One of the areas that I’d wanted to visit in Tasmania was the barren and often bleak landscape around the western edge of the Great Lake in the Central Highlands region. I’d seen it briefly on a previous trip last year and thought that it looked interesting.
near the Great Lake
The highway, which runs along the western side of the Great Lake, is sparsely populated with groups of fisherman shacks. I could only explore this architecture briefly as a rain storm was sweeping in from the west. There was no chance of using the 5×4.
I wandered around the man made track with my digital camera looking for an image or two that I could take with my film cameras. The rain forest is so messy and the light is so contrasty that I just concentrate on the little details in the open shade in order to be able to handle what consistently defeats me.
I’m down at Victor Harbor tonight packing my camera gear and loading 5×4 sheet film for my forthcoming trip to Tasmania. Half of the time on the island has been structured around photography in Queenstown.
fence
We went for an evening walk along the beach and amongst the houses set back from the beach. The sun was shining but the southerly wind was cold. It was jumpers and jeans –it was such a contrast to the warmth of Adelaide. I shivered, thinking how cold the south west part of Tasmania is going to be.
Wirranender Park in the Adelaide parklands is a favourite spot for transients to construct makeshift campsites. This is especially so for those aboriginal people who come down to Adelaide from their homeland in outback northern South Australia, and are unable to find temporary accommodation.
Aboriginal camp in parklands
As I mentioned in an earlier post Aboriginal people camped—ie., sleeping rough–- in the Parklands is a controversial issue in Adelaide.
We returned to exploring Wirranender Park in the Adelaide Parklands on Sunday even though it was raining. I wanted to see some of the sculpture in this public spaces; a space that looks as if it is being designed as an urban forest with an environmental trail.
Scattered along the trail are a large number of rock sculptures by Silvio Apponyi and other sculptors, including this piece by Sally Weekes:
hush
An interpretation taken with my 5×4 Linhof Technika IV. This Wirranendi area of the Adelaide Parklands was once covered by Eucalyptus porosa or Mallee Box Woodland. This consisted of widely spaced gums, many acacias, native apricots, quandongs, saltbushes, native herbs, peas and lilies and many types of grasses, providing habitat for many native animals and birds.
Yesterday we started to explore the west parklands in which the West Terrace Cemetery is situated. The part of the parklands that is next to West Terrace itself consists of soccer fields. Further west, adjacent to the northern side of the cemetery and running down to the railway line is a cultivated wilderness area with a wetlands known as Wirranendi Park.
Wirranendi is from the Kaurna aboriginal language and it means to become transformed into a green-forested area. The park is cultivated in the sense that it is being replanted with natives, and is a site for public sculptures that are far more intriguing than any art in public places in the CBD.
Adelaide, whose self-image is that it is an arts and festival city, has had an ironic shortage of contemporary public art, and what it does have is banal-eg., the brass pigs in Rundle Mall. Adelaide needs to reinvent itself.
Lie of the Land
The work above is a public space installation titled “Lie of the Land”, located in the Adelaide parklands on the “Western Gateway” to Adelaide City and was created by Victorian-based artists Aleks Danko and Jude Walton. The work consists of 25 stone domes stretched along either side of Sir Donald Bradman Drive east of the Hilton bridge. Each dome is made from local bluestone using the dry-walling technique.
“Lie of the Land”, with its closed forms and no opening, refers back to the way the early settlers sheltered in dome shaped structures they had copied from the Aborigines. The beehive shaped shelters were built by the early European settlers (immigrants) and that they used traditional aboriginal materials to construct them.
I was out at dawn this morning lugging the Cambo 5×7 monorail, Linhof tripod and computer bag of double dark slides down to Kings Beach to have the camera set up before the early morning sunlight became too intense.
There was just enough cloud cover to keep the sun covered long enough to give me the extra time that I needed to set the camera up:
5x7 Cambo
I had around a 20 minute time frame in which to work to take the photos before the early morning light became too bright.
We are at Victor Harbor for the long weekend along with heaps of other people who are having fun. It is definitely early autumn on the Fleurieu Peninsula, for though the days are hot, the early morning air is crisp and the nights are cool.
I have been going through my digital archive, looking at the pictures that were initially taken with the digital point and shoot around 2007 on a trip we did to Kangaroo Island in autumn 2007:
dead tree
I’ve never really looked at the pictures closely. They had the date digitally stamped all over them and they were not shot as jpeg’s and not in raw. I didn’t really know what I was doing then. A friend set the camera up for me–the menu looked looked far too complicated after a using a Lecia rangefinder — and I could not understand the ‘how to’ booklet. Everything on the camera was set on automatic.
One of the areas for poodle walks is Port Adelaide. The Port has fallen on hard times and has become a site of rustbelt. Despite the signs of urban renewal it has an industrial scruffy look, that is a long way from the sunbelt cities (eg., Brisbane) with their gleaming condo towers, bistros and boutiques that are so trendy because they signify vibrant urban environments full of young people.
Yesterday was a horror day. The temperature was around 35 degrees with a strong north wind blowing dust everywhere. It was the last day of the ten day or so spell of hot weather. During the night the rain started to fall lightly, and today we have had a steady, soaking rain all day.
white rose
There have only been odd moments when there was a break in the rain. I took advantage of one break around lunchtime to do some shopping at the Central Market, then we used another around 6 pm to do a poodle walk in Veale Gardens.
