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.
This was a settlement premised on the European subjugation of the Aborigines following years of virtual war. The picturesque repressed the history of white colonial brutality. It depicted the showing the pastoral wealth of the settled land without Aborigines---refusing to depict the Aborigines within a contemporary landscape, and instead relegating them to a pre-colonial situation as a dark, primitive, exotic, mysterious factor in nature. Glover's paintings, which challenged the picturesque conventions in order to depict the Australian landscape in new and original ways, emphasised settlement, development, and cultivation. These offered an appealing vision of the British Empire.
If there is a death of landscape painting --ie., the eclipse of traditional media such as large-scale exhibition paintings of landscape subjects--then this has been accompanied by a proliferation of landscape imagery across media, notably photography and, above all, film (e.g., Ivan Sen's 2013 film Mystery Road). This opens up the landscape to being a contested space that is open to multiple interpretations. Mystery Road and Goldstone (2016) depicts forgotten towns, a bloody frontier, a haunted country of massacre creeks and slaughter hills where brutality and dispossession are ongoing with the ruthless politics of land (eg., the mining companies)
Land and landscape are once again at the heart of contemporary political debates with aboriginal land rights as well as climate change and global warming. After the clearing there is just the roadside vegetation and pockets of native bush left. Most of land around Waitpinga is rarely seen as it is locked up in agriculture properties. It can only be seen from a plane or a drone.