Thoughtfactory’s Fleurieuscape’s Notebook

The current harmful algae bloom (HAB) in South Australia, a number of species within the Karenia family, some of which produce brevetoxins ((marine neurotoxins) including  Karenia cristata.  This HAB  is the largest and most destructive algal bloom in Australia’s history and it is persisting along parts of the South Australian coastline, a year on from when it was first detected in March 2025. It has affected 20,000 sq km of coast and resulted in marine mass mortality killing millions of sea creatures – from tiny shellfish to top predators like white sharks. It is  the most significant marine mortality events on the great southern reef in living memory. 

Though the  coastal water can be clear along  the beach  it has been stripped of biodiversity and marine life. If you walk along the coastal path between Rosetta Head and  Kings Head you can see the HAB  sitting in the sea just off the coast:

It comes and goes. Looking back we can see that that the initial SA Government response and messaging about the harmful algae bloom  were fragmented and confusing for stakeholders,  and that there were delays in both the Commonwealth and state governments' responses. The concerns of the local community on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula  were not heeded until the bloom reached the Adelaide metropolitan beaches.  

Karenia cristata is  the primary source of brevetoxins and this species produces high levels of neurotoxins -- hence Kalani's death from eating dead fish and the distressed and paralysed western grey kangaroos at Tunkakilla on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula who  were close to the toxic algae bloom. 

 UTS’s Professor Shauna Murray, who who first identified the Karenia cristata  species for  producing brevetoxins in Australian waters in November 2025  observes: “We isolated Karenia cristata cells and grew them in our laboratory and then used a series of molecular genetic methods to  dentify and quantify them in South Australian waters since March 2025. We found K. cristata cells were producing high levels of brevetoxins, which hadn’t been known before.”

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I had just finished an early morning poodlewalk along the coastal path  between Kings and Dep's Beach in Waitpinga.   I was  near  to the car at the Whale Lookout and I was just about to get into the car and looked north  from the coastal path  to  the agricultural fields  when this event happened --ie., came into presence: 

This event briefly created a clearing ("Lichtung") where something different to the world of agriculture (one of instrumentality and technology that enframes the earth as a resource) briefly appeared. 

Agriculture in the Fleurieu Peninsula  represents  the triumph of human beings' ability to take hold of the world, control and dominate it entirely from a secure ground. This  historical transformation of nature ensured that  agriculture --- grazing, cropping and  vineyards --- is dominant in the Fleurieu Peninsula.  It is seen as an unalterable fact of modem life and it reveals the  way in which both beings (cattle, people etc) are made manifest for practical use and how nature is reduced to nothing but a pile of resources available for use. 

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Below are two analogue photos from  the on-going, post-studio roadside series. This  is a minor photographic  series that has emerged from the various poodlewalks in and around Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia.

 The site of the first photo  is the southern side of the eastern end of Depledge Rd whilst the site of the second photos is Halls Creek Rd, with  both sites  in  Waitpinga.   Both  photos being  made with a Linhof Technika 70 coupled to  a Linhof 6x9 film back,  and Kodak Porto 160 ASA film in  the late afternoon.   

What could be more mundane  than the roadside of a back country road,  which people treat as a dumping ground for their  illegal dumping? What could be less uninteresting as an artwork? It is about as interesting as Ed Ruscha's serial photographic project entitled Various Small Fires  that presents a sequence of such objects  (matches that are alight, a lighter that’s fired, a lit cigar, a lit cigarette, an ignited gas ring and so  forth).

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In the 1960-70s the established understanding of art was the singular, precious, expertly made and evaluated art object, which ruled art history, the art market, and museums. In the then cultural backwater of Australia art   training took place primarily in the publicly funded art school. These  were primarily vocational, focused on the transmission of  practical, manual skills or art makings  and  were centred around studio practice.   

The autonomy of the art school  started disappearing  when it became part of the College of Advanced Education in 1973.   This reform sought to formalize and elevate the study of art and design nationally through the introduction of university-style academic requirements.  The “Art Theory” course, which  built upon the new climate and system of liberal education,  further underscored the importance of general and specialist knowledge—from both within and outside of the discipline of art— and critical and logical thinking. 

This was when the traditionalist notions of artmaking and the expressive theory of  art were  under siege from  American minimalists, conceptualists, and critics  who were pushing past the boundaries of painting and sculpture by delegating the production of their artworks to industrial fabricators and artisans, polemically downplaying the importance of execution and highlighting the primacy of the idea or concept. The minimalists (Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Tony Smith) in  placing   the subject's experience of the specific object (ie., its reception) over the formal qualities of an autonomous art work, highlighted that the spectator is crucial for completing the work of art. 

