Pinnacles, Perth, Pub and Pilbara

Eleanor Peres and Alex Psaltis (Fabrics)

“What do we do when we glean? select, extract, gather, pull out of context, recombine and often we have to be prepared to pick up the leftovers because, no doubt, someone has been there before us.”1
— Helene Frichot on Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I

This audiovisual essay transforms material from a mid-twentieth-century archive of “Australiana” photography books in large-format hardcover. These images were captured decades ago on stolen land that has still not been ceded. Its authors acknowledge and pay respect to Aboriginal communities past, present and emerging on both Gadigal and Wurundjeri lands where they practice.

In the absence of human ownership, the backyard fence becomes obsolete. We take a deeper temporal view where the chaos of shared experience renders the entire nation one big backyard. Not yours or mine but ours. Lichen leaks over architecture’s partitions and mycelium follows tree roots to escape property borders deep below the soil’s surface. Bushfire smoke traverses international date lines without a passport while subterranean coal seams burn deep underground.

The extraction and reformation of earth materials into life-size spaces from a distance and at scale via digital communication tools is an architectural process this work inverts. Material gleaned from second-hand physical books has been hacked, scanned and recomposed to blur scale, time and geography. The edge between the Pub, the Pinnacles, Perth and Pilbara is no longer discernible.

Our intention is to investigate familiar territory in unfamiliar ways, knowing what we now know. This is our research. The “wonder” and “beauty” of the antipodal nation shot on Hasselblad forty years ago seems to reach from inked centrefolds and seduce us to cherish it. Were these photojournalism encounters of “timelessness” and “grandeur” too polite a warning, given we are now critically aware of what was erased?

The borderless Australian backyard offered to you is constructed from moments in time we can never return to. The national outside rendered in these photographs is not the same one at the periphery of our apartments and cities today. Some sites have been decimated or developed, others renamed in recognition of ancient Aboriginal civilisation, and some appear frozen in time as the planetary atmosphere enveloping them evolves.

Images

  1. “Glistening streams linger after rain” Ayers Rock, p.186 2
  2. “The role of the missionary in outback Australia has been both lavishly praised and bitterly condemned. Nineteenth century missionaries brought the aboriginal people their first experience of western religion and often of western medicine as well. But the new faith brought a new culture, complete with previously unknown diseases (especially leprosy, heart disease and alcoholism). Within 100 years traditional aboriginal life had disappeared and much of the aboriginal culture lay in ruin. The problems continue today - trachoma (a chronic eye disease which can result in blindness) affects one in three aboriginal children in the outback, the aboriginal infant mortality rate is four times the national average, and the life expectancy for an aboriginal is 25 years less than that of a white Australian.” Mike O’Brien3
  3. “Sydney by day, a large modern metropolis which belies its humble convict origins”4
  4. “The city of Launceston lies on the Tamar River in Northern Tasmania. Just outside Launceston is spectacular Cataract Gorge”5
  5. “The view from Beacon Hill in the Hamersley Ranges, colourful desert mountains which rise above the red sand and spinifex of the state’s dry north west”6
  6. “The Pinnacles”7
  7. “Taken at exactly 9am. Each of the 100 photographers had been instructed to photograph a small business proprietor in front of their establishment.”, Vladimir Sichov, Bendigo, Victoria8
  8. “Not everyone worked on Friday, and with a day off, the beach is the best place to polish the suntan. Unfortunately, this exposure to the Australian summer sun gives Australians the highest rate of skin cancer in the world”. Brian Lanker, Burketown, Queensland9
  9. “Aborigines believed these huge granite boulders were eggs laid by a mythical rainbow snake. The Devil’s Marbles lie near the Queensland - Northern Territory border at Tennant Creek”10
  10. “Artist Brett Whiteley at work on his latest painting ‘just like a woman’ Bondi 1981 in Sydney. Graham McCarter”11
  11. “Cobar, deep inland on the Barrier Highway is a copper mining town which produces half a million tonnes of ore a year”12
  12. “The mountains of Queenstown, Tasmania”13
  13. Gerd Ludwig, Australian Hotel, Cowra, New South Wales14
  14. “Tasmania’s capital city, seen from the top of Mount Wellington” now more commonly named Kunanyi p.8315
  15. “Australia wakes up on a typical Friday. With a mighty stretch, camel hunter Terry Maloney, one of 15 million Australians, prepares to face the early desert chill. He will spend the day catching wild camels for export to the Middle East. It is already 7:30am in the eastern states and breakfast is on the stove, while four thousand kms across the continent, the west coast is still in darkness and most people have another few hours to sleep.” Ethan Hoffman16
  16. Gooses Bluff pound17
  17. “The Opera House”18
  18. “Alpine flowers pattern the slopes of Mount Kosciusko”19
  19. “Western Australia’s capital city - Perth - a modern, exciting metropolis known for its nightlife, good weather and youthful outlook.”20
  20. “American photographer Brian Lanker was assigned to cover Normanton and Bourketown in far-north Queensland.”21

