tag:theconversation.com,2011:/ca-fr/topics/landscape-9324/articles
Landscape – La Conversation
2023-08-14T13:55:52Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211216
2023-08-14T13:55:52Z
2023-08-14T13:55:52Z
The Summer Book, Tove Jansson’s novel about love, family and nature, will make you nostalgic for your own childhood
<p>A short novel of rare beauty, <a href="https://tovejansson.com/">Tove Jansson’s</a> <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-summer-book/tove-jansson/9780954221713">The Summer Book</a> (1972) tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl spending the summer with her grandmother on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland. </p>
<p>Jansson is best known for the <a href="https://www.moomin.com/en/tove-jansson/">Moomins</a>, the small hippo-like creatures she started drawing in her youth, and which later made her famous around the world. But she was also a remarkably prolific artist, who explored satirical illustration, painting, children’s literature and novels. </p>
<p>Finnish-born and Swedish-speaking, her writing sits comfortably within two major traditions of Scandinavian literature: one of imaginative children’s writers, from <a href="https://andersen.sdu.dk/liv/index_e.html">Hans Christian Andersen</a> to <a href="https://www.astridlindgren.com/">Astrid Lindgren</a>, and the other of fierce women writers that included <a href="https://blixen.dk/en/karen-blixen">Karen Blixen</a> (of <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/out-of-africa/isak-dinesen/9780141183336">Out of Africa</a> fame) and <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1909/lagerlof/biographical/">Selma Lagerlöf</a>, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909. </p>
<p>Born into an artistic household – her father Viktor was an artist and her mother Ham an illustrator – Jansson and her brother Lasse grew up during the <a href="https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/finnish_civil_war_1918">Finnish civil war</a> and spent most of their youth in the wake of the second world war. Art became Jansson’s escapism and also a way to voice her political dissent.</p>
<p>She published satirical cartoons in various newspapers, and eventually her first Moomins story, <a href="https://shop.moomin.com/products/the-moomins-and-the-great-flood-sort-of-books">The Moomins and the Great Flood</a>, in 1945. If dreaming up Moomin adventures helped her during and after the war, writing The Summer Book helped work through the grief of losing her mother on whom the grandmother character is based. </p>
<p>The little girl is based on Jansson’s niece, Sophia, and the girl’s father on her brother, Lasse. The house on the island was inspired by the Jansson family summer house on a little rocky outcrop called Klovharun.</p>
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<h2>Making the everyday magic again</h2>
<p>There is no better time than the end of summer to read this book. It will remind you of your own childhood summers, of that languid feeling of being a little bored and coming up with improbable games and pondering unanswerable questions like, “Are there ants in heaven?” or learning why you should never step on moss.</p>
<p>While it came partly from a place of grief and darkness, The Summer Book is an incredibly luminous book, a dynamic that is mirrored in Grandmother’s inevitable physical decline and Sophia’s buoyant growth. The descriptions are so vivid that you can almost smell the salty, cold beaches, picture the sunburned freckly noses and long for the endlessly bright evenings.</p>
<p>Most of all, it is a book about love and the importance of family bonds. The delicate relationship between Sophia and her grandmother is one of the most truthful descriptions of inter-generational relationships ever written. Very few authors are able to capture the depth of a child’s emotional world as well as Tove Jansson. The Summer Book is never sentimental and yet it is filled with love, wisdom and humour.</p>
<p>Nothing really happens and yet everything does. Every small adventure, from learning to gain the love of a shifty cat, to trying to plant new flowers on the island, becomes a metaphor for life itself. </p>
<h2>The case for playing</h2>
<p>The natural landscape of the tiny island is not just the backdrop to this precious novel, it also an important character itself. It is loud with the neverending wind, volatile with unexpected storms, and resilient like the moss and flowers that carpet the ground. The island is a small self-sufficient female universe, ruled by Sophia and Grandmother.</p>
<p>Sophia’s father, Papa, is there in the background, as reassuringly present as the landscape itself, yet silent. The dialogue is only between Sophia and Grandmother, occasional visitors and sometimes God. “Dear God, let something happen,” Sophia prays. “God, if You love me. I’m bored to death. Amen.” </p>
<p>Life on the island is a reminder of a simpler life that wasn’t simple at all. It is not described as an idyllic retreat from urban life – there is no electricity, the weather is temperamental, the sea can be deadly – and yet The Summer Book will leave you yearning for the chance to live a slower-paced, more deliberate, self-reliant life.</p>
<p>The coexistence of humanity and nature is one of the recurring themes in Jansson’s art, and on her island the two are in harmony. And if you are looking for yet another takeaway from this book, it must be this: to be inspired to live life as Sophia and Grandmother do on the island, with profound respect for their surroundings, and a joyous will to play – no matter what age you are.</p>
<p>And what better time to be reminded of this than when the sun is shining, the days are longer and the living is easier? For me, this book took me back to my own childhood and summers spent with my Danish family in a summerhouse not so different from Sophia and Grandmother’s.</p>
<p>With wild winds, unforgiving downpours and a brutally cold sea, time spent on the beach could be challenging. In response to my own (frequent) moaning, my grandmother, with the same unsentimental affection as Sophia’s, would shush me by saying: “Life is not easy, but it’s very interesting.”</p>
<p>And this is why we read books like The Summer Book. To remind ourselves of who we used to be, and of who we want to become. </p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Barbara Tesio-Ryan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Now is the perfect time to read Jansson’s novel – a book that will make you nostalgic for childhood summers.
Barbara Tesio-Ryan, Information Services Supervisor, The University of Edinburgh
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/194590
2022-11-24T13:51:03Z
2022-11-24T13:51:03Z
Community wildlife conservation isn’t always a win-win solution: the case of Kenya’s Samburu
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/496272/original/file-20221120-18-h0rj85.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A herder grazes cattle alongside wildlife in Samburu, Kenya.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Community-based wildlife conservation is often promoted as a <a href="https://www.conservation.org/places/africa">win-win solution</a>. The idea behind this approach is that the people who live close to wildlife can be involved in protecting it and have an interest in doing so. </p>
<p>This results in wildlife being protected (a win for global biodiversity) and local people benefiting from conservation through tourism revenues, jobs, or new infrastructure like schools, clinics and water supplies. </p>
<p>However, the reality of community-based wildlife conservation is sometimes less straightforward, as the experience of Kenya shows. </p>
<p>Kenya is home to spectacular wildlife, landscape and cultural resources that drive the safari tourism industry. This <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO4eVRLy24Q">brings in</a> millions of visitors – and billions of US dollars – to the country annually. Yet, Kenya’s tourist attractions face significant threats. These include <a href="https://theconversation.com/saving-east-africas-wildlife-from-recurring-drought-183844">climate change</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-us-kenya-cooperation-on-wildlife-and-drug-trafficking-matters-184070">illegal wildlife trade</a>, loss of habitat due to <a href="https://theconversation.com/kenya-has-been-trying-to-regulate-the-charcoal-sector-why-its-not-working-154383">deforestation</a> and <a href="https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/bd/data-hub/the-economic-pains-human-wildlife-conflict-3662002">human-wildlife conflict</a>. To address some of these risks, community conservancies have been established across the country. </p>
<p>Community conservancies are wildlife-protected areas established on community owned or occupied land. They make up a significant part of the wildlife protection landscape in Kenya, with implications for thousands of people. </p>
<p>There are currently <a href="https://kwcakenya.com/conservancies/status-of-wildlife-conservancies-in-kenya/">76 such spaces</a>, covering tens of thousands of square kilometres. They date back to the 1980s, but have accelerated in number and extent over the last 20 years. </p>
<p>In northern Kenya, which is characterised by a wide expanse of grasslands, most conservancies are supported by the <a href="https://www.nrt-kenya.org/">Northern Rangelands Trust</a>. This is a national NGO funded by global donors and international conservation agencies. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/kenyan-wildlife-policies-must-extend-beyond-protected-areas-127821">Kenyan wildlife policies must extend beyond protected areas</a>
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<p>It’s difficult to establish how much funding is directed to community conservancies. However, in 2020, the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association, an umbrella body, reported that the country’s conservancies incur about <a href="https://kwcakenya.com/conservancies-receive-historic-support-from-government/">US$25 million</a> in annual operational costs. This is mostly funded through donors and, to a limited extent, the government. </p>
