On my recent Mallee Routes photo trip I returned to sites in the eastern Mt Lofty Ranges that I had briefly photographed in during the 1980s. I spent a bit of the on the road time walking around the area on the Tungkillo to Palmer section of the Randall Rd, which runs from Mt Pleasant to Walker Flat.
Whilst I was taking some scoping snaps with my digital camera I remembered some of the photos that I’d made in the 1980s in this general location. The image below is one of the images that I remembered making using a Linhof Technika 70:
Eastern Mt Lofty Ranges
I recalled that in the 1980s I was visually attracted by the bareness of this landscape. It was a stripped, overgrazed landscape with just the odd tree hanging on. There was very little in the way of replanting or Landcare.
Whilst I was going through my archives looking for some better images to include in my portfolio for the Adelaide Photography 1970-2000 book— submissions have just been called— I came across a few images of River Red gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) along the River Murray in Victoria. I had more or less over forgotten about these mid-1980s images, as they were mixed up with some of the sand dune images of Adelaide’s coastal beaches in the archive.
Red River Gum, Barmah National Forest
The picture above was made on a late 1980s road trip in the VW Kombi along the southern coast of Australia then back along the River Murray. Other images from this road trip— e.g., the La Trobe Valley and the Riverland trunk images —can be found in this earlier post about the Adelaide Photography book. Continue reading →
This is another image from one of my visits to the Chowilla Flood Plain in South Australia’s Riverland region. This floodplain was listed as a Wetland of International Importance in 1987 under the Ramsar Convention.
river gum, Chowilla, South Australia
The picture was made with a Linhof Technika 70 in the same year as this image. From memory, it was taken a bit earlier the year. It was around 2004-5 when I was working as a staffer for a federal South Australian Senator. We had gone to see how little water there was on the floodplain during the decade long drought. Continue reading →
The next stage in the archive project after The Bowden Archives is a book with Adam Dutkiewicz entitled Adelaide Photography: from the 1970s –2000 to be published by Moon Arrow Press. It is a historical project that is a step to filling in the large gaps in the history of Australian photography and Adelaide’s late 20th century visual culture.
Once I’d purchased a VW Kombi I was able to make little road trips outside of the city, I started exploring around the Adelaide Hills and the Mt Lofty Ranges. I was stunned to see how small the city of Adelaide actually was sitting on the Adelaide plains. It really was an isolated, provincial city when compared to Melbourne and Sydney. It was easy to see how it was becoming marginalised.
city + plains, Adelaide
I was shocked by how barren or stripped the landscape was. The colonial settler society’s ethos of men’s mastery of nature resulted the trees being few and far between in many places. It was a reminder of the significance of agriculture prior to the emergence of manufacturing after 1945. Most land clearing occurred from the turn of the 19th century to the mid-20th century. The post World War 2 land development boom has seen the clearance of hundreds of thousands of hectares of native vegetation in the agricultural regions of the State. By the 1980s over 70 per cent of the land had been cleared. The land tax favoured the clearing of native vegetation not its conservation. Continue reading →
The suburbs west of the city of Adelaide and the parklands, such as Hindmarsh and Bowden, were earmarked as industrial areas prior to 1945 because they were in the vicinity of the road and rail links between Adelaide’s CBD and Port Adelaide. The industrial origins in the 19th century lay in the small cottage industries supported by both residential and industrial expansion. More noxious industries moved into the area in the early 20th century and the wealthier residents began to move out.
Though it was still a residential area, with many post 1945 European migrants (Greek, Italian, Yugoslav) being attracted to the area because of the low cost of housing, industry expansion quickened after the 1940s.By the 1980s the official view of Bowden-Brompton was that these suburbs were old industrial areas and that industry expansion was premised on purchasing adjoining residential property.
These properties were seen as being on congested sites, to be outworn and obsolete, as having reached the end of their economic and useful life, and that their low property values encouraged the intrusion of factories and businesses. The substandard housing was only worthy of demolition. The depressing character of sub-standard dwellings combined with noise, odours, dirt, smoke pollution and heavy traffic meant that Bowden was defined as a Adelaide’s slum. Slum meant an incidence of disease and delinquency.
The concerns of the people who lived in the slum for better living conditions for themselves could be ignored.
Gibson St, Bowden
Even though there was limited room for industrial expansion in Bowden, and industry was moving to Adelaide’s northern and north western suburbs, the old Hindmarsh Council, which had been captured by industry, had little interest in greening the suburb, the quality of the environment or urban renewal. The state government had no conception of urban infill with higher density housing. Continue reading →
The Bowden Archive and Other Marginalia 