Thoughtfactory’s Fleurieuscape’s Notebook

During the school holidays a funfair or amusement park is set up near the causeway to Granite Island. It is a tiny public space for Girder Family Amusements: a space between the holding pens for the horse drawn carriage to the Granite Island Recreation Park and the barbecue area  in the Soldiers Memorial Gardens. 

But a seaside town must have a funfair with its  ferris wheel, dodgem cars,  inflatable double slides etc etc. It is tradition--just like the horse drawn carriage to Granite Island and the Cockle train to Goolwa. There for the family day tourists.

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Below  are some more  images in the ongoing series of  suburban architecture at Victor Harbor in South Australia.  These photos, which   were made just prior to the Covid-19 lockdown whilst I was on an early morning poodlewalk with Kayla. They are part of  photography as placemaking.

This is at a time when the global digital photographic market  is contracting and stagnating,  resulting in  Olympus selling off their camera business (a Micro 4/3 system) to a private equity firm.  Covid-19 has  increased the stagnation as  it  has bought photography to more or less  a standstill since February 2020.  One  consequence is that there will inevitably  be  more consolidation in the camera industry and that  the  emphasis  of  my photography  is  on the local due to national travel restricted  and international travel untenable. There will be more  walking locally.  

This white house is on the western end of The Esplanade. It overlooks the beach, is opposite a caravan park and it is  near the mouth of the ephemeral Inman River. Kayla and I  often walk past it on the return leg of the  walk that we do along the Esplanade beach from Kent Reserve.  

 This house is at the other  end of The Esplanade and it looks out to Granite Island. 

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Prior to the Covid-19 lockdown  Kayla and I went on an early morning  poodlewalk   around  the streets that border the estuary, lagoon  and mouth of the Hindmarsh River. This is an older,  residential part of Victor Harbor  and it overlooks  the railway line to the river port town of Goolwa, the beach  and Encounter Bay. The houses are on a hill and their  view of Encounter Bay includes Granite Island. 

An early part  of the walk on this occasion was  the western part of the suburb of Hayborough. This is a well established part of Victor Harbor with many of the houses tucked away amongst the bush overlooking the Hindmarsh estuary and so difficult to photograph.  Privacy is everything for the old Adelaide money.   Fortunately, this particular house  is not tucked away: 

Another part of  our  walk was  along Bridge Terrace in Victor Harbor that   is just west of the mouth of  Hindmarsh River  This residential part of Victor Harbor overlooks a reserve and Encounter Bay, and runs from the the Granite Island causeway  to Bridge PoInt, which   overlooks the estuary and mouth of the Hindmarsh River: 

The purpose of the poodlewalk was to have a break from both  walking the back country roads  and  photographing the coastal rocks. landscape.  I also wanted  to  photograph some of  the residential  architecture  before some of these fine,   old buildings are pulled down to make way for the newer double storey  McMansion style homes.  

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The  landscape b+w picture below of roadside vegetation in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula is from the archives. It was recently shared with the Melbourne-based Friends of Photography Group (FOPG).  

The subtext of landscape art in Australia has been resolutely national; indeed, national identity—the Australianness of Australian  art--tacitly assumed the primacy of the nation. I would have thought that the concept of empire would be central,  since Australia was part of  the British empire.  An example would be the early colonial painters such as John Glover,  who struggled to reconcile the Australian landscape with the confines of the picturesque, the dominant landscape aesthetic of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The picturesque was in effect the visual language of the colonisers--it highlighted the beauty rather than the hardships of imperial lands, depicting colonial Australia as a land ripe for settlement. 

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This landscape picture is of a rocky outcrop just west of Kings Head in Waitpinga on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. It  was made on an early morning poodlewalk that Kayla and I did.  We hadn't been to this  location  to photograph since the autumn of 2019.  

It was  an overcast morning in late summer, on the cusp of summer and autumn. It was after a storm had just passed through Victor Harbor a few days earlier. The outcrop is on the Heysen Trail, but it  can only be accessed when  the  tide is low.   

Domestic coastal architecture  is primarily a  space for living within. Traditionally the buildings are sparse and  functional. They are summer holiday houses simply built.   Their exteriors are so ordinary as to pass unnoticed. 

