Absent History
The Absent History theme of the Photographing the Mallee project emerged during the collaborative Mallee Routes (2017-2019) section of the project. Towards the end of this collaborative phase, when I was starting the solo Eye on the Mallee section of the project I linked the contemporary black and white photos to the black and white photos that I had made in the 1980s to explore the Mallee’s absent history. These are the… Read More
interiors
This kind of late photography in the era of television and newer technologies turns up late, wanders through the places where things have happened, and explores the effects of the activity of a world gone. Though people are absent in this photography of traces, fragments, empty buildings there is a lot of remnants of activity
black and white 35mm archives
After seeing how successful the history section worked when it was integrated into the contemporary photos in the 2018 Mallee Routes exhibition at the Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, I remembered that I had some black and white 35mm negatives of the Murray Mallee in my photographic archives. Over the weekend I went back and looked at the contact sheets of the pictures from my initial exploration of the South Australian Mallee… Read More
re-photographing the Mallee
In a previous post I mentioned how I had reconnected to an old photo trip that I made in the 1980s in the VW Kombi to Mantung and Galga in the South Australian Mallee. However, I didn’t mention that I had some re-photography possibilities in mind. On the earlier trip I made several black and white photos with a large format camera ( these are in my film gallery on the Mallee Routes website), and… Read More
Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2017: Fringe
From what I can judge, it looks as if the Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2017 (BIFB17) is starting to come together. It has a online public space as the new website has gone live. However, there is nothing yet about the photographers who comprise the core programme, what the 2017 Biennale is trying to achieve in relation to contemporary Australian photography, or what the issues the symposiums and talks will address. My… Read More
painting the silos
One innovative representation of the Victorian Mallee that I came across whilst on the Hopetown phototrip in 2016 was the murals that were being painted on the silos throughout the Victorian north-west Mallee. One notable example was the mural on GrainCorp’s disused silo at Brim, which had been painted by the Brisbane street artist Guido van Helten in collaboration with the local community. This site has become a tourist icon in the Wimmera, judging by the number… Read More
wheat
The wheat was everywhere whilst I was on the Hopetoun road trip. I took a few 35mm snapshots of the dryland wheat fields with my old film Leica (an M4-P) whilst I was on my way back to our campsite at Hopetoun from Sea Lake. I’d been to Lake Tyrrell that afternoon to look for the remains of an old salt works butI didn’t have much luck. I just couldn’t find it. The… Read More
Space/place
The images in this portfolio explore the space /place dialectic of the South Australian and the Victorian Wimmera Mallee. They were made during the collaborative Mallee Routes of the project (2017-2019), then the second solo phrase of the project Eye on the Mallee. The film cameras that were used were primarily medium and large format (5×7 and 5×4).