It seems that this kind of landscape work is outside the boundaries of the art institution. In chapter 3 of her Photography and Australia Helen Ennis says:
“And, finally, what of the vexed, interrelated matter of non-Aboriginal Australians’ sense of belonging? While the Australian historian Manning Clark speculated that European settlers were eternal outsiders who could never know ‘heart’s ease in a foreign land, because … there live foreign ancestral spirits’, it now seems plausible that non-Aboriginal Australians are developing their own form of attachment, not to land as such, but to place. Indeed, it has recently been argued that for contemporary non-Aboriginal Australians, belonging may have no connection with land at all. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why art photographs of the natural landscape have lost their currency and are now far outnumbered by photographs of urban and suburban environments – after all, it is ‘here’ that most Australians live and ‘there’ that the tourist industry beckons them to escape.”
That claim—for contemporary non-Aboriginal Australians, belonging may have no connection with land at all—is a bit of a puzzle.
The light wasn’t right for Second Valley—far too bright and sunny. So we went to Port Elliot instead, but the light was dull and flat because of the heavy cloud cover.