pre-Mabo narratives of Australia

When you   step into history of water and country in Anglo-Australian society you quickly reconnect with the colonisation of Australia,  the  pre-Mabo narratives of Australia as an empty landscape (the doctrine of terra nullius),  the colonialist discourses that we are rooted in colonialist ideologies and legacies and racist law. These justify and legitimate the nigger hunts in the colonial history of frontier conflict involving  white men riding out on hunting expeditions to hunt and exterminate aboriginal people, as an exercise in land clearing.

A core  colonial ideology is  all about progress and destiny, the planting of flags and the arrival of legitimate historical narrative. This settler narrative  is  a heroic tale of the British as the discoverers, explorers and pioneers of the country, of how these white men came to settle a strange country and transform it by their science and technology, capital and labour, thus creating a civilisation out of a wilderness. This narrative  is silent about a population that has been almost exterminated; and it  denies that the wiping of Australian Aborigines  should be considered a genocide.

This discourse  repudiates the alternative  narrative of invasion and dispossession of the original inhabitants.  Section 127 of the Australian Constitution pre-1967, was a section in which Aboriginal Australians were not classified as people but as part of the flora and fauna. This represented the extinguishment of their rights to land.

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revisiting Salt Creek

We stayed  a night at Salt Creek in the Coorong on our return  to Adelaide after spending  a few days on the Mornington Peninsula in Melbourne with family.   The overnight stay allowed me to do some   photography on an early morning poodlewalk around the eroded calcified limestone  formations  at the Salt Creek outlet and the South Lagoon.

 

The South  Lagoon runs from Parnaka Point to south of Salt Creek and  I was guided by this report by the Goyder Institute  which had highlighted the decrease  in waterbird abundance in the Coorong. It stated that this decrease was been associated with a recent shift from an aquatic plant-dominated to an algal-dominated system.

the photographic landscape tradition

I am finding that many of the non-drought  images of the River Murray and the Coorong in my  archives are representations of natural beauty.  This seems to me, when looking back on these images today,  to be an inadequate way to photograph the River Murray and its various  wetlands, given the  damage to their ecological health  from both the  lack of environmental flows and the Millennium Drought.

This damage is  particularly noticeable in  the Coorong’s South Lagoon, and as this lagoon  is currently  in a  stressed ecological state, so the conventional landscape style photographs of  natural beauty  are inappropriate.

The problem with  conventional landscape photography in Australia is that is usually about the beauty of the landscape as a natural wilderness,  whilst  the River Murray and its various wetlands are manufactured landscapes. Since the 20th century the rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin  have been engineered for irrigated agriculture and these rivers have been,  and are, managed for the benefit of irrigation and water for the various cities.

The above photo of the Murray Mouth, for instance,  is aesthetically pleasing: it is a harmonious composition within the  picturesque  landscape tradition.   What is not shown in the photo is that  the Murray Mouth  can only remain open if it is being constantly dredged,  due to the lack of environmental flows.

salty landscapes

Clearing the land of vegetation  for agriculture can often mean salty landscapes and salt lakes as well as  salty ground water  that flows into the River Murray. The felling of  billions of trees (approximately 15 billion)  to make room for the farming in the Murray-Darling Basin, which  has  led to economic growth and national prosperity,  has caused, in just 150 years, a salinity crisis.

The gradual loss of farm and grazing land to rising salt is known as dryland salinity. It looks like this landscape near Lake Alexandrina: 

It is true that  salt is a natural feature of the Murray-Darling Basin’s landscapes and rivers as it is  derived from ancient ocean sediments, the weathering of rocks and deposition by rainfall over millions of years. However, human activities such as irrigation development and land clearing often exacerbate salt mobilisation, causing it to concentrate in certain parts of the landscape and rivers.