<p>Over 30 years of conducting anthropological fieldwork among Samburu communities in northern Kenya, I noticed that community conservation was gaining in popularity, yet there was little evidence about its operation or effects. I conducted a study to explore the issue in more detail. This research led to a <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793650290/Conservation-and-Community-in-Kenya-Milking-the-Elephant">book</a>, which sets out the impact of conservancies on cooperation and conflict in communities. </p>
<p><a href="https://kws.go.ke/content/national-wildlife-census-2021-report">Wildlife numbers</a> in Kenya are declining, but more wild animals are found on conservancy land than in unprotected areas. While this is promising, my research found that conservancies increased human-wildlife conflict, with communities bearing the brunt of loss and injury caused by wildlife. Further, the economic benefits of community conservancies to members were minimal. </p>
<h2>The roots of community conservation</h2>
<p>Community-based conservation has its roots in the realisation that the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Natural-Connections-Perspectives-Community-Based-Conservation/dp/1559633468">“fortress” model</a> of conservation – which is the creation of parks and reserves that exclude all human use – is untenable. Wild animals require vast landscapes to thrive. They cannot be contained within the boundaries of parks. </p>
<p>Equally, when local people are excluded from parks, they are denied access to the resources they need for survival. Treating people as less important than wildlife makes them less inclined to protect wildlife. This is particularly true in a place like northern Kenya, where livestock-herding societies like the Samburu have lived in close proximity to wildlife for centuries. </p>
<p>Understanding that successful conservation depends on local populations having a stake in its success has led to efforts in Kenya to engage communities directly in conservation activities. In this approach, the community sets aside <a href="https://www.nrt-kenya.org/community-conservation-overview">part of its land</a> for conservation activities in exchange for anticipated benefits that will flow from conservation. </p>
<p>In the Samburu case, communities have set aside about 10% to 25% of their land for wildlife, and in some cases for tourism infrastructure. These conservancies are run by paid staff overseen by boards made up of community members and supported by conservation NGOs. </p>
<p>Livestock grazing is prohibited or severely restricted on this land. </p>
<p>Community conservation creates boundaries, which are policed by wildlife scouts who are often armed. Although their stated role is wildlife protection, these scouts are in fact tasked with protecting pasture from outsiders and livestock from theft. </p>
<h2>Heightened tensions</h2>
<p><a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793650290/Conservation-and-Community-in-Kenya-Milking-the-Elephant">My research</a> involved spending a year in several Samburu conservancies. I observed how the conservancies operated and talked to members about how they felt about them. I conducted surveys to measure the costs and benefits incurred. </p>
<p>The study revealed a number of impacts of conservancies on local communities that mainly have to do with security and with funding.</p>
<p>I found that conservancies actually heightened tensions among Samburu communities. Creating zones of land use and restricting grazing makes it necessary to maintain boundaries and refuse access to non-members. This goes against Samburu norms of allowing livestock access to pasture, particularly during dry seasons and droughts. On the other hand, members of conservancies see the policing of grazing as a benefit.</p>
<p>Many times in the course of my research, I heard people refer to their Samburu neighbours outside conservancy boundaries as “outsiders” or “encroachers” who must be kept out. Conservancies resemble islands around which herders must navigate to find pasture. If and when they landed on these islands, conflicts often occurred.</p>
<p>Additionally, the amount of funding channelled to conservancies from donor organisations was relatively large compared to other sources of support. Conservancies that have tourism facilities also earn revenue from hotel contracts, bed-night charges and conservation fees. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/elephant-conservation-may-be-undermined-by-twitter-users-who-overlook-main-threats-191788">Elephant conservation may be undermined by Twitter users who overlook main threats</a>
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<p>Members perceived that there was a lot of money circulating in conservancies, controlled by the boards and staff. They reported minimal economic benefits for themselves, mostly in the form of school fees for students and sometimes an annual dividend. This fuelled suspicions among members that the money was being misused by conservancy boards and staff. </p>
<p>Suspicions of misuse of funds have resulted in bitter conflicts within the community over leadership, demands for greater public accountability and legal action.</p>
<p>These unintended consequences of community-based conservation call for more effective models. Conservation that places less emphasis on who may or may not use a piece of land, and that improves accountability, could result in better outcomes for people and for wildlife.</p>
<h2>The way forward</h2>
<p>The intentions behind community-based conservation are laudable. It aims to correct past failures, which include isolating wildlife in parks and excluding people from important survival resources. Yet, this approach brings its own set of challenges. There is a risk that if members don’t receive the kinds of benefits they have been promised, their support for conservation could decline, undermining the approach. </p>
<p>Greater engagement of members, and more accountability regarding funding and its uses would enhance confidence and ownership among members.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194590/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carolyn K. Lesorogol receives funding from the United States National Science Foundation that funded the research discussed here. </span></em></p>
Conservation that places less emphasis on who may or may not use a piece of land could result in better outcomes for people and wildlife.
Carolyn K. Lesorogol, Professor, Washington University in St. Louis
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/186885
2022-08-22T12:26:00Z
2022-08-22T12:26:00Z
Cell towers have come to symbolize our deep collective anxieties
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479964/original/file-20220818-22-29q3j2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C8%2C5742%2C3819&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Most of us would rather not think about the fact that we're immersed in an electromagnetic soup of radio waves.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/cellphone-base-station-towers-over-factory-roofs-royalty-free-image/1266611529?adppopup=true">RapidEye/E+ via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The new movie “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15325794/">Fall</a>” is a survival-thriller about two young women, Becky and Hunter, who are avid rock climbers. To mark the one-year anniversary of Becky’s husband’s death in a climbing accident, they decide to climb an abandoned 2,000-foot TV tower.</p>
<p>But a ladder breaks, and they find themselves stranded atop the rusty steel latticework. Ironically, at the top of the communication tower, the climbers are too high in the air to get a phone signal to call for rescue.</p>
<p>Other recent movies have also featured terrifying communication towers. </p>
<p>Take the 2016 film “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0775440/">Cell</a>,” which is based on a Stephen King novel. In it, a cell tower signal turns normal people into zombies, a literal version of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone_zombie">the cliché</a> about the effect mobile phones have on users. The 2018 Indian sci-fi blockbuster “<a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5080556/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">2.0</a>” features a gigantic Kaiju monster – akin to Godzilla or Mothra – made of cellphones. It rises to avenge the deaths of millions of birds supposedly killed by cell tower radiation. (Millions of <a href="https://www.audubon.org/news/no-5g-radio-waves-do-not-kill-birds">birds do die</a> every year by crashing into towers, but probably because they become disoriented by their lights, not from the radiation they emit.)</p>
<p>Why are communication towers so scary? Why, in “Fall,” is the steel tower somehow more disturbing than the rocky cliff face where Becky’s husband died?</p>
<p>I think it’s about more than fear of heights. <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Zj3a1f4AAAAJ&hl=en">As a scholar who studies attitudes toward technology</a> – and who wrote <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Against-Technology-From-the-Luddites-to-Neo-Luddism/Jones/p/book/9780415978682">a book on the Luddites</a> and <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/cell-tower-9781501348815/">another one on cell towers</a> – I see cell towers, like the radio and TV towers that preceded them, as the focus of deep collective anxieties.</p>
<h2>Channeling invisible forces</h2>
<p>As anthropologist <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/code-and-clay-data-and-dirt">Shannon Mattern has argued</a>, towers and antennas are visible manifestations of vast invisible networks – mostly wireless or underground – that can be hard for people to wrap their heads around, even as they grow increasingly dependent on them. </p>
<p>They’re a reminder of something that most of us would rather forget: that we’re immersed in an electromagnetic soup of radio waves, walking around every day in what design scholar Anthony Dunne <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/hertzian-tales">has called</a> “hertzian space.” Those same invisible waves also signal the possibility of ubiquitous surveillance and manipulation.</p>
