We would like to acknowledge the sovereign Traditional Custodians of the land on which we live as uninvited guests, in the suburb now known as Coburg – the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nation in Naarm. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation, who are the Custodians of the unceded land, skies and waterways where we live, work and make.
Thank you to Wurundjeri Elders, Aunty Juleanne Axford and Aunty Gail Smith from the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation for their permissions for Peta Clancy to photograph this beautiful part of Wurundjeri Country.
Future River: When the past flows, Counihan Gallery, 3 February – 28 April 2024 featured works by Maree Clarke (Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung), Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway), Peta Clancy (Yorta Yorta) and Jody Haines (palawa). The project was curated by Kimba Thompson and presented in partnership with Blak Dot Gallery as part of PHOTO 2024.
For the exhibition, Peta Clancy’s installation here merri merri lies explored Coburg Lake near the Newlands Bridge. Clancy’s installation combined historic photographs of Naarm/Melbourne’s Merri Creek and the Newlands Bridge, which were printed as large-scale wallpaper imagery, onto which newly imaged multi-layered framed colour photographs of Country were installed. Bluestone rocks were placed in the gallery space and a large-scale photograph of the creek was installed on the gallery windows facing Brunswick’s Sydney Road. A sound work was created by Xain Milke, from field recordings of Coburg Lake, and played on loop in the space.
The conversation between Olivia and Peta took place in Coburg on 30 May 2024 and has been edited for brevity.
Olivia Koh (OK): Can you tell me about how you conceptualised the photographic narrative in your recent show?
Peta Clancy (PC): I was talking to Kimba [curator Kimba Thompson] and we were standing in the Counihan Gallery space looking out at Sydney Road and talking about it as a continuation of Elizabeth Street, which is a waterway. Through my research I found photographs of Elizabeth Street flooded and I imagined Sydney Road flooding. We decided to put the image of a waterway on the window to continue this idea and to acknowledge the waterways and stories that have been altered and covered over in Melbourne through urbanisation.
PC: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about photography and place, and have been in conversation with colleagues on this topic. We have a collective and since 2022 I have been collaborating with colleagues Jahkarli Romanis, Dr Kirsten Lyttle, Dr Jessica Neath and Professor Melissa Miles. We have written papers together and given talks exploring the complexities of photography of place in colonised lands and discussed possibilities for cultivating reciprocal relationships with place and its Custodians. Initially, our discussions were about the history of photography of Country, landscape or place.
Historically, photography has been used as a means of control and exploitation by colonial powers. During the nineteenth century, ethnographers and anthropologists used the camera to catalogue, control, and objectify First Peoples. Likewise, Country was depicted in possessive and extractive ways. Landscapes were perceived with an eye to the number of livestock that could be grazed. Photographs of land that had been cleared, fenced and with homesteads built on, are now held in public archives and private collections. Countless significant cultural sites were photographed. A really good example of this is how photographs of Country and people were taken and then converted into postcards. Postcards became a currency in Australia as something people could own, whereas we’ve been thinking about non-extractive ways of working with photography and considering the agency of Country and photography: what photographs of Country may reveal or conceal about place – whether that’s history, memory, story, you know.
A starting point for this project was when I began researching historic photographs and postcards from the Coburg Historical Society. Coburg is well known through its traumatic history — it is where the former Pentridge Prison is located.
There's a bridge that crosses Merri Creek — the Newlands Bridge — which was built in 1865, from bluestone quarried (from within that area) using prisoner labour.[1] I found photographs of the area and of that bridge before Merri Creek was dammed using the rocks from the waterway to create Coburg Lake. The Woi Wurrung name for Merri Creek is ‘merri merri’ meaning ‘rocky rocky’. You can see all the rocks in the waterway when you walk along Merri Creek.
In the archives of the State Library of Victoria I was able to see the original photographs from which the postcards were made. I returned to the same location the historic photographs depict. This is a way of standing in the footsteps of the photographer but also trying to practise a different non-extractive approach to photographing Country, place or landscape. When I visited the area, it looked quite different because there is so much more infrastructure: there are bike paths, a weir, a road and the Newlands Bridge.
Coburg Lake is in the area of Pentridge Prison. I thought, ‘I don’t really want to go there’, because it is where a lot of Aboriginal people were incarcerated. Today the site of Pentridge Prison is a shopping centre and movie theatre – I mean, it’s my closest shopping centre, you know, but a lot of Aboriginal people don’t want to go there.
During 2018 and 2019 I worked on a project Undercurrent (2019) exploring a massacre site on Dja Dja Wurrung Country (a collaboration with Dja Dja Wurrung Traditional Custodians Mick Bourke, Amos Atkinson and Rodney Carter, CEO of Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation). This site is a flooded waterway, meaning that the massacre site is literally under water and consequently the ancestors are protected because people can’t walk in the area and their spirits are being cleansed by the water.
