An Australian Place
The photographs on display here reflect changing views about land and landscape. In the images from the early 1930s, Australia looks like another place—the landscapes are generalised and romanticised and could conceivably be anywhere in the world. Titles such as Weather of Tartarus (by Max Dupain) and Ebb Tide (by Monte Luke) reinforce this lack of specificity; these highly aestheticised works demonstrate the influences of Japanese art and also of the soft-focus photographic style known as Pictorialism.
In the late-1930s, photographers began to respond differently to the landscape, creating images that were expansive and filled with light. In the post-war period photographers like Axel Poignant and Richard Woldendorp were drawn to the vastness and emptiness of the Australian outback, producing grand, exalted images. In Robin V. Smith’s images taken in Western Queensland this harsh landscape is presented as alienating and inhospitable.
For Peter Dombrovskis, working in Tasmania during the 1970s and 80s, the beauty of the landscape lay in its wildness. His photographs have played an instrumental role in the conservation movement: Rock Island Bend was used effectively in the 1983 Federal election campaign to prevent the damming of the Franklin River.