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<img alt="A Christian cross perched atop communication technology." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479969/original/file-20220818-15665-4u0d8b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479969/original/file-20220818-15665-4u0d8b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479969/original/file-20220818-15665-4u0d8b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479969/original/file-20220818-15665-4u0d8b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=358&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479969/original/file-20220818-15665-4u0d8b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479969/original/file-20220818-15665-4u0d8b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479969/original/file-20220818-15665-4u0d8b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A cross tower doubles as a telecommunications node at Green Hills Baptist Church in La Habra, Calif.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/the-cross-tower-at-green-hills-baptist-church-now-holds-news-photo/564008531?adppopup=true">Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>So a latticework steel tower or a sleek <a href="https://pedroc.co.uk/content/vodafone-o2-monopoles">monopole mast</a> with an array of rectangular antenna panels clustered at its top can elicit powerful responses. </p>
<p>On the one hand, there’s denial – you might half-consciously “unsee” them and pretend they’re not there. </p>
<p>On the other hand, they can become a source of paranoia, which sometimes metastasizes into conspiracy theories. </p>
<h2>Hidden in plain sight</h2>
<p>Cell towers are often designed to hide in plain sight. Some are even <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/4/19/8445213/cell-phone-towers-trees">disguised as pine trees or palm trees</a> – rather poorly, in most cases. But stealth towers like these aren’t actually meant to pass for the natural objects they imitate. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479965/original/file-20220818-349-dj7ai0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Cell phone tower 'disguised' with palm fronds." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479965/original/file-20220818-349-dj7ai0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479965/original/file-20220818-349-dj7ai0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479965/original/file-20220818-349-dj7ai0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479965/original/file-20220818-349-dj7ai0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479965/original/file-20220818-349-dj7ai0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479965/original/file-20220818-349-dj7ai0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479965/original/file-20220818-349-dj7ai0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Cell tower ‘camouflage’ is meant to elicit benign disregard.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/cell-phone-tower-on-the-north-shore-of-the-salton-sea-is-news-photo/1397549380?adppopup=true">George Rose/Getty Images</a></span>
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<p>Like all camouflage, they’re just supposed to distract our attention long enough for us to overlook them. The brown painted “bark” and green plastic “leaves,” or the rows of rectangular antenna panels painted to blend into building façades, are simply prompts to our unseeing – cues to look away. Nothing to see here, they say. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, the towers <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/185854/monthly-number-of-cell-sites-in-the-united-states-since-june-1986/">quietly multiply</a>.</p>
<p>In recent years, 5G antennas have started showing up everywhere, often as unlabeled boxes or cylinders on standalone poles or streetlights.</p>
<p>Known as small-cell networks, these faster and more powerful 5G systems require many more antennas spaced closer together. This greater density has provoked <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/05/great-5g-conspiracy/611317/">increased fears</a> about potential risks to health and security, along with more paranoid reactions linking cellular radiation to cancer – a link <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/science/5g-cellphones-wireless-cancer.html">not supported by scientific research</a>. Some people even <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2020/04/coronavirus-covid19-5g-conspiracy-theory.html">wrongly blamed 5G for the COVID-19 pandemic</a>.</p>
<p>As a result of such conspiracy theories, 2020 saw a <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/05/18/deep-conspiracy-roots-europe-wave-cell-tower-fires-264997">rash of cell tower arson</a> reminiscent of the Luddites – textile workers in 19th-century England who <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/">sabotaged new mechanical looms that were putting them out of work</a>. Two hundred years later, the name Luddite has become synonymous with any reaction against new technology. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Caution tape wrapped around burned out metal boxes." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479967/original/file-20220818-459-zz89e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/479967/original/file-20220818-459-zz89e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479967/original/file-20220818-459-zz89e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479967/original/file-20220818-459-zz89e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479967/original/file-20220818-459-zz89e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479967/original/file-20220818-459-zz89e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/479967/original/file-20220818-459-zz89e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The base of a 5G phone mast damaged by arsonists in May 2020 in Liverpool, England.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/fire-and-explosion-damage-can-be-seen-on-an-ee-network-5g-news-photo/1227576029?adppopup=true">Christopher Furlong/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some of the extreme reactions against cell towers may be the result of displaced anxiety about the very real risks of everyday technology. </p>
<p>Most of us sense – though we often prefer to forget – that each steel cell tower or sleek 5G box is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s a visible sign of mostly invisible global communication networks, tied to centers of commercial and political power, that are gradually eroding our privacy and autonomy. </p>
<p>No wonder they’re so terrifying.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/186885/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Hiding in plain sight, they’re subtle reminders that we’re being watched, tracked, studied.
Steven Jones, Professor of English and Digital Humanities (Ret.), University of South Florida
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/181398
2022-05-11T19:33:39Z
2022-05-11T19:33:39Z
Landscapes can be weaponized to influence public opinion and perception during war
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462569/original/file-20220511-26-wicbe7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=28%2C349%2C1820%2C1664&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The U.S. military released a defoliant called Agent Orange over the South Vietnam countryside to weaponize the forest during the Vietnam War as part of the Operation Ranch Hand project.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Blast craters, denuded landscapes and burning oil wells. When we think of the relation between war and the landscape, we think of such <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780759119291/War-and-Nature-The-Environmental-Consequences-of-War-in-a-Globalized-World">destructive acts and toxic legacies</a>. Through this lens, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/science/war-environmental-impact-ukraine.html">nature and the landscape are often seen as casualties of war</a>. </p>
<p>Yet there have been cases where nations have used the landscape as a weapon. In one such touchstone case — <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/43298516">Operation Ranch Hand</a> — the U.S. military released a defoliant called Agent Orange over the South Vietnam countryside to weaponize the forest during the Vietnam War. </p>
<p>While the end of the Vietnam War saw an international <a href="https://2009-2017.state.gov/t/isn/4783.htm">ban on using the environment as a weapon,</a> landscape design — which includes the planning and planting of green spaces — continues to present itself as a tool capable of influencing the hearts and minds of local populations and ultimately achieving military objectives.</p>
<p>While speaking about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict, U.S. Secretary of State <a href="https://www.state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-on-cnn-state-of-the-union-with-jake-tapper/">Antony Blinken said,</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Winning a battle is not winning the war. Taking a city does not mean Vladimir Putin’s taking the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people. On the contrary, he is destined to lose.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Clearly, the United States military doctrine considers winning “<a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-07-15/hearts-and-minds-myth">hearts and minds</a>” as a necessary measure to win a war. </p>
<p>As a design critic who has been studying the role of landscapes in warfare, I argue that <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2022.2017690">trees and green spaces can be components of a non-coercive mode of warfare</a>, as they can be used to further community solidarity and diminish the likelihood of insurgency.</p>
<h2>Winning hearts and minds</h2>
<p>The experience of the United States military in Afghanistan has proven that having a more powerful military force does not guarantee winning a war. </p>
