Thoughtfactory: Fleurieuscapes

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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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). 

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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. 

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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.

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