This picture of the appearance or shining forth (Schein) of the quartz  form amongst Cambrian Kanmantoo rocks  along  coastal Waitpinga  on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia  is part of a long term,   ongoing  littoral zone  series in my local area. This particular  location  is near a natural spring of fresh water that flows through the coastal rocks into the Southern Ocean.  

Unfortunately,  the picture  is yet another example of me, as the large format photographer,  making mistakes on location.  The scanned digital file  is over-exposed  and the bottom half  of  the picture  is  out of focus.  I cannot recall why or how  I slipped  up,  as the file is from the archives,  and I have no explicit memory of this photo session.

 I've reworked  the  file into something that is ok as  a place-filler  for the absence of any  memorials  of the violent, early 19th century encounters along the coastal region of Encounter Bay; ie., one  between the white sealers from  Kangaroo Island and the first nations Ramindjeri people.

I had imagined the quartz area  as a site of violence between the whalers and the Ramindjeri people around 1800-30,  given that the pre-colonial settlement of  Kangaroo Island-based sealers  and whalers, many of whom were escaped convicts,  attacked Ramindjeri camps  at night,   kidnapped and enslaved Ramindjeri women  for labour and sexual purposes and killed the men.  Known sites for these attacks are Cape Jervis,  Rapid Bay,   the Murray River mouth area and the mouth of the Inman  River near Kent Reserve. The KI sealer's  forays to the Fleurieu Peninsula  for aboriginal women were regular, brutal and created political animosity between Kangaroo Islanders and Indigenous peoples. The Ramindjeri  wore  the brunt of the European intrusions into Ngarrindjeri territory. 

This history  is a key part in the  origins of the sealing industry in the Southern Ocean. 

Prior to the Bass Strait sealing industry collapsing in the 1930s  due to over-exploitation,  Kangaroo Island (KI) in the 1920's became  a trading stop for general shipping traffic due to its salt  pans that provided  sufficient salt to cure their hauls of skins. KI became a centre to recruit sealers and Aboriginal women to go west and a heterotopia (as in 'Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces' ). In the 1830s  the islands around Albany in WA became a sealer's industry.  

The sealer's kidnapping and enslaving the  Ramindjeri women are the empty spaces in history as the women's  voices are ones  that are not speaking in the historical documents of the colonisers,  or they have been silenced. Hence the need to photograph these sites of pre-colonial violence.