<p>While the <a href="https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-war-afghanistan">Taliban surrendered Kandahar</a> only two months after the launch of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/28/world/operation-enduring-freedom-fast-facts/index.html">Operation Enduring Freedom</a> in 2001, the U.S. military remained in Afghanistan and engaged in violent conflict for the next 20 years, ultimately withdrawing and returning the nation to Taliban control. </p>
<p>Central to the United States’ effort to secure peace was the strategy of winning “hearts and minds,” or making emotional and intellectual appeals to the local population through attraction and persuasion instead of force.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An army officer high-fives a girl carried by a woman outside the door of a bus." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462096/original/file-20220509-11-kcylbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462096/original/file-20220509-11-kcylbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462096/original/file-20220509-11-kcylbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462096/original/file-20220509-11-kcylbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=429&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462096/original/file-20220509-11-kcylbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462096/original/file-20220509-11-kcylbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462096/original/file-20220509-11-kcylbl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=539&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A U.S. Army officer high-fives a girl, evacuated from Kabul, Afghanistan, during the ‘Operation Allies Welcome,’ on Aug. 30, 2021.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The U.S. military may have ultimately failed to win the war in Afghanistan, but they did develop tactics to secure peace and win over the hearts and minds of local citizens. While <a href="https://fic.tufts.edu/publication-item/winning-hearts-and-minds-examing-the-relationship-between-aid-and-security-in-afghanistan/">not every effort was successful,</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2022.2017690">I found several instances where the U.S. military’s</a> war-fighting objectives aligned with an unlikely ally — the profession of landscape architecture.</p>
<p>Landscape architects, after all, have always worked to <a href="https://www.asla.org/livable.aspx">improve public and environmental health</a>. And while hearts and minds are not exactly the same as physical and mental health, it is understood that <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/discord-and-collaboration-essays-on-international-politics/oclc/370692">physical health and well-being are necessary to establish a peaceful society</a>. </p>
<h2>Green spaces influence health and mental well-being</h2>
<p>American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s legacy of park building in the United States shows that landscape architects are concerned with public health and social stability. Olmsted was the first professional to use the title of “landscape architect” and is best known for <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/civil/frederick-law-olmsted.htm">designing New York’s Central Park</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/22/us/frederick-law-olmsted-american-parks.html">Olmsted’s parks helped sustain Americans’ mental and physical health and social connections</a> during the darkest days of the pandemic. Urban residents enjoyed the greenery in these designed spaces after recognizing that <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-parks-canada-prescription-1.6344141">spending time in nature can improve one’s physical health and mental well-being</a>. </p>
<p>Since Olmsted’s time, a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2007.07.001">growing body of scientific research has concluded</a> that exposure to green space contributes to improved health and well-being. While medical professionals have been <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/prescribtion-nature-canada.html">prescribing spending time with nature</a>, landscape architects have been working to maximize the positive outcomes of exposure through design. </p>
<p>Landscape design presents itself as a tool capable of influencing the health and well-being and, therefore, the hearts and minds of local populations. Ultimately it can achieve military objectives through the planning and planting of green space.</p>
<h2>Weaponizing the landscape</h2>
<p>Using the landscape as a weapon is an underappreciated area of study.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A sign that reads 'Dioxin contamination zone — livestock, poultry and fishery operations not permitted' is placed in a field." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462098/original/file-20220509-11-h61m5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462098/original/file-20220509-11-h61m5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462098/original/file-20220509-11-h61m5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462098/original/file-20220509-11-h61m5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462098/original/file-20220509-11-h61m5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462098/original/file-20220509-11-h61m5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462098/original/file-20220509-11-h61m5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A warning sign near Danang airport, Vietnam, that reads ‘Dioxin contamination zone — livestock, poultry and fishery operations not permitted’ is seen in a field that was contaminated during the Vietnam War.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photo/Maika Elan, File)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1976, the United States, along with 47 other nations, became signatories to the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of <a href="https://www.un.org/disarmament/enmod/">Environmental Modification Techniques</a>. This treaty prohibits “modification of the natural environment for use as a weapon of war” and “acts of war injurious to the natural environment.” </p>
<p>While deliberate environmental destruction continues, exemplified by the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/11/1/13481682/isis-mosul-oil-fires-sulfur">burning of oil wells set ablaze by Iraqi troops during the Gulf War</a>, researchers hope that the International Criminal Court may one day prosecute “<a href="https://theconversation.com/crimes-against-the-environment-the-silent-victim-of-warfare-50215">crimes against the environment</a>.” </p>
<p>More recently, the Stop Ecocide Foundation has been working to provide a <a href="https://www.stopecocide.earth/legal-definition">criminal definition of ecocide</a> that will carry the force of international law, making punishable “severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment.” </p>
<p>These efforts are laudable and deserve our support. Yet, the understandable emphasis on damage and destruction decreases the attention given to acts of war, like tree planting efforts, that “improve” an environment.</p>
<h2>Understanding the long-term impacts of war</h2>
<p>One project undertaken by the U.S. military in Afghanistan saw active troops lead a <a href="https://www.dvidshub.net/image/354994/green-belt-project">reforestation effort</a> in the Panjshir region, where they planted 35,000 trees, creating a regional green space.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="An Army officer planting a sapling." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/460188/original/file-20220428-22-v2uv5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=94%2C37%2C2002%2C1314&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/460188/original/file-20220428-22-v2uv5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460188/original/file-20220428-22-v2uv5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460188/original/file-20220428-22-v2uv5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460188/original/file-20220428-22-v2uv5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460188/original/file-20220428-22-v2uv5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/460188/original/file-20220428-22-v2uv5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A U.S. Army officer plants a sapling during the ‘Afghanistan’s Future Takes Root’ initiative in Panjshir, Afghanistan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.dvidshub.net/image/328273/afghanistans-future-takes-root">(1st Lt. Holly Hess/DVIDS)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As many individuals experienced this regional planting effort, the landscape influenced the hearts and minds of local citizens on a population scale. </p>
<p>Despite the U.S. military now having withdrawn from Afghanistan, these planted trees and other green spaces continue to grow and exert influence. Thus, it is not just acts of war injurious to the environment that have wide-reaching and long-term impacts on a population. </p>
<p>As I write from my office on the <a href="https://indigenous.ubc.ca/indigenous-engagement/musqueam-and-ubc/#:%7E:text=">unceded territory of the Musqueam people</a>, I am more keenly aware that a beautiful landscape can manipulate hearts and minds and become a weapon of war. The continued presence of a colonial landscape, designed and imposed on these lands, is easier to recognize if we ask what this land looked like before and after establishing a settler-colonial society. </p>
<p>We experience green spaces differently depending on their design and our cultural background. We need to think about who designed and built our local green spaces and for what purpose. Ultimately, it matters if the landscape is redesigned and replanted by local populations or by occupying forces.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181398/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fionn Byrne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Green spaces can be used as non-coercive modes of warfare to further social cohesion and diminish the likelihood of insurgency.
