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September 5, 2006
These photos were taken on the long drive from Queenstown in the southeast corner of Tasmania to Tumbridge in the Midlands, whilst I was on a two week holiday in Tasmania earlier this year.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Queenstown, 2006
We stopped at a place where we could walk along, and around, the Franklin River in the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park.
This is the wild river that was going to be damned by the Tasmanian Government in the 1980s to produce electricity.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Moss on tree trunk, Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, Tasmania, 2006
This snap is a very different kind of image to the conventional wilderness photography or those photos that are produced to brand Tasmania-as-wilderness for the tourist industry.
This idealization of wild nature is largely indebted to the aesthetic of the sublime popularized by European Romanticism The habits of thinking that flow from this complex cultural construction called wilderness" are influential. William Cronon, in an essay entitled "The Trouble with Wilderness," suggests that in the sublime tradition:
nature comes to represent an enticing flight from history: the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living. The fundamental problem with the concept of sublime wilderness is that it depends on and reinscribes the notion of nature's otherness, of the separation between the human and nonhuman realms.
Alas, nobody in our party was interested in exploring the rain forest or staying there for several hours. Their's was clock time. Home in the Midlands was calling them, and we were due to fly back to Adelaide the next day. So I only had time to wander around with the Leica and take a few quick snaps. It was all a bit of a rush as the other people and dogs were waiting in the cars for me.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Moss & tree trunks, Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, Tasmania, 2006
I wish I could have stayed. The forest as an experience of the sublime in Romantic aesthetics---that "awful shadow"--- was the antithesis of this urban kind of experience in modernity:
Amid the deafening traffic of the town
Tall, slender, in deep mourning, with majesty,
A woman passed, raising, with dignity
In her posed hand, the flounces of her gown;
Graceful, noble, with a statue's form.
And I drank, trembling as a madman thrills,
From her eyes, ashen sky where brooded storm,
The softness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills.
A flash . . . then night! -- O lovely fugitive,
I am suddenly reborn from your swift glance;
Shall I never see you till eternity?
. . .
-- excerpt from "To a Passer-by," Les Fleurs du mal, Charles Baudelaire
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