walking the country

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This particular project is slowly taking on a vague shape with the recent shift away from thinking in terms of the classic idea of the roadtrip to walking the country. I’d started with the roadtrip concept as these were the classic way that photographers had historically explored the country beyond the various state capitals. More recently biking has replaced the Kombi’s of old.

The 14 day camel trek from outside Arkaroola to Mt Hopeless that Suzanne and I did with her walking friends in 2018 has bought this project into focus. It is about going off road and walking in northern South Australia. The earlier road trips to Andamooka and Lajamanu can now be seen as precursors to walking in the northern region of South Australia. These roadtrips gave me a sense of the country beyond the settled areas: they opened my eyes up to the country through which the highways passed.

am, creek bed

Walking the country has come to the foreground because we have recently registered to walk in the Gammon Ranges with the ARPA Bushwalkers, and also signed up to do a camel trek from Blinman to Lake Frome in 2021. I suddenly realized that this mode of exploring the country of northern South Australia photographically meant a conceptual shift from roadtrips to walking.

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pastoralism

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The area we were walking through in the northern Flinders is known as South Australia’s Far North, which starts from the town of Blinman. The region has low rainfall mainly in winter, and averages about 200 mm/yr. It has very old hard rocks that were deposited between 500 million and 1,000 million years ago when shallow sea that  stretched into central Australia from Kangaroo Island.

Just before we turned to walk along the creek beds of the Hamilton Valley on Day 4 we came across an old stone shepard’s hut on a pastoral station (large grazing property). Unfortunately I cannot recall which one, but I gather that most of this land in the northern Flinders Ranges was leased from the State government and not privately owned.

Helen

We hung around the site a bit using it for a morning break. The lack of rain meant that there was little water in the hut’s water tanks. The camels were very patient and they linked us back to the early 19th century and the Afghan culture before motorized transport replaced camels as a method of transport.

The hut itself appeared to be deserted, in the sense of it having been little used for quite some time.

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at Yudnamutana

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We are in the process of deciding whether or not to return to walking in the northern Flinders Ranges in 2021. The two options currently on the table are either walking in the Gammon Ranges with Suzanne’s walking friends under the umbrella of the ARPA Bushwalkers; or doing another camel trek, this time from Blinman to Lake Frome.

I have returned to looking through the archival photos made on the earlier 14 day camel trek in the northern Flinders Ranges we did in 2018. This picture is from the morning of day 2 just before we started the days walk:

Rock face, am

Day 2 was a short walk and it enabled us to spend the afternoon exploring the ruins of Yudnamutana mine and the smelter site. Yudanamutana also refers to the copper field of this name.

This mine was worked intermittently for copper from around 1862; work was abandoned in 1867, then picked up by the Flinders Copper Mining Company and worked between 1914 and 1918.

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Andamooka, South Australia

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As I have been going through my archives  I realised that my travelling along  the long road to the north did not start with the trip to Lajamanu as I had previously thought. I had actually been to Andamooka twice on roadtrips. The first road  trip to Andamooka was in the 1990s where I had made a few photos. I then returned to Andamooka around 2001 with Suzanne and we  stayed there for several days. I had  more  time to  photograph the landscape.

Linhof Technika 70

Andamooka, South Australia

The above image comes from the earlier trip in the 1990s. This  was on my own–a road trip in the VW  Kombi. It was a basically break from writing the PhD on Heidegger at Flinders University of South Australia.   Judging from the archives only a few photos were made  on the 1990s roadtrip. Continue reading →

walking in the Blue Mine Creek bed

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At the end of the first day  of walking we camped at a wonderful campsite close to Blue Mine Gap on the north western edge of the Gammon Ranges. We  were  walking in there of  Sir Douglas Mawson’s  1906  explorations into the geology  of the northern Flinders Ranges.  In the 1920s  and 1930s Mawson amongst others concentrated his research and fieldwork  around the  mineralization the northern Flinders Ranges, eruptions of  the pre-Cambrian glaciation throughout the Flinders Ranges,   the Cambrian strata of the Flinders Range,  and the identification of uranium  at Mt Painter Inlier,  which is about 100 kilometres north east of Leigh Creek and south of the Mawson Plateau.    South Australia is one of the world’s focal points for the study of the late pre-Cambrian era and glaciation.

After lunch on the first day we crossed  a  creek bed. The camels were playing up a bit,  and this gave me  5-10 minutes or so  to do some photography  in and around the creek bed. Surprisingly, the  light was still soft due to the continuing cloud cover,  and the malaleucas in the  creek made a welcome change to the bareness and environmental degradation of the stony hills with the loss of endangered plants and animals from  the  history of extensive  pastoralism since the European occupation of the land.

malaleuca, creek bed

We had  left the Umberatana Station track to  walk in,  and along,  the Blue Mine Creek on the way to the campsite for the night.  It was dawning on me that there was a history of  extensive mining in  the region for copper in the 19th century,   and that the  systematic regional mapping of the northern Flinders Ranges  after 1945 centred around finding coal, petroleum and uranium.  Mining was  just as crucial as pastoralism in terms of land use.   Increasingly it is now eco-tourism that provides  the income and employment in the region.    Continue reading →

The camel trek solution

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I found the  solution to my predicament about how I could  photograph in northern South Australia. I could do  a camel trek with  experienced cameliers. The camels would carry the swag, food and water,  we would do the walking and the cameleers would guide us through the remote, semi-arid landscape.  So we booked a 12 day walk  as part of a party of six  starting on June 19th and finishing on July 2nd.   The trek started from  near Arkaroola and it  finished at  Mt Hopeless, reputed to be the northern edge of the Flinders Ranges.  The group included 3 friends from Suzanne’s Heysen Trail walking group.

