-
The three photographs portray a dreamlike, painterly quality. The works reference the Ancestor and the Indigenous Uncanny, which has pertinence with the spirits on the landscape.
On the Erwin River, there was another big section of the Nunagari people and they were the people they built mud huts, they had sections of the land, ownership, farms. They planted, they replanted the ajicol and the mutter and they had their own country. And that’s where the best land was and that’s where the farmers came and took it over and pushed them out. And they were either shot out or died of influenza, scurvy, they would get scurvy from blankets from the boats, give it to the black fella and they would end up with scurvy and all sorts of white man diseases and from Dongra right through to Mingenew there is a full section of that tribe it died out.
Clarrie Cameron, After the crow flies, directed by Sonal Kantaria (2016, Australia/UK)
The ravaged landscapes bear witness to these diseases and atrocities which lie deeply embedded in the landscape: former battlegrounds, massacre sites, places of trauma. It therefore becomes even more important that cultural protocols are adhered to when entering into these landscapes. A sense of the ancestral presence in such landscapes is stronger for their being inscribed by such traumatic histories. In keeping with cultural protocol, and as with every site of significance I visited, I sought permission to enter and to photograph such places.
