|
July 30, 2009
The Silver City Highway in New South Wales runs from Wentworth, which is on the Murray and Darling Rivers junction, to the mining city of Broken Hill. This space or landscape is a part of what Elizabeth Farrelly calls the Big Empty.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, on the Silver City Highway, near Broken Hill, 2009
The Big Empty refers to the dead heart or the dead centre of Australia. Farrelly says about her trip from Sydney to Lake Eyre, which she entitles "Mile after mile of big fat nothing", that:
Lake Eyre might have been the reason for the trip but really, I’m there for the dry. I like the Empty. In fact I love it. So intense – so present – is the absence I photograph it compulsively. Five hundred frames of nothing. .. And though I’ve never really bought the spiritual side of desert, we find ourselves arguing around the campfire about the delphic ‘‘know thyself’’ and what, if anything, it’s worth. (Personally I oppose introspection, not least on aesthetic grounds.) Only later do I remember that deserts and mystics go together like flies and doo-doo.
I also love the Big Empty even when it is awfully dry. Only I see my photos as representations of something as opposed to "frames of nothing."
What we see as the absence or the nothing is a stripped landscape that has been created by a pastoral capitalism created in the nineteenth century. The trees and biodiversity were there once. The sheep and goats--which is what I saw asI passed through the region --- eat everything----including the new shoots. The land is not cared for in that there is no replanting to protect the ecology of the landscape. Landcare is what is absent in this region.
Use and abuse for profit s the name of the game . That view is mocked as the black armband of history as being too “negative” by the conservative's national narrative of Australia's past as one of achievement and progress based on the heroic achievement of dead white males who laid the foundations of the prosperous liberal democracy of Australia.”
|
stripped bare is right---such a long way from the richness of the country before pastoralism --a richness of colour and texture represented by the painting of Emily Kame Kngwarreye in an latter post.