Returning to Merri Creek, at Coburg Lake the Merri has been widened, and Country along the waterway has been covered by water. The creation of the lake altered the trajectory of the creek, along with the path the water had chosen to travel across Country for thousands of years. Through the process of flooding the waterway, thousands of years of culture, history and memory have been submerged. I think about what’s been covered over, culturally, and this is Wurundjeri cultural history. It’s not my place, but I think of it as a metaphor for colonisation and the history, the story, of this Country or land being literally covered by water and through colonisation. I think about cultural metaphors as a way to understand the history of these waterways. Through urban development, the area has been changed substantially by this infrastructure and it was impossible to photograph from the same perspective as the historic photograph and still see the waterway.
OK: Could you describe the images that were printed and installed onto the wall of Counihan Gallery?
PC: A large black-and-white photograph of Merri Creek and Newlands Bridge reproduced as a large wallpaper print was attached on one wall in the gallery space.[2] Installed onto the wallpaper were smaller framed photographs I had created that depict that same area in the vicinity of the Newlands Bridge.
When I create the images I like to collaborate with Country. I start by using my large-format film camera to photograph Country; I then scan the negatives and print the images as large-scale prints and then return to the same location as the historical photographs, and rephotograph the prints. I put the prints onto a frame at exactly the same location as depicted in the photograph, cut into the print, remove part of the image and rephotograph the print.
Through this process I show Country the photographs taken from my perspective; asking permission from Country to create new images. I like to think of this process as a collaboration with Country because the wind and the light affect the prints that I photograph. It’s a really beautiful process of working on and with Country. The final photographs explore multiple ways of understanding Country and its histories because of this layering process.
OK: I didn’t realise your process until later when I saw the photographs, I assumed that they were somehow digitally imposed or superimposed ... But to understand that this layering process is a physical process … Thinking about that in terms of being on Country, on site, really changes the reading. You’ve described your practice as ‘premised on in-depth depictions of place’, could you talk more about the ‘depth’? And, for example, a photograph in this exhibition shows a light leak, maybe on the photograph of the reflection of water, or how light is refracted on water, then on to a photograph that you’ve taken on that site.
PC: What I mean by ‘in-depth’ is that I spend time and photograph Country, returning over months and sometimes years. Coming back to the process, the final photograph is a combination of multiple photographs of Country: photographs of the print and then part of what is behind when I set up to rephotograph the print.
By cutting into the photographic print, I’m either removing parts of Country or revealing parts of Country as a way to explore the things that can’t be seen, such as history or memory. Whether they’re sites of trauma or sites of loss, those kinds of things are definitely still there. I’m also thinking about the agency of Country and the process that I explore is a way to understand and acknowledge this.
OK: I think that’s what the photographs are showing. How you’re pointing to other ways of seeing: where you show a scene and you show its materiality but also point to what can’t be captured.
PC: Yes. I was mentioning the Undercurrent series; it’s strange as well, how can you possibly explore or depict a massacre site in photographs? It’s an impossibility; you just can’t really.
OK: You make from a place of impossibility but still attempt to visualise this negation; your process demonstrates the limitations of photography while still using it as a visual language. You’ve talked about how part of the process is sharing the images with Country. I think this sharing process cannot be shown in the images. It’s something that you’ve lived, which still sits somewhere within the photographic work but is not able to be represented.
PC: Yeah. Right. Because I take a lot of photos, but it’s about slowing down and being there, developing a relationship and deeper respect for Country where I’m working. In an interview on 3CR Community Radio on the show Solidarity Breakfast, Annie McLoughlin, the interviewer said, ‘Through spending lots of time, you deepen your relationship with place’. Which I thought was really beautiful.
artist. Image courtesy the artist and Dominik Mersch Gallery.
Considering the agency of Country, when I made the Undercurrent work, I was talking to Professor Brian Martin, the director of Womenjika Djeembana Indigenous Practice Lab at Monash Art Design & Architecture. He asked me, ‘did you preconceive how the images were going to look?’ Originally when I was going to work on the project, after being invited to explore Dja Dja Wurrung Country, I had planned to visit a number of locations and potentially make work responding to them. But in the end I felt it was much more honest and respectful to honour and develop a deeper relationship with just one place, one location. Then Brian said, ‘Oh, it’s really really interesting because I feel like Country in a way made the work.’ You know, you can say the wind moved the photo paper or light bounced off the photo itself; these environmental factors make the photo. Light and water are intrinsically part of the photographic process anyway, but there’s something to say about consciously giving agency to Country.
OK: This is such a different way of thinking about photography, because in a western sense the photographer ‘captures’ nature or ‘captures’ the image of landscape because it’s a possessive motivation or impulse to depict the land. But in the sense you’re talking about it, you create these images in a collaborative process that is material and chemical, whereby Country is affecting the image.
