history – Page 4 – Thought Factory

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…

Art, critical writing, history

Brisbane photography circa 1993

January 30, 2016

I have never seen any copies of Doug Spowart’s Photo.Graph that was published in the 1990s or the earlier News Sheet apart from a post on the Brisbane Photography Scene 1993 written by Ian Poole on the wotwedid blog that Spowart runs with Victoria Cooper. It’s a pity because Photo.Graph was designed to fill a gap in the discussion, critique and commentary about a segment of the photography discipline within Australia.

Carl Warner, untitled, 1996/1997

Poole is a familiar figure in photographic culture because he is a cross over between an advertising /commercial photographer (20 years) and an exhibiting art photographer. Familiar in the sense that art photography in the 1970s and 1980s was kicked started by advertising /commercial photographer starting to teach at art schools and private photography schools. Athol Smith and John Cato in Melbourne are good examples of this figure. Poole is different to them in that he had a post-graduate degree in visual arts from Griffith University. So he is well placed to assess Brisbane photography in the early 1990s.

The article is starting point for a discussion about Queensland contemporary art photo practice and its a survey of events by the individual commercial and art photographers working in Brisbane and Queensland in 1993 –their exhibitions, travels, plans and books– just over a decade before the formation of the Queensland Centre of Photography. One of the photographers mentioned by Poole was Marion Drew. Others were Carl Warner and Richard Stringer. All are currently practising. What the article indicates is that photography was flourishing in the city of Brisbane in the early 1990s under the Labor government of Wayne Goss. The corruption that had gone on so long under a National Party Government of Bjelke-Petersen in the Moonlight State was in the past. Brisbane was no longer a big country town.

colour, film, history, landscape

Traumatic history

January 25, 2016

This picture made in the Namadgi National Park is from the dark landscapes projected it is of a traumatic event–the Canberra bush fire. It is also a place of collective memory of the Canberra bushfire of 2003, which was the first confirmed case of a fire tornado in Australia, in which 4 people died, 490 were injured, over 500 homes destroyed, and 164,000 hectares burnt. That burnt area was close to 70% of the Territories total area.

burnt tree, Namadgi National Park

It is a site of traumatic history, and it is a photograph made of a place at which the bushfire event occurred over a decade before. As a photographer I came late to the scene and what is photographed is the remaining traces of the bush fire in the landscape. It is a photograph that was taken in a return to a location or site in the Namadgi National Park after the bush fire has happened, and it is made in response to the traces of this event in the landscape. Continue Reading…

coastal, colour, film, history, landscape

Fleurieuscapes + the Indigenous absence

November 26, 2015

I’ve started working on my forthcoming Fleuriescapes exhibition at the Magpie Springs Gallery in January/February 2016. The exhibition explores the Fleurieu Peninsula in terms of people, space and place as this opens up a way to gain a perspective on the white colonisation of the region and the contemporary Indigenous absence. The exhibition is the first step in this project about a region that markets itself as Adelaide’s holiday adventure playground.

The history of the Fleurieu Peninsula appears to be premised on the pioneer myth/legend based on the ingenuity hard work and adventurousness of the early settlers and the cultural extinction of the Ngarrindjeri people. An anthropologically constructed image of a southern Indigenous person in a possum skin cloak in the South Australian Museum comes to represent a ‘unique’, but extinct Indigenous presence in the heartland of the white Australian nation.

Starfish Hill

The story of modernity excludes Indigenous people. It produces a set of foundational myths that are written by signs of development such as the bridge, the jetty and the marina. They all represent the power of western technology to overwrite the ‘natural landscape’. This is the landscape in which Indigenous people and Indigenous interests have been traditionally located. It is assumed that the Indigenous place has been obliterated or covered over by the layers of progress. Continue Reading…

Older Posts

Newer Posts