  1. Helene Frichot, “Creative Ecologies, Theorizing the Practice of Architecture”, 13 December 2018, Bloomsbury Visual Arts ↩︎

  2. Australia, a Timeless Grandeur, 1981, Helen and Bruno Grasswill and Reg Morrison ↩︎

  3. Australia, 1987, Juanita Phillips and David Copsey ↩︎

  4. Australia, the Timeless Continent, 1984, Ted Smart and David Gibbon, Neil Sutherland, Eberhard Streichan and Oystein Klakegg ↩︎

  5. Australia, 1987, Juanita Phillips and David Copsey ↩︎

  6. Australia, the Timeless Continent, 1984, Ted Smart and David Gibbon, Neil Sutherland, Eberhard Streichan and Oystein Klakegg ↩︎

  7. Australia, 1987, Juanita Phillips and David Copsey ↩︎

  8. Australia, a Timeless Grandeur, 1981, Helen and Bruno Grasswill and Reg Morrison ↩︎

  9. A day in the Life of Australia, March 6 1981, Rick Smolan and Andy Park ↩︎

  10. Australia, 1987, Juanita Phillips and David Copsey ↩︎

  11. A day in the Life of Australia, March 6 1981, Rick Smolan and Andy Park ↩︎

  12. Australia, the Timeless Continent, 1984, Ted Smart and David Gibbon, Neil Sutherland, Eberhard Streichan and Oystein Klakegg ↩︎

  13. Australia, the Timeless Continent, 1984, Ted Smart and David Gibbon, Neil Sutherland, Eberhard Streichan and Oystein Klakegg ↩︎

  14. A day in the Life of Australia, March 6 1981, Rick Smolan and Andy Park ↩︎

  15. Australia, 1987, Juanita Phillips and David Copsey ↩︎

  16. A day in the Life of Australia, March 6 1981, Rick Smolan and Andy Park ↩︎

  17. Australia, a Timeless Grandeur, 1981, Helen and Bruno Grasswill and Reg Morrison ↩︎

  18. Australia, the Timeless Continent, 1984, Ted Smart and David Gibbon, Neil Sutherland, Eberhard Streichan and Oystein Klakegg ↩︎

  19. Australia, 1987, Juanita Phillips and David Copsey ↩︎

  20. A day in the Life of Australia, March 6 1981, Rick Smolan and Andy Park ↩︎

  21. A day in the Life of Australia, March 6 1981, Rick Smolan and Andy Park ↩︎

Eleanor Peres is a designer from Lutruwita (Tasmania) who has lived and worked in Tokyo, Rotterdam, and Moscow. She studied architecture at UTS and TU Delft and is currently based in Sydney with Sibling Architecture. Her research explores the tense relationship between living systems and artificial structures and its critical role in future imaginaries. Her work has been published by Strelka Mag, Caliper Journal, Contemporary Art Tasmania Journal and the Fifth Estate. Eleanor was a recipient of the Byera Hadley Travelling Scholarship in 2018, the Marten Bequest in 2020 and was a researcher in the Terraforming 2020 Education Program at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design. In 2021 she will be an artist-in-residence at The Unconformity in Queenstown and will curate a winter exhibition of Australian architecture research at the Tin Sheds as part of Emergence Collective.

Alex Psaltis is a multi-disciplinary sound artist who composes music from a network of machines through solo and collaborative practice. He followed a Bachelor of Sound and Music Design at University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) with an honours in Interactive Composition at the University of Melbourne (UoM). Between the two cities and cultural contexts, Alex has worked on large scale audio visual installations, composed for screen and produces and performs experimental music under the pseudonym Fabrics. Throughout his career, he has performed alongside Rival Consoles, Avalon Emerson, Blanck Mass and μ-ziq, and appeared at the Soft Centre festival of experimental art and sound. Listen on Spotify or SoundCloud.