Fionn Byrne, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, University of British Columbia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/129547
2020-12-01T19:08:31Z
2020-12-01T19:08:31Z
Not all blackened landscapes are bad. We must learn to love the right kind
<p>The devastation wrought by last summer’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/dec/25/factcheck-why-australias-monster-2019-bushfires-are-unprecedented">unprecedented</a> bushfires created blackened landscapes across Australia. New life is sprouting, but with fires burning again <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-29/bushfires-burn-across-nsw-cold-change-hits-sydney/12931478">in New South Wales</a> and <a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/fraser-island-bushfire-closes-in-on-attractions-tourists-evacuated/2a8d8e82-06ef-42a4-86ea-b349ba05ab1f">Queensland</a> we have once more seen burnt land and smoke plumes.</p>
<p>The findings of the <a href="https://naturaldisaster.royalcommission.gov.au/">Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements</a> are a reminder that we need to change our approach to bushfire management. One way of doing so is by rethinking the notion of <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-19/australia-bushfires-how-heat-and-drought-created-a-tinderbox/11976134">a blackened landscape</a>, embracing the positive qualities of contained fires. </p>
<p>Learning to love blackened earth will not be easy. It involves a fundamental change in aesthetic values — thinking through prejudices often attached to the colours of black and white.</p>
<h2>‘Nice and clean’</h2>
<p>When we were conducting fieldwork with Phyllis Wiynjorroc, the senior traditional owner at Barunga, Northern Territory, in 2005 we came across some country that had been burnt off by traditional firing.</p>
<p>Phyllis commented that it was “nice and clean”. To her eyes, a blackened landscape is pristine and beautiful. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/our-land-is-burning-and-western-science-does-not-have-all-the-answers-100331">Our land is burning, and Western science does not have all the answers</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Such landscapes are valued in many parts of the world. A darkened land can be valued because it is rich in humus. <a href="https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781402018398">Amazonian Dark Darths</a>, for instance, (also known as Indian black earth) are known for their fertility.</p>
<p>In sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, local people <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/food/the-plate/2016/06/africa-soil-farming-sustainable/">strategically enrich nutrient-poor soils</a> to produce highly productive African Dark Earth.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317574/original/file-20200227-24664-ulx0qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317574/original/file-20200227-24664-ulx0qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317574/original/file-20200227-24664-ulx0qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317574/original/file-20200227-24664-ulx0qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317574/original/file-20200227-24664-ulx0qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317574/original/file-20200227-24664-ulx0qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317574/original/file-20200227-24664-ulx0qi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Phyllis Wiynjorroc with her grandchildren Teagan and Joel at Barunga, Northern Territory.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Claire Smith</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As others have observed, <a href="https://theconversation.com/our-land-is-burning-and-western-science-does-not-have-all-the-answers-100331">Indigenous wisdom</a> could help prevent Australian bushfires. Aboriginal cultural burning is low-intensity. Fires burn in a <a href="https://www.dpaw.wa.gov.au/management/fire/fire-and-the-environment/41-traditional-aboriginal-burning">mosaic pattern</a> (like a chessboard), allowing animals to move between areas. Afterwards, the burnt hollows of trees provide homes for selected animal species and some plants <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5426625/">regenerate</a>.</p>
<p>Aboriginal people, anthropologists and archaeologists have called for a return to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-09/indigenous-cultural-fire-burning-method-has-benefits-experts-say/11853096">cultural burning practices</a>. Authorities also conduct controlled burning, with <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-burn-legacy-why-the-science-on-hazard-reduction-is-contested-132083">debatable sucess</a>. We need more research on these aspects of Indigenous and Western science.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/strength-from-perpetual-grief-how-aboriginal-people-experience-the-bushfire-crisis-129448">Strength from perpetual grief: how Aboriginal people experience the bushfire crisis</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Concepts of colour</h2>
<p>We see colour not only through a cultural lens but also through our own embodiment.
A white-skinned tourist once told us that the landscape after a reduction burn looked black and dirty. She was so repulsed that she planned to make representations to politicians to ban such burns. This contrasts to the aesthetics of Aboriginal land management practices.</p>
<p>Non-Indigenous people typically connect the colour <a href="https://theconversation.com/this-map-shows-what-white-europeans-associate-with-race-and-it-makes-for-uncomfortable-reading-76661">black</a> with danger and bad things, while <a href="https://theconversation.com/are-you-racist-you-may-be-without-even-knowing-it-10826">white</a> is associated with purity and good things. This is obviously not the case for Aboriginal people. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/languages-dont-all-have-the-same-number-of-terms-for-colors-scientists-have-a-new-theory-why-84117">Languages don't all have the same number of terms for colors – scientists have a new theory why</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Many Indigenous people (including the Aboriginal author of this article) find phrases like “<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-has-australia-learned-from-black-saturday-111245">Black Saturday</a>” offensive. If the recent bushfire season had been dubbed “Australia’s White Devil”, it might have been similarly offensive to non-Indigenous people. </p>
<p>The challenge ahead will be to rethink our assumptions and create new, positive ways to think about the black colours of a burnt landscape. </p>
<h2>Aesthetics and identity</h2>
<p>An Australian identity for the 21st century will need to embrace new understandings of our landscapes. One artist who grappled with the aesthetics of <a href="https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/27859/">bushfire landscapes</a> was Fred Williams (1927-1982). His celebrated <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/williams-burnt-landscape-ii-bushfire-series-t12269">bushfire series</a> was prompted by a fire that stopped 100 metres short of his home in February 1968. This experience fundamentally altered Williams’ vision of the Australian landscape.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/319272/original/file-20200309-118890-1qyxvfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/319272/original/file-20200309-118890-1qyxvfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/319272/original/file-20200309-118890-1qyxvfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/319272/original/file-20200309-118890-1qyxvfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=445&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/319272/original/file-20200309-118890-1qyxvfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/319272/original/file-20200309-118890-1qyxvfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/319272/original/file-20200309-118890-1qyxvfd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=559&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fred Williams.
After bushfire (1) 1968
gouache
57.0 x 76.6 cm (image and sheet)
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased through The Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of the H. J. Heinz II Charitable and Family Trust, Governor, and the Utah Foundation, Fellow, 1980 (AC9-1980)
© Estate of Fred Williams</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His groundbreaking artistic response was a detailed and repeated focus on burnt land that helped reshape Australian perceptions of bushfire. As writer John Schauble <a href="http://www.proceedings.com.au/tassiefire/papers_pdf/thurs_schauble.pdf">has noted,</a> the series contains depictions of “the fire itself, the burnt landscape, those dealing with a single burning tree and the fern diptych”. </p>
<p>Williams, he has written, “examines not just the forest as a whole, but the minutiae of its rebirth, depicting individual plants as well as sweeping landscapes”.</p>
<p>Like Williams, we will have to alter our appreciation of what an Australian environment looks like. </p>
<h2>Where there is smoke …</h2>
<p>Rethinking our cultural appreciation of fire as we explore links between <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00173-7">bushfires and climate change</a>, will also require a reappraisal of <a href="https://theconversation.com/smoke-from-bushfires-poses-a-health-hazard-for-all-of-us-11493">smoke</a>. </p>
<p>As David Bowman states in <a href="https://books.google.co.in/books?hl=en&lr=&id=5pQZlbzJvTkC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=info:YYfApoIykk0J:scholar.google.com&ots=Hi_AuNY9oF&sig=a-TPthFrgAAVB_Ig5y6St_Hv9iY&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false">Australian Rainforests: Islands of Green in a Land of Fire</a>, “Living in the bush means learning to live with fire”. The gum tree naturally drops leaves and small branches. It annually sheds bark. Throughout Australia, this provides the fuel that makes fires and smoke almost inevitable. </p>
<p>There are many kinds of smoke. There is the unwelcome smoke of last fire season, which <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/australian-bushfires-melbourne-covered-in-smoke-despite-cool-change.html">clouded Australian cities</a> and towns, <a href="https://theconversation.com/australias-bushfire-smoke-is-lapping-the-globe-and-the-law-is-too-lame-to-catch-it-130010">lapped the globe</a>, and was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUWkET3IHxo">visible from space</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315571/original/file-20200215-10985-bjsarj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315571/original/file-20200215-10985-bjsarj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/315571/original/file-20200215-10985-bjsarj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315571/original/file-20200215-10985-bjsarj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315571/original/file-20200215-10985-bjsarj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315571/original/file-20200215-10985-bjsarj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315571/original/file-20200215-10985-bjsarj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/315571/original/file-20200215-10985-bjsarj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ngarrindjeri Elder, Major Sumner, conducting an Australian Aboriginal smoking ceremony, part of the repatriation of ancestral human remains from the United Kingdom. 19 May, 2009.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/86624586@N00/3545144681/in/photostream/">Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Then there is smoke from contained fires. Smoking ceremonies have been a part of Aboriginal cultural practices for centuries, if not millennia.