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Fire.  In Talisker Conservation Park. This park  is located on the south-western area of the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia,  is north west of Deep Creek Conservation Park, and it is populated by rough barked manna gum (Eucalyptus viminalis spp. cygnetensis).

 It is primarily known for the  former Talisker Silver Mine, which  is of significant heritage value, as a largely intact example of historical silver mining practises that represent Cornish mining traditions and mine construction techniques. Deep Creek Conservation Park is the  largest portion of remaining natural vegetation on the Fleurieu Peninsula,  and it is surrounded by land that has been cleared and is now being used for agriculture,  particularly grazing. 

Probably a messmate stringybark (Eucalyptus obliqua).

There has been a moderate decline in rainfall in the region since the 1970s. Summer in South Australia's  Mediterranean climate-type  climate  with its warm-to-hot dry summers and mild-wet winters means high temperatures, hot north-westerly desert winds,  and increased risk of high intensity fires. 

Climate change projections for the region indicate decreasing rainfall (the winter rainfall  is largely declining),   increasing temperatures, rising sea levels and more severe fire danger days. So more bushfires.

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 Roadside, a sub-theme in the Fleurieuscapes project,  is informed by,  and takes its bearings, from Joyce Evans  intriguing  2013 body of work entitled  Edge of the Road.  The latter  appears to have been forgotten in  our photographic culture ---- sucked into its black hole.  

Roadside emerges from walking the unsealed back country roads in Waitpinga, usually on poodlewalks,  and it is concerned with both the state of side of the road,  the road itself and the  flux of the roadside. 

The picture of  illegal dumping of wet I initially took to be carp by local fishermen on Depledge Rd  in Waitpinga   was made on an early morning poodlewalk. I found out that it is redfin perch  not carp, and it  is slowly rotting away n the side of the road. I am surprised that  not even the local foxes, who clean up all the dead bodies in the bushland,  are  eating  the redfin.  I am glad it's not  carp as it  makes the standard poodles sick if they eat it. 

So much for the assertion that recreational fishermen are  in tune with, and respect,  nature. 

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Adorno argued in History and Freedom that the idea of history as progress in the realisation of freedom was shaken to its very core by the Auschwitz. This catastrophe had its impact on aesthetics in that  the  progressive quality of art could now refer to only such works that undermined the false optimism of the linear  model of historical progress.

One way this undermining took place was the artistic critique of the conventions of the beautiful, glorified by traditional aesthetics as an expression of freedoms,  exemplified by  modernist aesthetic theory of Greenberg.  In this theory  abstraction has often been understood precisely in terms of an aesthetic of the beautiful based on the judgment of taste and  there is  an aesthetic distance from  both popular cultural forms  and the logic of the market.  Art's  logic is an interruption of  tradition through formal innovation or revolutions to prevent its becoming an object of consumption and  ultimately losing its emancipative functions. 

 he critique and undermining of modernist aesthetic theory  was a  negating of  the beautiful form with its proportion, its balance, its unbroken unity, its harmony and its replacement by the rough, shapeless and resistant. Adorno argued in Aesthetic Theory that the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism (Lenhardt translation, p. 282). 

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A personal context  about the  singular place  (topos) in which we find ourselves and where we live, walk and photograph. 

The picture below is from a granite headland and is a  view of the coastline in  South Australia's southern Fleurieu Peninsula   looking west from the top of a headland  towards Kings Head, Newland Heads and  Cape Jervis.  The  granite headland, which was ice-moulded during the Permian glaciation, is known as Rosetta Head (The Bluff)  or Kongkengguwar  for the first nations  Ramindjeri people.  This region is becoming increasingly developed and framed as a tourist experience.  Rosetta Head itself is currently undergoing a major, long-term tourist upgrade by the Victor Harbor Council.  

The walking trail  along the western coastline from Petrel Cove in the foreground is  now known as the Wild Coast Way and it links up with the southern part of the 1200 kilometre Heysen Trail, which starts at Cape Jervis and ends in the Flinders Ranges.    Suzanne  walked the Heysen Trail over 3 years. In spite of its length it is a very popular walk in South Australia.  

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Two seascapes from the winter of 2022. Both of the pictures are of Encounter Bay  from Rosetta Head (Kongkengguwarr) . This is a headland, 97m above sea level

I pretty much stand in the same location  and I'm looking  in the same direction east by south east --- the camera is basically  looking across  Encounter Bay to the coastline  of the Coorong.  

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I've been re-looking at the film archives on the iMac and I came across  these photos of Kings Head, Waitpinga. I haven't looked at this particular archive in years. I cannot remember when these two photos were made. They were  probably made just before  we moved down to live at Encounter Bay on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula. 

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