Milton Haseloff, Picnic near Burra Creek, circa 1962, 35mm slide
This exhibition been kindly supported by the University of South Australia, School of Art, Architecture and Design, as part of the requirements for Doctor of Philosophy, Visual Art by Major Studio Project.
I can be seen in the bottom left of this photograph, with a red jumper, corduroy overalls and a defined upsweep in my hair. I am looking at my Grandma, Dorothy Armstrong, in the white hat. Pre-modern Australians made inroads to coping with Australia’s geographic challenges, and Grandma had links to pioneers who required resilience and creative adaptions, more so than I.
I have defining memories of being repeatedly herded by a sheep dog as a regular visitor to the Mid North during childhood, and this may clarify why a holistic approach to this research was taken. I had to adjust to nature’s laws. With my young cousins, the family farm’s outbuildings were explored; perhaps to see a sheep slaughtered, perhaps to collect eggs, or look down the well. The return to the farmhouse meant a substantial ‘run for one’s life’, up a steep, baked earth track. It was not the snakes, the swooping birds, or the barrelling winds funnelled by the nearby ranges, which was of concern. The worst terror ensured when the sheep dog named Poochie, darted endlessly behind us, his nose pointed to the ground, his panting audible. Every adventure on the farm seem to be accompanied by this ‘wolf’ like creature, and the faster we ran home, the more he circled.
There are codes of living and aspects of a new location that may only be understood as experience is gained, and time passes. The feelings of terror have been transmuted to those of enchantment now knowing they were the actions of a faithful canine worker, who kept the children together for their return to their parents. This is just as sheep are kept together. My research has looked to understand the local reasons for particular cultural practice in the same way – the use of household objects, aspects of design, unusual domestic practices that can be poorly understood. These were the often over-looked practices that create the meaningfulness, none-the-less, within place.
Poochie was symbolic of the permeable membrane between my comfortable urban, domestic life, and the other-worldly atmospheres, so strongly felt in regional Australia that seemed to dictate people’s survival. As the research progressed my thoughts turned to my great, great, great grandparents who arrived from Wales only to sadly perish within a few years of arriving in Kapunda. They would have been about the same age as I during those challenging years. To make a place for themselves in Australia they had to re-learn all that they knew, to engage with the specific, ongoing complexities of place. Their home would have been a site to begin reciprocal relationships with the natural world, as landscape “entered” the home.
Author Nicholas Rothwell reveals his poetic observations of the “clearly invisible”:
There are patterns and connections in our lives that elude us; resonances, fields of force, which go unknown until we tune our minds to the world beyond ourselves. Often it seems to me that life’s surface and the links of cause and effect we imagine ruling us are deceptive, and that deeper systems and symmetries lurk just out of sight; patterns that yearn for us to find them and align ourselves with them.[1]
To explore environmental awareness, and reciprocal interactions with the geographical and climatic conditions that become part of home life, I have applied John G. Bennett’s Systematics, as adapted by humanistic geographer David Seamon. This has enriched my phenomenological observations of the Mid North where imagination and memory has been combined with empirical observations. The consideration of noetic science has also played a role in interpreting the aspects of domestic culture that rest beyond ideologies. The multiple singularities, ever-moving edges, expansive possibilities, sense of order, freedoms and, most importantly, the implicit atmospheres of place, have all been entry points for these paintings.
Sue Michael
February 2017
smichael@westnet.com.au
[1] Nicolas Rothwell, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2009), XXI.