Ngarrindjeri Elder, <a href="https://www.ngarrindjeri-culture.org/major-sumner">Major Sumner</a>, uses <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-05-12/major-sumner-a-ngarrindjeri-elder-takes-part-in-a/1681466">smoke</a> as part of the ceremonies associated with the repatriation of human remains. Smoke may be used in Welcome to Country ceremonies and at the opening of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyAM9EbHRaQ">Aboriginal Studies Centres</a>. </p>
<p>On Phyllis Wiynjorroc’s lands, Aboriginal women use smoke from burning selected leaves to protect newborn babies. Research has shown that traditional smoking techniques can produce smoke with <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378874114003547?via%3Dihub">significant antimicrobial effects</a>. </p>
<h2>Noticing</h2>
<p>Monitoring when the landscape around us is blackened through the right kind of burning will help us become more aware of (and comfortable with) regular burning practices. We will also notice when such burning is needed.</p>
<p>How we interpret colour is <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=8WGADAAAQBAJ&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=negative+conceptualisations+of+the+colour+black&source=bl&ots=q_de3sg0Z5&sig=ACfU3U2H9BHvs7nKWuPJPRAM7JsInSdazg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwis6OS4zLXqAhU2xzgGHT4eBH8Q6AEwDHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=negative%20conceptualisations%20of%20the%20colour%20black&f=false">culturally conditioned</a> and <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=mIrf1uUTNCYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=unconscious+connotations+of+the+color+black&ots=VUgujOvl1i&sig=evDQuXHC8X9kghXRWr7qkJlw44Y#v=onepage&q=unconscious%20connotations%20of%20the%20color%20black&f=false">often unconscious</a>. Negative connotations of the colour black have <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1966-07379-001">long been challenged</a>. </p>
<p>Clearly, there is more than one form of blackened landscape. But if we can learn to love the right kind, we might be able to limit our experience of the other.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129547/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Pristine and beautiful or black and dirty? As bushfires become more frequent and we look to Indigenous fire control practices, it is time to reconsider our attitudes to burnt earth.
Claire Smith, Professor of Archaeology, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University
Gary Jackson, Research Associate in Archaeology, Flinders University
Kellie Pollard, Research lecturer, Charles Darwin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/133152
2020-04-24T00:55:51Z
2020-04-24T00:55:51Z
Mavis Ngallametta review - a bittersweet collection of a songwoman’s stories of home
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327404/original/file-20200412-186399-hagscg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=26%2C53%2C4394%2C3327&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bush Fire At Top Yalgamungken 2015. Collection: Art at Swiss Re.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy: Martin Browne Contemporary</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains references to deceased people.</em></p>
<p>This has been a difficult review to write. The late Aurukun artist Mavis Ngallametta’s major survey exhibition <a href="https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/mavis-ngallametta">Show Me the Way to Go Home</a> opened in March at the <a href="https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/mavis-ngallametta">Queensland Art Gallery</a>. I was lucky enough to view the exhibition before QAG shut its doors to the public a couple of days later. </p>
<p>Now the gallery has uploaded a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_OplQD58KphdKaQik_DeVPB7zRKfrnjv">video journey through the exhibition</a> with co-curator Katina Davidson. But my concern is the exhibition will be another victim of COVID-19, through no fault of its own. Perhaps future historians will look back on the earliest days of the pandemic and ask what fell through the cracks? What were the unseeable exhibitions? Writing these words somehow feels like writing a love letter to the future. </p>
<p>This exhibition is both important and necessary, securing Ngallametta’s rightful position in Australian art history. </p>
<h2>Songwoman</h2>
<p>Mavis Ngallametta was a <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/research/guides-and-resources/language-and-people-bibliographies/kugu">Kugu</a> woman born near the Kendall River in west Cape York Peninsula. She lived a traditional life on Country until she was five, when her family moved to the Presbyterian Mission further north at Aurukun. Ngallametta later became an elder of the Putch clan, and a cultural leader of Aurukun’s Wik and Kugu people. </p>
<p>She was a songwoman and the exhibition’s title is drawn from Irving King’s 1925 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1ZMTwPim_s">Show Me the Way to Go Home</a>, one of Ngallametta’s favourite songs. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327407/original/file-20200412-32369-1e7x9ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327407/original/file-20200412-32369-1e7x9ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327407/original/file-20200412-32369-1e7x9ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327407/original/file-20200412-32369-1e7x9ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327407/original/file-20200412-32369-1e7x9ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327407/original/file-20200412-32369-1e7x9ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327407/original/file-20200412-32369-1e7x9ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327407/original/file-20200412-32369-1e7x9ko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1125&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mavis Ngallametta’s Ikalath #10 2012 from a Private Collection in Sydney. © The estate of Mavis Ngallametta.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Jenni Carter</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More than 40 of Ngallametta’s paintings and sculptures are assembled for the first time. The exhibition is organised in terms of site, or groupings of paintings that are records of the most significant places in her life. The Kendall River series for instance, was inspired by a 2013 helicopter trip, where Ngallametta and a number of her family returned to their Country. </p>
<p>What comes to the fore is just how rapidly Ngallametta’s command of the medium took place. Ngallametta was introduced to acrylic paint at a women’s painting workshop at the <a href="http://www.aurukun.qld.gov.au/for-visitors/buying-art-craft/wik-and-kugu-art-centre/">Wik and Kugu Art Centre</a> in 2008 at the age of 64. From 2010, her works started to grow in scale and ambition. It was also around this time that Ngallametta shifted away from acrylics to ochres and clay. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327400/original/file-20200412-186399-cfhb4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327400/original/file-20200412-186399-cfhb4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327400/original/file-20200412-186399-cfhb4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327400/original/file-20200412-186399-cfhb4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327400/original/file-20200412-186399-cfhb4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327400/original/file-20200412-186399-cfhb4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327400/original/file-20200412-186399-cfhb4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327400/original/file-20200412-186399-cfhb4f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=786&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kugu-Muminh people, Putch clan Australia QLD 1944-2019 Pamp (Swamp) 2009. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Natasha Harth</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Connections to the land</h2>
<p>Inscribed on the paintings’ surfaces is the complexity of Ngallametta’s connection to the land in and around Aurukun. Ikalath, the coastal region north of Aurukun, has spectacular red cliffs that rise steeply from the sandy beaches. The cliffs are where sacred white ochre is collected for paint. As a Kugu woman, this was not Ngallametta’s traditional country. It was through her adopted son Edgar’s blood ties that she inherited a relationship to Ikalath.</p>
<p>In a remarkably short period of time, Ngallametta developed her own distinct visual language, drawing from tradition and punctuated with her own unique motifs. The waterlilies and birds that featured in her early acrylics never fully disappear from her later works. Ngallametta would start with an acrylic blue base and gradually build the layers of paint from there. The blue unifies her practice, as well as reflecting the ebb and flow of the ocean, swamps and waterways she was responding to. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/mavis-ngallametta-is-causing-a-quiet-stampede-in-the-art-market-27592">Mavis Ngallametta is causing a quiet stampede in the art market</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The meandering lines are interspaced with dots, as well as delightful nods to realism such as flowers, ducks and pigs. Her paintings draw close to oral story telling techniques, where she conveys an intimate knowledge of the land, combined with personal details and memories: family camping trips, fishing and preparing painting materials. </p>
<p>Before turning her attention to painting, Ngallametta was a master weaver, using materials such as cabbage palm and pandanus. Later, she would weave from ghost nets, or discarded fishing nets that washed up as detritus on the beaches of Queensland’s far north. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327393/original/file-20200412-73081-1fn0867.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327393/original/file-20200412-73081-1fn0867.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327393/original/file-20200412-73081-1fn0867.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327393/original/file-20200412-73081-1fn0867.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327393/original/file-20200412-73081-1fn0867.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327393/original/file-20200412-73081-1fn0867.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327393/original/file-20200412-73081-1fn0867.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327393/original/file-20200412-73081-1fn0867.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ik (Basket) 2010. Collection of The University of Queensland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Carl Warner</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The influence of Ngallametta’s weaving practice is evident through this exhbition. The strong horizontal bands that feature on her ghost net baskets reappear on her canvases as an intricate weft and weave of colour and paint. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327401/original/file-20200412-113939-ns9520.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327401/original/file-20200412-113939-ns9520.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327401/original/file-20200412-113939-ns9520.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327401/original/file-20200412-113939-ns9520.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327401/original/file-20200412-113939-ns9520.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327401/original/file-20200412-113939-ns9520.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327401/original/file-20200412-113939-ns9520.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327401/original/file-20200412-113939-ns9520.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dragging Net at Less Creek (detail) 2015. Collection: Johnny Kahlbetzer, Sydney.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Jenni Carter</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Bird’s eye</h2>
<p>There are many ways the history of Australian landscape painting can be written. One possible genealogy is via artists’ attempts to resolve the vastness and enormity of the country. <a href="https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/william-robinson">William Robinson’s</a> swirling landscapes with multiple points of perspective are logical points of comparison. However, Ngallametta, is doing something very different from Robinson. </p>
<p>The use of bird’s or mind’s eye perspective is a familiar technique used by Indigenous artists to represent country. Ngallametta evokes the sensation of flying over the land, only to have the land fold back and over, enveloping the viewer.</p>
<p>In this way, standing in front of Ngallametta’s enormous paintings is akin to the experience of standing before a giant wave. Her paintings rise up, asserting their physical verticality and threatening to engulf the viewer. This vertiginous experience is counteracted by the strong horizontal bands. These anchor the viewer, creating not just one, but many possible horizons. The horizontal and vertical are in constant dialogue, creating a tension that pulses with the energy of life in Queensland’s far north. </p>
<p>Joyful and exuberant, with accents of wry humour, Mavis Ngallametta’s paintings, weavings and sculptures are exactly what we all need right now. Hopefully we will get to see them in person again soon. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327394/original/file-20200412-73081-ynxyx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327394/original/file-20200412-73081-ynxyx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/327394/original/file-20200412-73081-ynxyx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327394/original/file-20200412-73081-ynxyx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327394/original/file-20200412-73081-ynxyx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327394/original/file-20200412-73081-ynxyx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327394/original/file-20200412-73081-ynxyx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/327394/original/file-20200412-73081-ynxyx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Burdekin ducks 2011. Dux of Distinction Collection: John Conroy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Carl Warner</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>Although the <a href="https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/">Queensland Arts Gallery</a> is currently closed, Show Me the Way to Go Home is scheduled to continue until 2 August 2020. A series of exhibition videos can be viewed [<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_OplQD58KphdKaQik_DeVPB7zRKfrnjv">here</a>].</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/133152/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chari Larsson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Though galleries have since closed their doors, this reviewer got to see Mavis Ngallametta’s works in all their glory. Their birdseye view of Country provides a perspective we’re missing right now.
