Blog

  • the Darling gone dry

    the Darling gone dry

    The photos below shown the condition of the Darling River north of Wentworth in NSW. They were made at a bridge near Pooncarie around April of 2018, just before the drought broke and the Medindee fish kill. This was just after Barnaby Joyce, as the Federal Water Minister in the Turnbull Government, had been using…

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  • The Coorong’s wetlands

    The Coorong’s wetlands

    The Coorong wetlands in South Australia are a Ramsar listed wetland and is often seen as natural, given that it is national park. But it is deeply historical as it has been shaped by entangled changes to human and nonhuman lives.

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  • Flood Country

    Flood Country

    Living in flood country means living with droughts and floods, with rivers that have variable flows, and floods that spread out onto the floodplains.

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  • Carp + flood country

    Carp + flood country

    The various rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin often run dry during the frequent droughts and then they flood when the drought breaks and the heavy rains fall. Once such flood event happened during the November 2022-February 2023 period to the heavily modified River Murray.

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  • The war on nature

    The war on nature

    One of the popular white settler views around Federation was the need to create a culture and society premised on the conquest of nature; that human beings needed to establish mastery domination over nature; the natural world was seen as waste; and it was a waste to let the flowing water of the rivers in…

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  • a river system at breaking point

    I last photographed along the Murray River in 2019 when I explored the area around Lake Bonney, Barmera and the Overland Corner in South Australia. This was just after I’d camped at Wentworth and photographed the lower Darling River up to Pooncarie. That was during the drought and I never made it to the Menindee…

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  • before the floods

    before the floods

    This is a picture of the Little Murray River near Lake Boga which is close to Swan Hill in Victoria. My camp was very close to the Little Murray, which is an anabranch of the River Murray. I spent a lot of my time at Lake Boga walking along the banks of the river, which…

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  • wetlands v agriculture

    Wetlands in the Murray-Darling Basin river system can be understood as  watery places that are co-constituted by an assemblage of human and nonhuman relations and they are, historically, the changing outcome of a plurality of multispecies interactions. So argues Emily O’Gorman, an environmental historian, in her recent book  Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human Histories…

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  • wetlands (sort of)

    wetlands (sort of)

    Well Covid-19 pandemic has been and (more or less) gone, the River Murray has gone from drought to being in flood in the autumn of 2023, and I’ve made no further road trips to work on this project since 2019. There are no more planned for the next 6 weeks or so as Suzanne has…

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  • project on hold: being reinvented

    This project has been on hold for the last 8 months because the organizer and the key figure abandoned it. They walked away from it in early 2020 without saying anything. The project had reached the stage of bringing a curator on board to conceptually develop the project and to organize an exhibition. That was…

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