Tag: River Murray
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on Pental Island
The photos are early in the morning on Pental Island near Swan Hill in Victoria circa 2020. It was a little sanctuary beside the meandering Little Murray River; a sanctuary surrounded by a world of intensive irrigated agriculture and thirsty crops.
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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
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
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
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
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 (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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Frontier conflict on the Overland Stock Route
I am planning to go on a photocamp at Wentworth in NSW next week for the Mallee Routes project. I leave after Anzac Day, on Friday 26th of April. Whilst there I plan to explore along the lower Darling River, which is in dire straits due to the massive increased water use upstream, bad water management …
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pre-Mabo narratives of Australia
When you step into history of water and country in Anglo-Australian society you quickly reconnect with the colonisation of Australia, the pre-Mabo narratives of Australia as an empty landscape (the doctrine of terra nullius), the colonialist discourses that we are rooted in colonialist ideologies and legacies and racist law. These justify and legitimate the nigger hunts…
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the photographic landscape tradition
The picturesque in Australian landscape tradition has become part of picturesque tourism and it is misleading in so far as there is no reference to human presence or activity, no visible signs of natural history, no scars from taming the wild river to make it suitable to extract water for irrigated agriculture, towns and cities.
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The ‘Our Waters’ project: an update
The 1st Our Waters exhibition has been planned for the SALA Festival in Adelaide in 2019. Each photographer takes an image from the Godson Collection and responds to it. There will be six photographers and 12 prints in the exhibition.
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Photography in the Anthropocene
It was a welcome relief to come across pockets of habitat in the Lower Lakes and the Coorong National Park that were in a healthy condition, despite the lack of river flow during the Millennium Drought (1997–2009) in south-eastern Australia. These low flows happened within the proposed Anthroprocene period, which is a time when much of…
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Landscape loss + nostalgia
One of the frequent responses to the common experience of landscape loss in Australia’s industrial modernity –eg., salt ladened landscapes, dried out wetlands, low flows in our rivers, on-going land clearing and the loss of biodiversity in Australia—is that of nostalgia, or a yearning for what has been lost in the Anthropocene. The rivers used to flow with…
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at the Stockyard Plain Basin
When I was working in the Senate as a policy/political advisor prior to 2006 I realised that one of the crucial aspects of the management of the River Murray in South Australia was the salt interception schemes (SIS) with their associated disposal basins. The current salt management in the Murray-Darling Basin aims to intercept the…
Nourishing Terrains 