A lo fi visual diary
With Agtet gone Ari is listless and lonely. The poodlewalks have lost their sparkle and their joie de vivre. He just walks behind me. Last week he walked me down to the West Terrace Cemetery and then just stood amongst the gravestones looking for Agtet.
Atget, Ari and myself had often gone to the West Terrace Cemetery together in the late afternoon for our poodlewalks. It was one of our favourite walking places. I could take photos and the poodles could hunt for rats.
Ari and I returned to a familiar haunt on yesterday’s afternoon walk—the West Terrace Cemetery and the Wirranendi Park section of the of Adelaide’s parklands. The rain had eased, it was overcast, and the sunlight was soft.
We had initially gone to the western parklands to see if a transitory aboriginal camp was still standing. I’d taken some photos before going on the Tasmanian trip but, as the early morning light was now quite different, I wanted to see what had happened whilst we’d been away. I was thinking of re-shooting the camp with more of the scrub.
The camp had gone–been dismantled by the Adelaide City Council no doubt. None last long. So we walked through the West Terrace Cemetery looking for picture possibilities then through the Wirranendi section of the parklands.
When I was in Melbourne I used to board the train at Frankston and travel daily up the city to do my photography. Since it I took around an hour I used to take photos through the windows. I took the photo below whilst the train was at Frankston station. It was just before it was due to leave for Flinders Street station, stopping at all stations.
It is a pretty ordinary photo of a banal shopping strip in Melbourne’s suburbia. Within seconds I was surrounded by 3 Victorian police wanting to know what I was doing. Taking photos in public is now a suspicious activity even when there is no obvious security buildings close by. I was placed in the position of having to defend what I was doing.
After much indecision I’ve decided to do a little project in the Wirranendi section of the Adelaide parklands. What tipped the scales in favour was the wetlands as this could become the focus of the project rather than the public sculpture.
The urban forest just wasn’t enough on its own, even though some of the work is fascinating. But it requires the use of a large format camera to get the subtle detail.
It has been raining in Adelaide for several days straight now. Autumn has gone, winter has arrived. I’ve been trying to take the 5×7 Cambo out between the showers to get some photos of the tree roots of Morton Bay Figs. But I’ve had no luck.
Although it is clear blue skies when I leave, the apartment, by the time I get to the location the showers are sweeping across the ground. It clears, but then it is too dark and the light is too flat. So I’m down to quick snaps whilst walking the dogs in the parklands.
I’ve always found the bush hard to photograph as it is so messy and it is difficult to find any form. So I’ve returned to Wirranendi Park in Adelaide’s western parklands on the poodlewalks to learn how I can begin to make it work.
That kind of workflow requires a reskilling. I realise that I’ve been deskilled as a photographer by using a prosumer digital camera and I need to reskill myself so that I can tackle the bush. That requires me returning to the same place again and again—the bush around the wetlands.
I’m back in Adelaide. I wandered through the parklands with the poodles late yesterday afternoon wondering where my photography would go next. I played around with some low light light with the (film) Leica –poetic moments and all that—having a look without taking anything but I wasn’t really enthused.
I was at a loss. Where do I go from here? I felt hesitant. All the large format gear had been left down at Victor Harbor. How was I going to use the 8×10 in the city? You cannot wander the streets looking for the moment with that kind of gear.
I thought that I would start by picking up on the waste project that had been pushed into the background.
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.
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:
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.
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.