A note from playwright John Doyle:

Vere came about by accident. I was ambling about Wentworth Falls on a lunch break working on a documentary and got talking to a gardener working in the grounds of a very nice house. He informed me the house was where Vere Gordon Childe lived. I had never heard of him, so set about finding out.

He was a remarkable fellow as it turned out. Is considered the Father of Archaeology. He chose to end his life at the Grose Valley, at virtually the same point where Charles Darwin had stood almost a century earlier and realised that there were not two Creations - one on the northern hemisphere and one earlier in the southern, but the answer was that the Earth was a lot older than he had ever imagined for those small streams to cut such vast gorges.  

This set me off thinking about the human journey. 

Vere [Faith] is therefore an exploration of the human journey: what is it exactly that makes us human?


Some facts about Vere Gordon Childe (pictured above during the excavation of Skara Brae in 1927):

He was better known as V. Gordon Childe

He was born in Sydney in 1892 to an English family, and educated at first the University of Sydney then later at the University of Oxford

He was a passionate and vocal socialist, and his political views sometimes limited his access to academic work opportunities

He apparently had a penchant for wearing a red tie that was an outward indication of his political leanings

He also is reported to have enjoyed wearing very short shorts with socks, sock suspenders and large boots during warm weather

He travelled widely and spoke several European languages

He never married and was widely regarded as an eccentric

He loathed (and was not particularly skilled at) performing excavations, but was instead recognised for his superior ability to interpret evidence

His most famous excavation was of a Neolithic village in Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland from 1927 to 1930, which was the topic of one of his many books

He was Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh from 1927 to 1946, co-founder and president of the Prehistoric Society and director of the Institute of Archeology from 1946 until his death

He died in 1957 when he committed suicide by jumping off a cliff in the Blue Mountains

He is mentioned in the film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

By Alex Lalak

Vere [Faith], 6 November - 7 December, 2013.