At Encounter Bay the 1940-50s houses  are slowly being pulled down and  grander  seaside designs are being built. 51 Franklin Parade, Encounter Bay is a recent example:

The old summer holiday house has been replaced by a house for people  to permanently  live in.  Victor Harbor is changing. Sea change is starting to  influence the style of architecture. 

I have been slowly photographing the roadside vegetation in my local area on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula with large format cameras--in this case  a 5x4 Linhof Technika IV. This kind of slow photography  is an attempt to photograph nature whilst avoiding  working within the tradition of wilderness photography, which is where a lot of large format photographers in Australia have situated themselves and their work.

The roadside vegetation subject matter  is often mundane, ordinary and boring. It requires a lot of scoping to find something  that is  suitable to photograph,  and  I basically do the scoping whilst I am on my daily poodle walks along back country roads. These  walks allow me to become familiar with the bush and  early morning light during the autumn, winter and early spring months.   

This particular tree study emerged from my frequent early morning poodle walks along Baum Rd in  Waitpinga  It's a no exit road that runs between agricultural /grazing fields and it leads to  farms and  holiday houses along the coastal edge  of the Waitpinga  Cliffs. This minimal traffic means that this  road  is ideal for early morning poodle walks.

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We went for a an exploratory drive through the hills of the Fleurieu Peninsula  towards Yankalilla to become more familiar with the back country roads in our local region. I  used  the trip in this place  to scope some  future photographic possibilities. Yankalilla is  on the western side of the Peninsula.  It is not often that we venture to the western Fleurieu Peninsula. 

 We started the trip driving along the roads that were familiar with --the ones that Suzanne had walked along when she did the Heysen Trail (Tugwell Rd + Keen Rd).  Then we turned west  along Hancock Rd and  spent a bit of time wandering around,  and exploring,  the ruins of this  Congressional Church at Bald Hills on Hancock Rd. It was our only stop on the trip  to Yankallila.      

After leaving the ruins of the church we  continued  along Hancock Rd,  turned right into  Mayfield Rd, then left into the  Inman Valley Rd, which runs east/west across the Peninsula.  We drove west along the Inman Valley Rd to the outskirts of the Yankalilla township.   We turned  around before entering the Yankalilla township,   drove back along the Inman Valley Rd before  turning into Torrens Vale Rd. We then  drove along  Parawa Rd up  to Range Rd, which is one of the main east west roads across the Peninsula.  

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The  coast of the  southern Fleurieu Peninsula  can be quite wild and dangerous  especially when the weather is rough or stormy:

When I am walking  in those conditions I experience the coastal landscape as dark and strange. Hence  my attempts with granite,  or rock pools to find a way to represent the dark and the strange without embracing a mystical version of the noumenal world. 

This image, for instance,  is an attempt to make the coastal landscape along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula  dark and strange without going mystical  --ie referring to a noumenal world of processes, forms, or ideas  that lies behind the phenomenal world that  is experienced by us. 

The noumenal world can be  invoked when trying to explain the phenomenal, by describing the underlying causes  of the phenomenal through theoretical reason.  Thus theoretical natural science refers to a world of  molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, the curvature of space-time, black holes, the Big Bang, etc. However, this is not the world of objects in space and time (eg.,rocks, sea, seaweed, rock pools  etc) that I daily experience with my  senses when  I am on a  poodlewalk. 

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This picture is from the archives. It  was made in 2013 at Kings Head, Waitpinga, just below Kings Beach Retreats.  We were still living in Adelaide's CBD at the time,  and coming down to Encounter Bay every second weekend. 

This  photo session incorporated  a poodlewalk to Kings Head  from the car park at Kings Head Rd   and back again. This walk  is part  of the Heysen Trail  to Waitpinga Beach in the Newland Heads Conservation Park,  and then to the Trail's starting point at  Cape Jervis.      

 I remembered this image when I uploaded  this digital version, which was made 5 years latter as a scoping study. The above  picture  is a 5x4 scanned colour file  that has been converted into black and white. So I had already made the 5x4 picture (along with several medium format versions made in the same year) that I was scoping for in January 2018.  My memory was that the previous 5x4 attempt hadn't been successful--people said they didn't think much of the image -- so I felt that I needed to  have another go.    Hence the  digital scoping. 

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