Chari Larsson, Lecturer of art history, Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/104720
2018-10-30T14:14:53Z
2018-10-30T14:14:53Z
Africa’s roads are badly built, and there aren’t enough. This can be fixed
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241602/original/file-20181022-105757-peefhw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Rift Valley Road in Ethiopia.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>One of the fastest growing economies in Africa, Ethiopia, has an <a href="http://www.ethcrge.info/crge.php">ambitious plan</a> to cut a green, sustainable path to becoming a middle-income country by 2025. Along the way, the country faces growing urban migration and rising demand for food – challenges that are linked by, and depend on, roads for access, supply and mobility.</p>
<p>In 1997, the total road network in Ethiopia was 26,550 kilometres. By 2014 it reached 99,522 km. For the country to reach its ambitious growth targets it’s aiming to double this to over <a href="http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/ethiopia-double-road-network-200000km-2020/">200,000 km by 2020</a>. </p>
<p>But new roads in Ethiopia and across sub-Saharan Africa often change the landscape, bringing dust, flooding and erosion. The impact is felt most by rural communities. Roads can negatively affect water flows to wetlands, block fish movements and cause landslides, as well as impact the livelihoods of millions of people.</p>
<p>There is a solution: an <a href="http://www.globalresiliencepartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Meta-Meta-Solution-Statement.pdf">approach</a> to road building developed by Dutch social enterprise MetaMeta shows that it’s possible to reduce the impact of new roads and support food production by harvesting excess water. </p>
<p>Under a project rolled out in Ethiopia as well as nine other countries including <a href="http://www.globalresiliencepartnership.org/teams/metameta/">Bangladesh</a>, roads are being built using innovative designs and drainage structures to collect water caused by flooding. This has solved an infrastructural issue while conserving water that can be used for crops and to feed livestock. </p>
<h2>Well built roads</h2>
<p>Practitioners at <a href="http://metameta.nl/">MetaMeta</a> found that more than a third of households in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, reported flooding as a result of new roads with negative effects on crop production for around one in ten households.</p>
<p>The study found that poor road construction can lead to soil erosion on farms and plots of land hugging the roadside. In addition, construction can increase the cost of road maintenance and repairs. This in turn limits transport options, including restricting access to markets, schools and hospitals. The net cost is damaged livelihoods.</p>
<p>One solution, developed by MetaMeta, helps both mitigate the impact of new roads and support food production by harvesting excess water with “smart roads”. A project called <a href="http://roadsforwater.org/">Roads for Water</a> is testing the concept. Funded by the <a href="http://www.globalresiliencepartnership.org/">Global Resilience Partnership</a>, an independent partnership of public and private organisations focusing on the most vulnerable people and places, this project uses innovative road concepts, designs and <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-66239-8_7">drainage structures</a> to collect water caused by flooding. </p>
<p>For example, roads can route water to storage ponds or underground aquifers. Road drifts can help to retain water in dry riverbeds, and ensure systematic spreading of floodwaters.</p>
<p>By harvesting rainwater, communities living near road networks can increase their resilience to shocks such as floods and droughts.</p>
<p>In Ethiopia the project showed that USD$1,800 per km investment is sufficient to implement such measures, and can directly benefit over two million people.</p>
<p>This compares favourably with annual maintenance expenditures <a href="http://roadsforwater.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/the-burden-of-maintenance_roads-in-SSA.pdf">per kilometre of USD$1,100 per year</a> on rural roads in sub Saharan Africa and a periodic maintenance of USD$11,200 often incurred from water damage.</p>
<p>These smart roads are increasing resilience to shocks, such as floods because water is being harvested and maintenance costs are reduced. They are also driving down the cost of road construction through, for example, the reuse of borrow pits for permanent water storage rather than requiring them to be backfilled. This is a considerable cost saving measure and additionally creates a local water resource. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/01/asia/bangladesh-south-asia-floods/index.html">Bangladesh</a>, for example, smart roads are helping build resilience to floods that submerged a third of the country last year. If countries like Ethiopia and Bangladesh are to become more resilient they will need innovative solutions to an increasingly uncertain climate.</p>
<p>The importance of building resilient roads will only intensify as populations grow and countries develop.</p>
<p>Globally, an estimated 900 million rural people still don’t have access to road and transport infrastructure. The <a href="http://blogs.worldbank.org/ppps/forecasting-infrastructure-investment-needs-50-countries-7-sectors-through-2040">investment gap</a> on global roads is expected to approach USD$1.6 trillion per year for the next 40 years as increasing amounts of roads are built, especially in the developing world.</p>
<p>But solutions for better roads won’t work unless they are driven by local ideas and are compatible with local needs and contexts. Collaboration and buy-in between local partners – from engineers to technicians, farmers, labourers and governments departments – is critical. Solutions as simple as bringing the ministry responsible for roads together with the ministry responsible for water and talking them through the challenges and opportunities can produce remarkable results.</p>
<p>_Frank van Steenbergen, the head of MetaMeta, also contributed to the article. _</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104720/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nathanial Matthews is the Program Director of the Global Resilience Partnership. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Frank van Steenbergen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Smart roads in Africa could help reduce the impact of flooding and other disasters that affect rural communities.
