Yesterday I walked along Newcastle Beach and discovered, as I’d seen before, dozens of dead birds washed up on the sand. The shape in which the sea had left them was, in many cases, beautiful and so I began to photograph them.
As I did so, I also became aware of the many footprints left in the sand, all different shapes and sizes, and so I started to photograph those as well, and in doing so, began connecting one with the other.
During the first week of this residency, I carried out a number of walks, the routes of which I recorded using GPS.Collecting all these walks together, I created a map of all the walks which can be seen in two images below. The first shows the pattern as revealed in the GPS software, the second in Google Earth.
The next phase for this work is to divide the the first image into segments, each of which can then be tranferred to heavyweight tracing paper, after which the lines will be cut and the pieces left behind (i.e. the spaces in between the walks) transferred to canvas.
The big coal ships have fascinated me ever since I first saw them when I arrived in Newcastle. Like the huge clouds above them, they seem on the face of it not to be moving, but rather – like a photograph – fixed in their shape. Only over a period of time, as one watches, do the ships reveal themselves as moving, changing their course, just as the seemingly immutable clouds change their shape.
The past too is like this. It appears to us fixed in its final shape by history, but when we observe at length we begin to see things differently – just as with the ships and the clouds, the past changes shape not unlike the way the present constantly changes its shape around us; because the past was once the present.
I have for a long while been interested in old photographs, in the distant parts of photographs where things are not the ‘subject’ of the picture. For example, the image below is a detail from a holiday snap taken some time in the early 1980s. I’ve no idea who the girl is and only noticed her when I enlarged the image.
Merleau-Ponty once wrote how distance was not a property of the horizon, and distance too – we might say – is not a property of those people occupying the background of these photographs. They are – or were – as much a part of the scene as those of us in the foreground – the subjects of the photograph. We are always as much a part of the distance and the foreground as everyone else; we are both these things at one and the same time. In temrs of history, we in the present are like the subject of a photograph, and those in the past are like those in the distance. Everything is the same part of the present, just seen from different perspectives.
The past is as much about movement as is the present (just as the distance contains as much movement as the foreground) and to observe this movement in the past (or the distance) requires us to be patient – to watch and to listen.
It is interesting that watching and listening to the distance has become a theme during my residency here, and that the image above – a video still of the ships and the sky – was filmed from Shepherd’s Point, a place from which the Services would listen and watch for the enemy during World War 2.
A few days into the residency now and I’ve managed to do a fair bit of research around Newcastle, carrying out a number of walks and working on some video pieces down on the beach. I came to Australia with ideas as regards work I wanted to carry out and that is going according to plan, but it’s always important when coming to something like this to leave room for work to develop as a consequence of initial and ongoing research. The first week was always going to be a time for gathering information, which I’ve done as a result of the walks around town, and through these, a number of areas which I couldn’t have known about before coming here have interested me. One of those areas is the story of Yi-ran-na-li, the Aboriginal name for cliffs near Newcastle beach. To see them surrounded (for reasons of safety) by a wire fence is a little sad to say the least, and the fact the sign describing the cliffs and the lack of respect they’ve received (‘it’s not too late to show the respect Yi-ran-na-li deserves‘) – contains spelling mistakes is far from encouraging. It’s a small thing, mis-spelling ‘the’ as ‘thre’ but it seems to speak volumes nevertheless. A work about this, entitled ‘Thre’ might therefore be on the cards.
The town of Newcastle is the world’s biggest exporter of coal, and the vast ships which come and take the coal away interest me a great deal. They look almost like a photoshopped image when you see them lined across the horizon, as if someone has done a cut and paste job with a single ship. Nobbys Island – now attached to the mainland via the Macquarie Pier – was surveyed in 1797 by John Shortland who spotted coal seams and set to work having the island mined. The island itself was regarded by the Awabakal people as having been created in the time of the Dreaming by the great rainbow serpent as it pushed itself onto the land after dropping from the sky. It was also thought to be home to a giant Kangaroo, and again its rather sad to see
it reduced from its original height of 62 metres to just 28.
The importance placed on rocks by the Awabakal people finds a connection with the importance placed on coal by ‘modern man’. Seeing the ships come and take the coal away seems almost a metaphor for the ships which brought the convicts and took away something of the country’s ‘innocence’. Of course, one has to be careful not sound accusatory, rather, this is analogous to modern man’s destruction of the world for the sake of capital gain. Something is lost and the cliffs of Yi-ran-na-li remind us that sometimes we just need to listen.
Listening was something carried out not far from Yi-ran-na-li, up on Shepherd’s Hill. The idea of the Radar as a metaphor for listening interests me, as well as the idea of looking out across the sea for approaching ships etc. The ships bringing the convicts, and the ships coming to take away the coal.
Whilst taking notes on one of my walks I wrote: The radar beeps of several crossings. This alludes to the crossings here which beep continuously until, with what sounds like a blast from a ray gun, you are given the go ahead to walk.
The idea of looking for the individual – a theme central to my work – becomes important here. In order to find those people, we sometimes have to listen to what the rocks have to tell us. Of course, for rocks we might substitute buildings, houses, roads, pathways etc. And as we walk amongst them, we are like a radar, a signal which looks for that which is invisible, and which returns – not a blip or a shadow on a screen – but what we might term an empathetic response.
Read more at:
http://thelockupresidency.blogspot.com/2010/11/tho…
During Walk No.4 I discovered a sign entitled ‘Undermined’ about the coal industry in Newcastle. Given the importance of coal to the area, I’ve reproduced the information below in its entirety.
‘Awabakal clans used Newcastle’s coal in their fires and ceremonies for millennia, and explain its origins in their ancient Dreaming stories. Europeans also sought this valuable substance, so when Lieutenant Shortland noted coal deposits here in 1797, shops were quickly dispatched to return quantities of coal to Sydney. In 1799 The Hunter exported a shipment of coal to Bengal, and Newcastle coal was later shipped to the Cape of Good Hope by the Anna Joseph.
During the early years of settlement, the Colonial Government declared Hunter River coal to be the property of the Crown and prohibited free individuals and companies from mining here. Convict gangs were obliged to work the coal seams and load the vessels. In 1826 private enterprise was finally permitted to mine coal and the Australian Agricultural Company obtained the first lease. In 1831 the company sunk its initial shaft near the Anglican Cathedral and innumerable tunnels chasing the buried coal seams have since been excavated below Newcastle’s streets. The success of the Australian Agricultural Company soon attracted other companies and mining operations spread to the extensive coalfields of East Maitland in 1844.
Fast-loading steam cranes were installed at King’s Wharf in 1860. But the demand for coal still exceeded the loading capacity of the port so the Bullock Island mud flats were reclaimed and new coal loading wharves were constructed. In 1888, twelve hydraulic cranes were in position.
During the late nineteenth century, sailing vessels berthed two or three deep along the length of the Bullock Island dyke, creating a forest of masts, while hundreds of sailors of all nationalities flocked to the city of Newcastle on Saturday nights. Throughout the twentieth century, further developments in mining and loading saw Newcastle’s exports soar, and by 1907 coal shipments exceeded 4,500,000 tons.
The port of Newcastle has long been the economic and trade centre for the Hunter region. In the 1989-90 financial year Newcastle handled 68.2 million tonnes to become the world’s largest coal export port and Australia’s largest tonnage dock.’
