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.