14 From Landscape to Land

In Australia, we are guilty of romanticising ecological destruction. In this case, a painting spotted on a station owner’s wall in the Murchison, WA brings some of Amanda’s cultural blind spots home to roost. She shares her own journey from ignorant to less ignorant while contemplating the art of station country.

Over the years my sensitivity to country has changed. I would characterise it as being a journey from Landscape to Land - a phrase I’ve borrowed from an Aboriginal and non-indigenous exhibition of the same name staged in Daylesford, Victoria in the 1990s.

ART TELLS THE LAND

Previously I have talked about Bill Gammage’s book “The Biggest Estate on Earth’ and how part of his research into land management systems of the first peoples involved looking for clues in the artworks from the European-trained landscape painters of the 18th and 19th centuries.

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He looks at the work from the late 1800s out of Melbourne known loosely as the Heidelberg school. One particularly famous and representative piece is Arthur Streeton’s Golden Summers – painted during a drought, on the hinterland around Melbourne, this image depicts dreamily beautiful paddocks of golden pasture in the summer. As I explained previously

Perennial grasses don’t do golden summers – many perennials are active summer plants that hold colours of green, purple and rich browns through the heat of the summer, that’s the pleasure and the point of them – so these ‘golden’ carpets would have been introduced grasses, annuals like wild oat that die in summer and leave the soil vulnerable to scouring wind, rain and sun.

So Bill’s point is that we are looking at land that had gone from being managed grasslands to dried paddocks in a very short span of time.

A MURCHISON STATION

In August 2017 a friend and I visited a station a few hundred kilometres northeast of Geraldton. We went because we felt like doing some station time and because I had met the owner, an elderly man, who was generous with his invitations to interested bodies – he could clearly do with a hand.

His was a cattle station that had given him a good living over several decades. His wife had died a few years ago, his health was declining and he was now the last one standing and facing a bit of a succession crisis – he was a bit bitter about the fact that his kids weren’t interested in taking the station on. I got the sense that years of hard work and pride in his achievements, not to mention a large house and lots of infrastructure and machinery were his legacy and he was eager to see them into the right hands.

My perception of the place was that the land had been hammered and needed major restorative work – years of poor rainfall, and constant grazing pressure from native and feral animals as well as sheep and cattle meant there were expanding tracts of land that were denuded of plant life.

THE IDEOLOGY OF ART

In his house he had some artworks by a well know local painter from the Murchison region. I had seen this man’s work before – he is a skilful painter of traditional and ‘realist’ works in that he depicts what could be called ‘consensual reality’.

I was transfixed by an image painted on a large steel saw blade mounted upright on a stand. It was one of those circular plates a few feet in diameter with wicked steel teeth and a little hole in the middle - it had been painted with what I recognised as a representative, as in ‘typical’ painting of the Outback .

Shown with respect for the skill of the painter and the love of this image by its owner.

The first image was in browns, reds and golden colours, with a feeling of afternoon light. It showed a wooden slab hut, with a corrugated iron roof and front veranda partially reflected in a still pool of water. In the foreground this water is circled by a dirt road that winds past the front veranda and heads far away into the distance. The dam has a high side that has a series of fat berms of clay with deep, dried channels created by water running into the depression. There is the inevitable windmill next to a corrugated iron water-tank on a stand and the image is divided by a mauve horizon line with blue sky above. Central and low in the picture three crooked fence posts stand in for a broken-down fence linked by wire in front of the dam. No people. This is station life in the outback, familiar as a view from a particular 20th century vision.

THE ART OF THE EXTRACTIVE PASTORAL

The old pastoralist pointed out this painting in the living room of his lovely house with great affection. I didn’t get to discuss the nuances of his attitude to the image – but it seemed from our exchange that the painting satisfied something in him about his life in the Rangelands. Maybe because it is representative of enormous hard work. I had listened to him talk about his life long enough to understand that hard work was something that he valued very highly, perhaps above all other qualities – and this artwork certainly hints at arduous labour. What I couldn’t understand is how he could derive any comfort from an image that depicts the broken-down end game of hard slog from generations of extractive pastoral practises.

To me the image speaks of environmental degradation, human wrongheadedness, isolation and heartbreak. I might not even have particularly noticed this scene, except that it is all painted on an industrial saw blade, an object that could stand in without much controversy as both the cause and effect of such degradation. And it is apparently presented without irony.

Clearly what I see is not what the painter intended or what the owner of the picture sees.

