These photographic fragments of a walk artwork are a memoriam to those times when Maleko, our silver standard poodle, and myself spent together walking and hanging about in the local Waitpinga bushland in South Australia’s southern Fleurieu Peninsula. It also addresses the question: ‘what are photographers for?’
Maleko had an aggressive rectal cancer tumor that spread through his body in a very short time. He was ten years old. Towards the end he turned to scavenging on the walk, started losing his sight, became disorientated, and failing to keep in touch with me.So the bushland walks had to stop. Maleko’s body eventually collapsed when we were in the Grampians (Gariwerd) in September. He was euthanised in Horsham on Saturday night, the 15th of September.
Maleko and I had many photowalks in this bushland over the years and we would usually walk for an hour or more. We would often start on a path made by the kangaroos then just wander around. Our time on these walks were a form of immersion of a being in the bushland in the sense that we become a part of it, and it becomes a part of us. This kind of immersion is a being-in-the-world, rather than a standing outside looking at, and walking through it, as an object.
It was Maleko who lead the way for me to become at home in the bushland and he was much better at mapping it than I was. I would often become dis-orientated and would lose my sense of where I was — but Maleko never did. On those occasions I would follow him back to a familiar trail that lead back to our normal exit point.
This photowalk references, builds on, and is a continuation of, an earlier one in the local Waitpinga bushland on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. The idea of a walking art in the local bushland frames how Maleko and I enter into, wander around, see and exit the bushland whilst on our morning and afternoon poodlewalks. I would see possibilities. scope with a digital camera, and return the next day to photograph.