PC: I am really interested in the idea of spending time in a place and creating photographs over a long period of time; this may be years, in contrast to the idea of using the shutter speed (measurements of time) to capture a ‘decisive moment’, which is spoken about throughout the history of photography. It’s more about slowing time and collaborating with Country as a way to create photographs of place. And it seems a more deeply respectful approach.
OK: I think of what the suburb Coburg is … a name for what is built upon it. In thinking about the city as an obfuscation, or the suburbs as an obfuscation. And Elizabeth Street. And not originally understanding that, as you said at the start of this interview, ‘there was a river there’. You can say, ‘Yes, Melbourne is a colonial construct’, but this is different from really understanding how mapping has affected the land. And changed where it is placed. Could you talk more about the Newlands Bridge at Coburg Lake?
PC: Yes. Kimba and I were talking about the photo of the bridge and I’d been researching this Newlands Bridge, made from bluestones quarried from the area. The bridge was actually built by convicts or prisoners from Pentridge Prison, which is just across the road from Coburg Lake/Merri Creek. Coming to talk about Coburg Lake (which was built as a public swimming pool), when the lake was created and Merri Creek was widened at that section, so areas of Country were covered over by the water. And I wonder about this concealment of cultural memory in place. Rocks were taken from Merri Creek (remembering merri merri means rocky rocky) which were then used to create a wall to dam a section of the creek to create Coburg Lake. So the waterway itself was used, or parts of it, were used to destroy itself.
OK: Could you tell me about the bluestone rocks in the Counihan Gallery space?
PC: In conversation with Kimba, I decided to bring the bluestones into the gallery space to deconstruct the photographic image and the impact of colonisation on Country. I was directly referencing the bluestone bridge depicted in the large-scale wallpaper photograph and thinking of knocking it down to reveal what’s underneath. I imagined this engineered structure breaking down.
OK: Where did you source the rocks from?
PC: We didn’t knock them off from anywhere ... we were walking on the street and we’re like, ‘oh, there’s a loose one!’ No, we got the bluestones from a landscaping place in Keilor and we purchased them. They’re so heavy it’s unbelievable. They referenced the structure of the bridge and the city. It was a new approach for me, to extend the photograph.
OK: Thinking of a photograph in the expanded sense: the gallery walls, the gallery window, your sound work as creating a spatial experience for the viewer.
PC: Instead of place being represented by a two-dimensional flat plane with one horizon line, it’s more about the experience and engaging your peripherals and sound, expanding the photograph in a very basic sense. Photographs transform the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional image and change the relationships between things. It’s taking the photograph back into a three-dimensional world, but extending that to think about reciprocity with place and Country.
OK: Yeah, and the real material relations ... you’re drawing attention to these. I just keep thinking, since you’ve been talking about these kinds of perverse logics, as with the bluestone, getting the prisoners or incarcerated people to build public infrastructure, build rivers and bridges. And then that kind of colonial logic in the river, using rocks integral to the river, as you said, for its own destruction or re-formation, a violent re-formation. Then bringing those objects into the space and making those histories unfixed. We think about photographic language as ‘fixed’ – the fixing of paper. You’ve created a very unfixed installation: you’ve got the image of the rocks, and then you’ve also got the actual rocks. Like a proposition … as in, what if the rocks came out of that historical photograph you installed in the gallery, disrupting what we know or we accept as an image?
PC: Yeah, amazing. With that image on the left [of the gallery space], it’s almost like those rocks are coming out of the image. Rocks that were used to build the wall that destroyed and changed the waterway, but also the potential of what it symbolises, this unfixed history of place. It’s all an illusion, because Newlands Bridge has only existed for less than 200 years compared with Wurundjeri connection to Country for thousands and thousands of years.
OK: There’s something about what you said about Pentridge as well that personally sort of sticks because I always think of that prison as a gentrified space. It seems so wrong to me. Because, for example, the jail cells have been converted into hotel rooms and the area into retail spaces and a cinema.
PC: There’s a lap pool in one of them. I was absolutely infuriated … I thought it was the Merri-Bek Council that sold the land when the prison closed down in 1997, but it was the Victorian Government. I would have really loved it if they had made it into parkland to let Country heal.
OK: Yeah, if they actually took down those bluestone structures?
PC: The bluestones are so heavy and dark. But I imagine the people working with the weight of that, like when I was de-installing, so heavy.
OK: The weight of it … or?
PC: Yeah, just that lack of respect for trauma and memory.
[1] An artificial lake was created by placing a weir across Merri Creek near Newlands Bridge. Excavations for the basalt weir to be built across the creek began in early 1914. Stone removed from the creek was used to build a wall on the bank of the creek. PROV, VPRS 11314/P1, unit 15, Public Works Committee minutes, 29 April 1914, clause 9.
[2] Photograph by G.G.M. of Merri Creek from c.1914–16; scan of original glass negative. Courtesy State Library of Victoria Collection.