THE ART OF THE IRONY-FREE ZONE

But let me not get too snooty. I have been there too, living in that irony-free zone. Thirty years ago, living in Melbourne, I moved a few hundred kilometres north-east to stay in a cottage on a working sheep farm with a friend who had scored a job in a high school at the nearby town of Mansfield. It was my first experience of living rural and I revelled in it. Every day we walked for miles along gouged out creek lines and across barren stony hills loving the romance of nearby Lake Eildon with its striking stands of dead trees sticking up from the waters like huge, grey forks: finding a post-urban thrill in the far horizons and big skies.

Sheep farm at Maindample near Mansfield north of Melbourne

REALEYESING THE LAND

It wasn’t till later when I moved permanently to the regions that I started to ‘realeyes’ the land. To see that the country I lived on for this year was suffering from massive erosion – I can see it now – but then, I was seeing from a very limited urban perception, finding beauty in the openness and emptiness and drama and power in the large cracks in the earth.

PATRICK WHITE AND CULTURE

At the time I was a huge fan of Patrick White. His books had been one of the first ways I had been imaginatively introduced to a sensual understanding of the land I lived in. Voss, published in 1957 and based on the life of 18th century Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, takes the reader into the desert – Patrick’s desert is a vast, empty, metaphysical wasteland where outsiders go to die – a perfect springboard from which a romantic urban girl can experience her first sheep and wheat farm…. without actually seeing what is there.

All my voracious book reading had not given me eyes to see. In reality I was living on soil that had been stripped of all its defences against wind, rain and sun by decades of inappropriate land management regimes.

You live and learn. I left the farm at Maindample to go to Art school. In my art-as-religion phase that lasted through 4 years of art school and 25-years of practice I would simply have dismissed the circular saw painting as bad taste, a cliched response to our land, to be lumped in with the clumpiest type of bush poetry. But the heady days of post-modernism and the happy intellectual pursuits this entailed has given me lots of interesting filters and not least, an interest in what other people are seeing. This saw painting carries a lot of ideology - unconscious ideology - and how (as they used to say in visual culture classes) do we unpack it?

OUR PERCEPTIONS KEEP US SAFE….

And here’s a question. Why didn’t my old pastoralist mate see the hubris and ruination of his life’s work in this image and hurl it through one of his leadlight panels (tastefully decorated with wildflowers)? He was already upset that his ‘legacy’ was not being embraced – and yet he gives house room to a painting that appears to shout at him that in this particular instance human labour is pointless, aggressively destructive and leads to country that cannot sustain life.

ROMANTICISING ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION

I can only say that this adds to my understanding that our perceptions are there to give us feedback from the world that protects our fragile ego selves and promotes what we think is vital to our continuing existence. It has occurred to me that if he did ‘read’ the image as I have, it could trigger a crisis in consciousness that he would be unlikely to recover from – so he’s smart to look at the painting as an ornament to a life well led - and to maintain his anger – it is all keeping him safely within the world he feels comfortable living in.

And, in case, you think I’m not taking any lessons from this – that my perception of this image is bolstering the view of myself as someone sensitive to country and awake to hidden ideologies…I want to reassure you that it has not gone unnoticed that I am an over-educated smarty pants.

Why get stuck on analysing this piece of art? I do know I felt for this old man and maybe, rather than dismissing the painting I wanted to examine what it might be addressing - namely, our cultural propensity for romanticising ecological ruin.

DON’T SAY THAT WORD!

And speaking of ideology, this time ideology-made-conscious - the word ‘outback’ offends me – what do you mean ‘outback’? For those who live in the arid Rangelands, it is rightly, the centre of the planet, nothing ‘out’ or ‘back’ about it..

And ‘downunder’? While we are unpacking clichés, let’s have less of the urban-centric – especially northern Euro-urban-centric - language. 85% of Australia is being re-calibrated and is not emerging as Patrick’s imagined emptiness – it is country rich with a complexity of life that could never be adequately depicted on saw blades by Euro-blinkered Rangeland dwellers.

THE REAL EDUCATION

Twenty years ago I had the opportunity of living in the bush out the back of an old cattle station turned tourism business near Kings Creek in Central Australia. I spent my days tracking through this country, observing, lighting fires, drawing bushes; absolutely blown away by the red dirt, plants, the wildlife.

On one of the monthly supply runs to Alice I saw a bunch of Western Desert dot paintings in a gallery - possibly not for the first time – but for the first time when I could actually ‘see’ them because I had some experience of the country they depicted. They blew my mind. This was a whole different way of viewing country – once seen, things can’t be unseen and everything changes…

Golden Summer, Arthur Streeton, abridged