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A recreational lake in the Mallee

May 15, 2016

One of the side trips on the Mallee Highway silo photoshoot in Victoria was to look for, and scope, edgelands around Ouyen to continue part two of the project. I did this on the last day when it was bright and sunny and of no use to me for taking photos of silos with a large format camera. Bright and sunny is normal in the Victorian Mallee, with overcast days being the exception. From my travelling around I could see that the Mallee is a specialist grain growing areas diversifying from livestock production (sometime in the 1980s).

I spend the Wednesday morning driving around the boundaries of the town and I stumbled on this behind the golf course just over a kilometre form the centre of town:

felled trees, Ouyen

It wasn’t private land so I wandered around to have a look. The trees were being felled so that large basin could be dug out. I kept on walking around to discover why a basin here. A sign lying on the side of the road said that this basin that was under construction was for a man made recreational lake. It’s ambitious as it 700 metres long by 200 metres wide, with a depth of five metres when full, and it will cover about 14 hectares. Continue Reading…

colour, digital, history, landscape, ruins, topographics

at Lake Albert

April 10, 2016

After attending the Centre of Culture, Land and Sea’s informative workshop at Meningie in South Australia. I used the opportunity to explore around Lake Albert and the Narrung Peninsula with its legacy of settler agriculture before driving on down to Salt Creek for a photoshoot for the Edgelands project.

Lake Albert, along with Lake Alexandrina, is a part of the Lower Lakes of the River Murray, and is adjacent to the northern lagoon’s eco-system of the Coorong. Being at the bottom end of the highly engineered River Murray, Lake Albert suffers from the river’s minimal environmental flows. Those at the terminus of the River Murray receive what is left over after consumptive use in the Murray-Darling Basin.

Though the Barrages at Goolwa were constructed to maintain the Lakes as freshwater systems at a constant water depth, the Lakes/Coorong region is at the end of a major river systems, which means that this region is highly sensitive to changes in freshwater flows. Despite the Basin Plan, which has addressed the overallocation of water from the Basin’s rivers by irrigated agriculture, not enough fresh water currently flows into Lake Albert to flush the lake out, so it is salty, and all the contaminants from the upper part of the river end up in Lake Albert.

Lake Albert, South Australia

The irrigators around Lake Albert suffered from a lack of water during the Millennium Drought (from 2002- 2010)—-when Lake Albert was closed off from natural river flows by a Government constructed band at the entrance top the Lake. Exposure and oxidation of acid sulfate soils due to falling water levels from 2007-2009 in the Lower River Murray and Lower Lakes also resulted in acidification of soils, lake and ground water. The low water levels on Lake Albert resulted in many of the dairy farmers, who had relied on pumped water from Lake Albert, being forced to sell their cattle and even abandon their dairy farms. Continue Reading…

coastal, film, history, landscape

a road trip with an 8×10

March 29, 2016

I am planning a large-format road trip to the Coorong where I work the 8×10 Cambo monorail, black and white film, and one 300mm normal lens. I will also have a 5×4 field camera with me to use with colour film and for when I am walking through the wetlands. The photo trip is to build material for the second part of the Edgelands project.

I will attend a workshop at Meningie run by the Centre for Culture, Land and Sea on the ecological state of the River Murray and Coorong on Sunday 3rd April. I will then drive to, and base myself at Salt Greek for 3 days. The work from this roadtrip will be part of a group exhibition at the South Coast Regional Arts Centre (in the historic Old Goolwa Police Station building). The exhibition is a part of the Alexandrina Council’s 2016 ‘Just Add Water’ program.

melaleuca, Coorong

Before you think a road trip with an 8×10 monorail is crazy, here is a precedent from the 1980s: then Doug Spowart (using a Sinar P 8×10) and Maris Rusis (he was Queensland’s only committed 10×8 image-making practitioner at the time) did a road trip from Brisbane to Canberra, Kosciuszko and Suggan Buggan in the late 1980’s with 8×10 monorails. Continue Reading…

history, landscape, nature, topographics

Land Dialogues

March 23, 2016

There is a forthcoming conference on Land Dialogues at the Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia. It is an interdisciplinary approach to place/space and human/non-human convergence discourses. The conference blurb says that this involves the following themes:

