Category Archives: Human landscapes

Damn (monumental masonry)

Damn (monumental masonry)

Damn (monumental masonry) Click to view larger image

The Snowy Scheme entailed the construction of some 16 dams across the mountains, ranging in size from the  huge (Eucumbene, with a capacity of nearly five billion cubic metres) to the tiny (Deep Creek, capacity just five thousand cubic metres). Construction took 20 years, with work on the first (Guthega) starting in 1950, and the last (Talbingo) not completed until 1970.

They now form a prominent, perhaps dominant, feature of the mountain landscape, especially seen when flying over the region. They now fill river valleys that were previously home to remote alpine rivers.  Mountain forests, fine farming country (e.g. where the Blowering Dam now sits), whole towns (‘Old’ Adaminaby and ‘Old’ Jindabyne) have been inundated to achieve the goals of the Scheme.

For this image, I’ve put the names of the sixteen onto a hillside looking out to the snow-covered Crackenback and Main Ranges, looking a little like monumental masonry. The windmill suggests an alternative technology for generating power and pumping irrigation waters.

Monaro Merino Ngarigo Snow Hydro

Monaro Merino Ngarigo Snow Hydro Country

Monaro Merino Ngarigo Snow Hydro Click to view larger image

The base photograph for this image was taken on The Arable Road, just at its junction with the Cooma-Jindabyne Road near the Cooma Airport. The ‘real’ sign marks the boundary of the ‘Brookfield Park’ property.

Like the Cooma Welcomes You image, it was inspired by another sign, whose message is “Monaro Merino Country”. I’ve made a few additions to that message (there could have been more) to allow for some alternative designations of the land.

Watson’s Crags

Watson's Crags - No message

Watson’s Crags – No message Click to view larger image

Watson’s Crags lie on the steep western side of the Kosciuszko Main Range, between Mt Twynam and Mt Townsend.

It’s a rugged and rarely visited part of the mountains, several hours walking or skiing from the nearest road or ski-lift access. In Winter some intrepid skiers brave the steep slopes, and in summer a very occasional bushwalker, but mostly it’s left undisturbed by humans. Unlike much of the region, people have made no claim to the land, don’t try to ‘make use of it’, and are content to just let it ‘be’.

So if this land could speak, I imagine that it would talk with its own voice, unsullied by any accretions of human aspiration or ambition. In this image, a massive billboard has been constructed to allow the land to speak to us with its own voice, and its message is…. “No Message”.

This image relates to an earlier “No message” billboard, this time sited on the other side of Mt Townsend. Click here to view it.

Cooma Welcomes You

Cooma Welcomes You

Cooma Welcomes You Click to view larger image

The road down through the Monaro towards Cooma is lined with innumerable advertising billboards, navigational signposts and ‘Welcome to…’ signs. My favourite is a sign which simply declares: “Monaro Merino Country”. It’s straightforward, unequivocal, indeed perhaps a little blunt. This is sheep country.

The passing motorist is left with no doubt about how they should regard the landscape that expands before them as they head south – the gold and brown treeless plains and the undulating wooded hills, with here and a view to the more distant ridges and peaks of the Great Dividing Range. Alternate readings of the land are not countenanced – or even acknowledged.

A little further south, and on the other side of the road, beside a long straight line of old power transmission poles, is another sign to warmly advise all and sundry that “Cooma Welcomes You”. Similar signs can be found on the outer perimeters of most towns, and are probably a world-wide phenomenon. (“Pyongyang Welcomes You”?) But I’ve always been puzzled by these all-encompassing, anonymous messages of civic goodwill, because I’m sure that there are people who are NOT welcome in Cooma (or other places), and to say otherwise is frankly misleading.

In this image, I’ve inserted another, more enigmatic sign, with the slightly cryptic assertion (as a billboard within the billboard) that this is in fact ‘Vacant Land’. All claims on the land, all claims of possession, control or exclusive usage are rejected, as this is Terra nullius. (But if this were indeed the case, who would have the authority to erect such a sign?!)

Wilderness

Wilderness

Wilderness Click to view larger image

What we now refer to as “The Snowy Mountains” region was once, and for tens of thousands of years, the exclusive domain of indigenous people. In particular it was home to the Ngarigo, but was also visited for seasonal feasting on the Bogong Moths by people of the Ngunnawal, Wiradjuri, Jaimathang, and Walgalu (and perhaps other more distant groups also).

Now the area is used for a range of purposes, which are often in competition or open conflict over their respective claims to the land. It is a place of wilderness parkland, winter skiing and summer bike riding, heritage and commercial development, irrigation storage and hydro-electricity generation, pastoralists and tourists, all alongside each other. The land is marked by evidence of their various pursuits – pipes and dams, ski lifts and feral pigs (and horses and rabbits etc), fences and fire trails, mountain huts and luxury resorts.

