Thoughtfactory: large format

a minor blog about the trials, tribulations and explorations of large format, analogue photography in Australia

The Adelaide parklands

When we were living in Sturt St in Adelaide's CBD  we spent a lot of time walking the standard poodles in the Adelaide Park Lands --usually  a couple of times a day and at different times of the day and night.   I came to love being in them,  and I celebrated that they had received National Heritage Listing in 2008.  Surprisingly,  they have yet to be listed as a State Heritage Area by the state government. The latter has been procrastinating for a decade or more.   

What caught my eye in the parklands were the Morton Bay Figs. They were impressive trees, and there weren't  that many of them. There was not  enough water  to nourish  them during  Adelaide's long,  hot summer months and they often became stressed towards the end of the summer.   

There were  only  a few occasions that I walked into the southern parklands with the 5x7 Cambo monorail and heavy Linhof tripod from our townhouse in Sturt St to make some photos.  The archives indicate that I only made a few images  and  these were of the trunks of the Morton Bay Figs.

The reason for the lack of photos was that I  didn't really know what I was doing with  large format  photography in the parklands. I vaguely sensed photography’s incapacity to offer significant understanding of the historical and social narratives of place.   I did, however,  have a  loose  concept premised on  the violence in the parklands in the form of gay bashings, rapes, murders, bashings of aboriginal people and a strong police surveillance mostly against the aboriginal people. 

The loose  idea was that of  a  female body in torn clothes (not a naked female body) lying on the ground and  I would use the two above  images as "stage sets" and situate  a  female body with torn clothes in the background of the photo.  i thought that this male violence against women walking in a public space would  be a supplement to the Adelaide project, as the parklands are just as central to Adelaide's urban  identity as Colonel  Light's metropolitan design of straight and narrow.  The aim of the supplement was to counter the  old colonial  idea of Adelaide as paradise on earth.  

The parklands  had a popular, negative image: bashings, murders, rapes, drugs, gay beat,  illegal camps etc happened there.  Somehow the parklands were seen as marginal or peripheral to the urban environment of the CBD -- in philosophy this is a  parergon (the ‘by-work’) that is an accessory to the ergon (the ‘work’). 

This conceptual project  never came to fruition and I was embarrassed by my inability to work on,  and carry through, this concept about the  parkland's negative culture.  Adelaide, is a very planned city, and even though there is little writing about the textures of the city, it  understands itself to be more of a literary city than a  photographic or visual one.  Literary Adelaide didn't seem  all that interested  in  the southern parklands. It was the developments along North Terrace, the seedy atmosphere of Hindley St that caught their eye,  or the serial murders constructed as 'Weird Adelaide' that has its own life.   

I was  unsure of myself -- I didn't have the confidence  to visually represent the southern parkland's negative culture and ended up just photographing a few  tree roots of the Morton Bay Figs   I abandoned large format in the parklands to focus on the city's built environment  and its modernist buildings  in the CBD.

 It is  only 8 years latter when living at Encounter Bay that I have even  looked at these tree root  as a group,  and started to think about why I found the conceptual stuff  so difficult.  Whilst looking at them  I' started  to question  the conventional assumptions about the marginal status of the ‘mere’ supplement, emphasising mutual dependency  between parklands and city,  rather than the strict hierarchy.   

Maybe, as Barbara Hanrahan observed in The Scent of Eucalyptus,  you need to be  absent from a place in order to be able to represent it. On option would be  for me  to  pick up  the abandoned project by  working from the above  fragments to  make some new photographs.   The fragments have posed the question: how can you  represent the negative culture around Adelaide's parklands as the 'weirdness of  the ordinary'