(1) Analysis or application of existing or emergent dialogues with land in indigenous, pre-colonial, post-colonial and anti-colonial contexts.(2) Explorations of the limits (or perceived limits) of sustainment principles, sustainabilities, ecologies and agriculture.(3) New/Old Frontiers, Land and the Digital and explorations of, or reflections on potentials for new topographies including data visualisations in relationship to land. (4) Experimental or experiential works or non-standard items including exhibition or performance towards dialogue with land.

Theme (4) includes a photographic exhibition that is curated by James Farley entitled Land Dialogues – Contemporary Australian Photography (in Dialogues with Land). The Photographers involved include Christine McFetridge, Kate Robertson, Renata Buziak, James Farely, Chris Orchard, Jacob Raupach, Felix Wilson, Carolyn Young and Amy Findlay. However, it is unclear what kind of dialogue with the land these photographers are engaged in since there is no curatorial statement online apart from the general statement that photographers involved are exploring and reevaluating how the Australian community identifies, represents and values the spaces that we create and occupy. Surprisingly, there no abstracts of the conference papers online.

Currently we have a vacuum about the nature of dialogues with nature in contemporary photography within the gallery system that was once premised on the modernist divide of nature and culture as mutually exclusive. Nature was landscape rather than country, and nature existed in a repressed state in the galleries through the 1980s and early 1990s. So what kind of dialogues with nature are happening in the second decade of the 21st century, given that agricultural industrialisation, which was an early cornerstone of Australian modernity, has left us with parched catchment areas, salt encrusted soil and degraded rivers?

My own work in the Edgelands project —here and here —-can be considered to be a dialogue with the land as opposed to country. This image of the Murrumbidgee River near Hay is an example:

Murrumbidgee River

The Murrumbidgee River runs through Wagga Wagga and it is the second largest source of water flows into the Murray-Darling system. The 1,600 km long river is ranked as one of the two least ecologically healthy of 23 tributary rivers in the Basin. Lake Burley Griffin, which is a part of the upper Murrumbidgee, is pretty much a fetid carp pond. By the mid 1970s, almost all of the water in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area had been allocated to irrigators, and today we are seeing an example of river system collapse with the signs of an ecological disaster are all too clear.

architecture, landscape, topographics

at Andamooka

March 14, 2016

The blurb for Lars Heldmann’s fascinating ouThere photography exhibition at the South Coast Regional Art Gallery (Old Goolwa Police Station) of the mining towns and landscapes in and around Roxby Downs , Andamooka and Cooper Pedy in northern South Australia says that the images in the exhibition “give us access to the remote and vast interior, which is in contrast to our living environment along the coast and interior waters.” It is an interesting attempt to uncover the missing narratives of our regional pastas well as a search for things that many of us in Adelaide did not know existed. The art works of this region are few and far between. I know of no reclamation art that has been produced by the visual arts community, or any rehabilitation work done by landscape architects.

The ouThere exhibition reminded me of my images of Andamooka. So I went back to the archive and had a look at the images that were probably made around the beginning of the 21st century. We spent several days at Andamooka, but we never took the opportunity to go on to explore Lake Torrens National Park to the east, nor drive north to Marree, which is at the junction of the Oodnadatta Track and the Birdsville Track. The reason was that we were tourists, travelling in a little Ford Laser, without access to a 4 wheel drive.

petrol pump, Andamooka

The odd image from my Andamooka work has made its way into the Regional Landscapes: South Australia and Edgelands portfolios.

I didn’t see this part of South Australia as the unknown or the Australian Outback. People live and work here. For instance, the nearby town of Woomera was a military town, whilst Roxby Downs and Andamooka are mining landscapes and towns –industrial and pre-industrial. Andamooka, at that time, was more or less, a declining shanty town with abandoned mining shafts, since the opal field was mined out during the 1970’s. There was little sign of the Aboriginal people who would have had a long-standing connection with the area. Continue Reading…

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