We left the stormy winter weather at Encounter Bay on the southern coast of  the Fleurieu Peninsula,  and drove  up to Alpana Station near Blinman. We  arriving  in the late afternoon  and stayed overnight in the shearers quarters.  This  gave me an hour or so for a bit of photography wandering around the station  before dinner in the North Blinman Hotel. I had no time to explore Blinman itself,  to check out the Blinman mine,  or scope the fascinating landscape around Blinman.

emu,  Alpana Station, Blinman

I had a digital camera–the Sony a7R111– and two film cameras–a Leica M4-P and a Rolleiflex TLR. I decided against taking a carbon fibre tripod to use with  the Rolleiflex, as the Sony  has good low light capabilities and can be handheld in low light.   This was to be a trial  run to see if my body  could handle the walking  for 12 days, and whether or not I could do any  photography. I considered using large format (ie., taking the 5×4 Linhof Technika IV) to be over the top.  I understood that as everything centred around the 12 camels–the pace, the camp site,  where to walk, and the loading and unloading of the camels  each day— this might allow some time for photography.   Continue reading →

re-assessing

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I realized when I was at Karlu Karlu in 2016 hat I found  the country in the northern part of South Australia  (ie., north of  Port Augusta) that we  had passed through on the way to and from  Lajamanu to be as  interesting as  the destination itself. I realized that wanted to explore this country rather than travel though  for 12 hours a day to  get to a particular destination. It was the journey, not the destination that was crucial for me.

Pylons+ Flinders Ranges

But how to explore the northern part of Australia? Aerial photography was too expensive; I didn’t  have a 4 wheel drive; I wasn’t prepared to go into this semi arid county on my own;  I wasn’t interested in just sticking to the main highways, stopping for a break and a quick photo;   or just taking photos through a car window as I travelled  through the landscapes limited.

The landscape looked interesting through the window:  there were the salt lakes either side of the Stuart Highway, the various deserts, the pastoral landscapes north of  Goyder’s Line, the Flinders Ranges themselves,  and the country of the northern Flinders Ranges. This was a landscape that I didn’t know.  Continue reading →

Karlu Karlu: photographing landscapes

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On the return trip  once  we had linked up to the Stuart Highway via  the Buntine and Buchanan Highways we moved quickly south trying to make up for extra  time in taking the northern route  from Lajamanu. Our aim was get beyond Tennant Creek  so that we could camp overnight in our swags  at  Karlu Karlu,   a series of round boulders, which have formed from an enormous chunk of granite, and which are  strewn across a large area of a wide, shallow valley.

We wanted  to photograph the  impressive rock formations  of huge, red, rounded granite boulders in the early morning light because daylight drains all the colour out of rocks, and flattens the shapes. The next morning, whilst   I was photographing the rocks I realised  how much my approach to photographing the landscape worked within the common conception of the landscape tradition in which the ‘landscape’ is a pictorial way of representing,  and in doing so it is transformed into something   useful for human beings.

rock+tree, Karlu Karlu

Thus the  colonial photographers on the various expeditions  to Alice Springs and beyond were interested in how the land could be useful for  development–ie., for the pastoral industry or  for agriculture. Karlu Karlu in contemporary postcolonial Australia  is an iconic  site for the tourism industry,  which frames the landscape as something to be viewed and appreciated. Karlu Karlu  is  right up with  Uluru and the Olgas as iconic  tourist sites.

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photography after Lajamanu

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We left Lajamanu via Top Springs so that we could link up to the Stuart Highway via  the Buntine and Buchanan Highways. The Landrover’s  compressor  housing had been  damaged,  and  so we had to avoid the long drive over  the severe corrugations on the Tamani Road.   Whilst having lunch at Top Springs I realised that the photography being done on this road trip was working within contemporary art, in that  it is part of the current of art that emerges from post colonialism in a globalised world.

Top Springs, Northern Territory

This contemporary art current is a new temporality: it is decentred and diverse, is post medium, is  more open to an interaction with artists from different cultures, has no brief against the art of the past, no sense that the past is something from which liberation must be won, has taken leave of the linear conception of history with its carrying art into the future whilst waging war  against the old old forms.   The conception of time is one of a set of possibilities rather than a linear progression. Continue reading →

at Emu waterhole

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Between the end of  the 2016 Milpirri Festival and prior to leaving  Lajamanu we visited Emu water hole just outside Lajamanu. The waterhole was full  and it in a  Tanami desert-scape of sparse vegetation ( spinifex, desert oaks, acacias and mulga trees), blue skies and strong sunlight.   The history of the desert  is one of a  ice gre around 20,000 years ago,  which retreated around  11,000 years ago and the rangelands  emerged.  That shift  to an arid zone is a climate change event.

Desert in Australia  traditionally means unsuitable for pastoral undue to the sandy soils that are deficient in nutrients  and the spikesy spinifex grasses that are unpalatable to stock.

Kitty + Ursula, Emu Waterhole

The Warlpiri have  extensive knowledge of water sources  in  the flat terrain  in their dreaming stories, their vocabulary has names for  different types of transient or permanent waterholes (e.g, rock holes, soakages)  and they  pass their  knowledge about water holes and food tracks on through dance and paintings. I started to decode these paintings whilst at Lajamanu —I got as as far as circles for waterholes, lines for journeys, half-circles for people.  Continue reading →