This picture is from Mount Alma Rd looking north across some farmland towards the Spring Mount Conservation Park in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula:
The Spring Mount Conservation Park is situated on a broad ridge that stands between the Inman Valley and the Hindmarsh Tiers Rds. The trees in the park are mostly mature Brown Stringybark (Eucalyptus baxteri) and Messmate Stringybark (E. obliqua).
If the Fleurieuscapes book is to be centred around a poetics of homecoming---with its associated words of dwelling, place, region, abiding and building, then the various words need to be unpacked.
Firstly, we need to unpack what is is meant by poetics. It is broader than poetry in that it implies a creative act that points to something beyond itself. This refers to poiesis or a bringing into being: an unending creative struggle to express that which conditions and informs our worlds of meaning and yet resists being exhaustively articulated in the terms of these worlds.
How does this conception of poetics relate to visual art including photography?
The starting point would have to be Kant, since it was he who first systematically outlined the logical grammar or conceptual machinery of aesthetics though his categorical separation of knowledge /truth as in the natural sciences, morality and aesthetic in modernity into separate domains. In the Critique of Judgement Kant acknowledges that scientific cognition excludes aspects of ourselves from its view of nature and that this must be accounted in other than cognitive terms.
He does this in terms of an aesthetics that is based on the imagination, autonomous art, intuition, aesthetic ideas, taste and the lack of concept. Kant, in other words, in inscribing art with the autonomous domain of the aesthetic relegates art and aesthetics to what is outside truth and goodness. Autonomous art is autonomous from truth and morality.
This photo is made from an ecological perspective on the landscapes that have been produced by the economic development of settler capitalism. Today there is only scattered remnant vegetation left from the clearance for agricultural production in the Fleurieu Peninsula. It's not a pretty picture.
The photo of an intimate landscape --dead roadside vegetation-- is the opposite of a nostalgic picture of a cosy, rural life to a harmonious settlement that has its roots in the yeoman tradition in the form of soldier settlements. The state government, as a promoter of economic development, in the early 20th century was also the architect of a desired cultural landscape and social class that emphasised the virtues of small-scale family owned and operated yeoman farms.
The ‘ pioneer legend’---which saw white settlement as a battle to win the land, in which humans were evenly pitted against nature---is now a form of myth making, given the emergence of agri-businesses and the family farm becoming all but obsolete. The pioneer idea, in pitting settlers against the land was not only fruitless, in leading to the ruin of the settlers, but self-defeating in ultimately ruining the land itself.