Selki, The Mother of ‘The Forest of the Fallen’

ByMichael Gray Griffith 09/10/202609/10/2026

In a cold park near Launceston, we were asked to come and see a project a woman named Selki was doing.
In this park, laminated sheets of A4 paper were stuck to the ends of thin bamboo poles that had been planted in the ground.
On the sheets were images of people who had been injured or killed by the vaccine.
Selki initially gathered these stories from the Died Suddenly pages on Facebook, where they had been submitted by the person who had been injured, or by a family member or friend.

This was installation art—probably the most powerful piece I’d ever seen. The way the people’s faces and stories blew in the breeze, and the way people checking the stories out did so with silence and reverence, all of it hit home.

For the initial interview I called it the Forest of the Fallen, and the name has stuck.
Since then the forest has been replanted all over Australia by an army of volunteer planters. At its height there would be up to one hundred and fifty planted on any given Saturday.

But who is Selki? Well, this is one of the interviews I recorded with her. And I don’t think she will ever receive the adulation she deserves, but she is, without doubt, a great humanitarian and the greatest installation artist in Australian history.

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