The Dark Landscapes project works in the tradition that recognises the Gothic nature of the Australian landscape. The Australian Gothic is the focal point of all that is dark and menacing in Australian photography. It suggests the terror latent in the Australian landscape. Often the work in the this tradition is melancholy, ghostly, dismal, fear inspiring and gloomy. It expresses the uncanny in the familiar.
Our history is one in which we have largely destroyed landscapes that have existed for about 70 million years, which is many times longer than the eurocentric ideal of a northern European fields, conifers and weeds of the colonisers. European civilisation rests upon the colonisers driving the indigenous peoples of their country, torturing their souls, and destroying their culture.
And this is why we are brooding. The darkened bush of the remnants of nature simply reminds us of this horror. It is a place of trauma that draws on the tension between seeing and not seeing events and places of trauma and memory. Some of the photographs are taken in the act of a return to a location after something has happened, and in response to traces of events in the landscape. It is a late photography.
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