Rachel Hine

Rachel Hine
Australian, born 1971

Heard not the voice of a bird 2020
wool, silk, metallic yarn and cotton
Geelong Gallery
Purchased with funds generously provided by Christine Bell, Geelong Contemporary and the Sybil Craig Bequest Fund, 2020

Geelong-based artist Rachel Hine uses the ancient medium of tapestry to depict her protagonists in unfixed and dreamlike scenarios.

This work takes its title from a line of prose in the 1866 poem Australian Babes in the Wood—an account of the nine-day disappearance and search for the three Duff children in the Wimmera bushland of north-east Victoria. The trio were found alive by local Indigenous trackers, who heard the children’s voices travelling through the harsh Wimmera scrub: 

... And a sudden start shook the tracker’s heart.
As the echo came—‘Quite–quite right’;
For he thought he heard not the voice of a bird,
But the voice of children dear.