In this image, looking down to Thredbo Village from near the top of the Crackenback chairlift, adventure sport and wilderness are placed side-by-side, metaphorically sharing the same lift up the mountain. Down below, at the out-of-focus resort, a giant Bogong Moth rests on the ground as if on a helicopter landing site.

Battlesheep

Battlesheep

Battlesheep (Click to view larger image)

In this rural landscape (photographed just to the east of Dalgety, near the Black Range Road junction) I wanted to give equal space to two quite different relationships to the Monaro landscape: that of the pastoralist European settlers and that of the former occupier-custodians of the land – the Ngarigo people.

Neither people appear directly in the image, but are represented respectively by the sheep on the land and the Bogong Moth-clouds in the sky. Each is given equal space in the scene, with the horizon line separating their domains. There are roughly equal numbers of each species.

The text on the left side of the image is from a poem (Andy’s gone with cattle) by Henry Lawson, lamenting the departure of a much-loved family member gone off droving. It goes in part like this:

Who now shall wear the cheerful face
In times when things are blackest
And who shall whistle round the place
When Fortune frowns her blackest

Oh, who shall cheek the squatter now
When he comes round us snarling
His tongue is growing hotter now
Since Andy crossed the Darling

Also a lament, but of a quite different kind, is the text on the right hand-side. It is taken from The Song of the Women of the Menero Tribe, which was ‘collected’ and translated by Dr John Lhotsky during his travels in the Monaro in 1834. It was claimed to be “the first specimen of Australian Music” * Lhotsky recorded the original words (presumably from Ngarigo language?) as:

Kon-gi, kawel-go, yue-ri, congi, kawel-go, yue-ri Kuma gi ko-ko, kawel-go, kuma-gi ka-ba ko-magi ko-ko, koma-gi, ko-ko kabel-go, Koma gi ka-ba, ko-ma-gi yue-ri

which he translated as:

Unprotected race of people,
Unprotected all are we,
And our children shrink so fastly,
Unprotected all are we**

Song of the Women of the Menero

Song of the Women of the Menero (http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-an9331227)

‘Battlesheep’ is s reference to sheep as an instrument of the contest for control of the land (and a minor play on the word: ‘battleship’…). ‘Mother of All’ references the nurturing function of the land, while also alluding to the frequently cited expression: ‘Mother of all battles’ – a discordant ambiguity.

* Whitley, G. P., ‘Lhotsky, John (1795–1866)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lhotsky-john-2357/text3085, accessed 18 September 2012.

**Sydney Gazette, 2 December 1834. Reprinted in: Young, Michael, Ellen Mundy, and Debbie Mundy. The Aboriginal People of the Monaro: A Documentary History. Sydney: NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, 2000. p. 82

Some of my old pictures released back into the wild

Some of my old pictures released back into the wild  Sunday, 16 September 2012

Some of my old pictures released back into the wild (Click to view larger image)

A whimsy. We talk of photographs as being ‘taken’ or ‘captured’ by the camera. With this image I wanted to take the analogy a little further, imagining the captured images as wild creatures, trapped in their native habitats, transported and secured away in some form of photo-zoo.

In my case, the zoo is digital storage inside a computer, a dark airless confinement with no-one even looking at them, huddled up with a crowd of their fellow creature-images. (Perhaps the analogy could have been with a live sheep export vessel, or battery hens?)

I fancied the thought of liberating some of the imprisoned images, and watching them frolic out into freedom back in the wild. The bull, itself a tamed creature, looks on impassively, unsure of what to make of it all.

The base photo was ‘captured’ on the north coast of Kangaroo Island. For a little bit of self-referentiality, one of the newly released images (now perched up in a tree) is that of the original scene itself.

The digital images are presented as having assumed physical form, attained materiality (“just like photographs used to have in the good old days of film and print”. The irony of course is that this representation is itself a digital image…

(* As an alternative title, I had considered a twist on the old Sierra Club motto i.e.: Take only footprints; leave only photographs)

Terra nullius

Terra nullius

Terra nullius (Click to view a larger image)

This image depicts a section of road between Dalgety and Jindabyne in the Monaro region of NSW. Prior to the arrival of the first European colonists in the 1820s this region was Ngarigo country. They ranged widely over the region, and (along with members of other language groups who lived around the Snowy Mountains) travelled in summer to feast on Bogong Moths amongst the granite boulders of the high country.

As with squatters and settlers in other parts of the colony, the Europeans appropriated the land for their use and instituted a system of land title that ignored any property rights that may have been held by the indigenous people who had lived here for many thousands of years previously. Their right to take ownership in this way was later formalised into the legal doctrine of terra nullius i.e. the principle that the land was vacant prior to their arrival.

In this image I simply wanted to draw attention to this notion (which is no longer recognised by the Australian legal system). However the road’s invitation to move into the ‘unoccupied’ land is symbolically contested by the Bogong Moth cloud shapes which still look down over the land. The diagonal slash of the road is intended to lead the viewer’s eye from the right foreground (and its text), towards the horizon on the left and up into the moth-clouds.