this work originates.

The project and this film’s title is drawn from a small book titled Love’s Tribute, or What The Sea Never Told written by Alice Caldwell who lost three brothers in the tragedy.