Rosetta Stone

Ashfield’s Rosetta Stone was today installed, set and bolted to a galvanised steel cradle, outside Thirning Villa, a late Georgian villa set among tennis courts, a bowling club and a cricket ground, all of which were once orchards of the A’Beckett family.

Rosetta Stone by Ian Marr, installed at Pratten Park, Ashfield

The stone bears an inscription in nine languages of a fragment from Homer’s Iliad – ‘No stranger shall go empty from our door, for we ourselves have eaten the bread of strangers in other lands”.

The work is a foundation work for a sculpture garden associated with the Ashfield Council’s Artist-in-Residence program.

It floats as though it was a significant treasure from deep antiquity: which one day it may be.

Rosetta Stone detail, by Ian Marr, installed at Pratten Park, Ashfield