Nathanial Matthews, Senior fellow, King's College London
Frank van Steenbergen, Water management specialist, Utrecht University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/100627
2018-09-04T10:11:59Z
2018-09-04T10:11:59Z
Bogs are unique records of history – here’s why
<p>Peat bogs, which cover 3% of the world’s land surface, are special places. While historically often considered as worthless morasses, today they are recognised as beautiful habitats providing environmental benefits from biodiversity to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/28/ultimate-bogs-how-saving-peatlands-could-help-save-the-planet">climate regulation</a>. However, they are threatened by drainage, land reclamation for agriculture and peat cutting for fuel, which has significantly reduced the extent and condition of these ecosystems on a global scale. Bogs are fragile and sensitive to change, whether by human hands or by processes such as climate change.</p>
<p>A less well known aspect of bogs is their remarkable archaeological potential. In their undisturbed state at least, bogs are anoxic (oxygen-free) environments due to their saturation. These conditions are hostile to the microbes and fungi that would normally decay organic material such as the remains of plants, which are the principal constituents of the peat. The same anoxic conditions also offer protection from decay for organic archaeological remains. The vast majority of objects and structures used by our ancestors were made from organic materials (in particular wood). These are normally lost on dryland archaeological sites but can be preserved in peatlands.</p>
<p>The saturated conditions mean that even soft tissue can survive, including both skin and internal organs. Probably the best known archaeological finds are the remains of “bog bodies” such as the famous prehistoric <a href="http://www.tollundman.dk/">Tollund Man</a> in Denmark, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-28589151">Lindow Man</a> in the UK, or the more recent Irish discoveries of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01mc3wb/p01mc1tj">Clonycavan Man</a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01mc3wb/p01mc1ym">Old Croghan Man</a> and Ireland’s oldest known bog body, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24053119">Cashel Man</a>, dated to the Bronze Age. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233871/original/file-20180828-86126-acgbbk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/233871/original/file-20180828-86126-acgbbk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233871/original/file-20180828-86126-acgbbk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233871/original/file-20180828-86126-acgbbk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233871/original/file-20180828-86126-acgbbk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233871/original/file-20180828-86126-acgbbk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/233871/original/file-20180828-86126-acgbbk.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Excavating a trackway on Hatfield Moors, South Yorkshire.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Henry Chapman</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Seeing hidden landscapes</h2>
<p>But archaeology is only part of the story these environments have to tell. They are important archives of the past in other ways: the layers of moss and other vegetation that make up peat are themselves immensely valuable as archives of past environments (palaeoenvironments). The manner in which peat accumulates means that the deposits have stratigraphic integrity, meaning that contained within each layer can be found macroscopic and microscopic remains of plants and other organisms that shed light on landscape change and biodiversity on timescales ranging from centuries to millennia. The high organic content of peat means that these records can be dated using the radiocarbon method.</p>
<p>The best known such records are probably <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/GeolSci/micropal/palynology.html">pollen grains</a> which provide evidence of past vegetation change. But evidence from other organic material can be used to reconstruct other past environmental processes. For example, single-celled organisms called testate amoebae, preserved in sub-fossil form, are highly sensitive to peatland hydrology and have been extensively used in recent years to reconstruct <a href="https://bogology.org/how-we-do-it/biological-methods/testate-amoebae/">a history of climatic changes</a>. Meanwhile, fossil beetles can tell us how the biodiversity and nutrient status of a peatland has altered over time.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234248/original/file-20180830-195331-1ciyqlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234248/original/file-20180830-195331-1ciyqlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234248/original/file-20180830-195331-1ciyqlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234248/original/file-20180830-195331-1ciyqlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234248/original/file-20180830-195331-1ciyqlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234248/original/file-20180830-195331-1ciyqlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234248/original/file-20180830-195331-1ciyqlb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fossil beetle remains associated with Old Croghan Man bog body, Ireland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Nicki Whitehouse</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The potential of bogs to preserve both environmental and archaeological records means that they can be regarded as archives of “hidden landscapes”. The accumulating peat literally seals and protects evidence of human activity ranging from the macroscopic (in the form of archaeological sites, artefacts and larger plant and animal remains) through to the microscopic (pollen, testate amoebae and other remains) material that provides contextual evidence of environmental processes. </p>
<p>Through detailed integrated analyses these records can provide evidence of past human activity ranging from the everyday exploitation of economic resources of peatlands, through to the ceremonies associated with prehistoric human sacrifice and the deposition of the so-called bog bodies. The associated palaeoenvironmental record can be used to situate these cultural processes within long term patterns of environmental changes.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231891/original/file-20180814-2924-1q2xcdh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231891/original/file-20180814-2924-1q2xcdh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231891/original/file-20180814-2924-1q2xcdh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231891/original/file-20180814-2924-1q2xcdh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231891/original/file-20180814-2924-1q2xcdh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231891/original/file-20180814-2924-1q2xcdh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231891/original/file-20180814-2924-1q2xcdh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A bog in Estonia seen from above.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/areal-view-bog-wetlands-estonia-northern-1153059275?src=qDEksY65BXq4R3ztzgP2gg-1-3">FotoHelin/Shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Taming the wild</h2>
<p>There has been extensive study of the palaeoenvironmental record from bogs and notable archaeological excavations of sites and artefacts, but there have been relatively few concerted attempts to integrate these approaches. In part this is because generating sufficient data to model the development of a bog in four dimensions (the fourth being time) is a formidable research challenge. But some peatlands have seen relatively extensive archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research over the last few decades, providing an excellent starting point. Hatfield and Thorne Moors, situated primarily in South Yorkshire, are two such peatlands.</p>
<p>These two largest surviving areas of lowland bog in England are located within a wider lowland region known as the Humberhead Levels. After decades of industrial peat extraction, these bogs are now nature reserves managed by Natural England, and are becoming the “wild” bogs they once were. We are attempting to <a href="https://projectwildscape.wordpress.com">reconstruct the wildscape</a> and bring the complex histories of this vast and dynamic boggy landscape to life.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234638/original/file-20180903-41711-bvvvpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234638/original/file-20180903-41711-bvvvpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234638/original/file-20180903-41711-bvvvpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234638/original/file-20180903-41711-bvvvpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234638/original/file-20180903-41711-bvvvpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234638/original/file-20180903-41711-bvvvpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234638/original/file-20180903-41711-bvvvpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Flora on Thorne Moors.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Peter Roworth</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These moors are just two surviving parts of a once rich mosaic of wetland landscapes. In the past, this landscape was famed for its wildness – a remnant of an extensive complex of mires, rivers, meres and extensive floodplain wetlands. Antiquarians such as John Leland visited the area in the 16th century, and his descriptions provide a “window onto what must have been a truly fabulous ‘everglades-like’ landscape”, as described by local historian Colin Howes.</p>
<p>Now largely drained, tamed and converted to farmland, it’s hard to imagine the vast wetland landscapes that once characterised these areas. Following large-scale land reclamation in the 17th century, many of the traditional practises such as fishing, fowling, grazing and peat-cutting (turbary) rights were no longer available to commoners. Consequently, the connections between people and place became increasingly defined by a new, dryland landscape and disconnected from its former wetlands that were once so central to people’s lives.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234639/original/file-20180903-41723-ihswj7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/234639/original/file-20180903-41723-ihswj7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234639/original/file-20180903-41723-ihswj7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234639/original/file-20180903-41723-ihswj7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234639/original/file-20180903-41723-ihswj7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234639/original/file-20180903-41723-ihswj7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/234639/original/file-20180903-41723-ihswj7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sphagnum moss on Thorne Moors.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Peter Roworth</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://projectwildscape.wordpress.com">We are investigating</a> and reconstructing this dynamic and changing wildscape throughout its history, reconnecting communities to these wetland landscapes. Drawing together previous research alongside targeted archaeological fieldwork and palaeoenvironmental analyses, we are combining these with newly available digital data and sophisticated modelling techniques to reconstruct their interwoven landscape and human histories. Together, for the first time, we are beginning to see the complexity of the dynamic and changing landscape that once characterised the Humberhead Levels.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/100627/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Henry Chapman is a project partner of The Reconstructing the Wildscape project, which is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is co-produced through the participation and commitment of volunteers and projects via the HLF-funded Isle of Axholme and Hatfield Chase Partnership.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ben Gearey is a project partner of The Reconstructing the Wildscape project, which is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is co-produced through the participation and commitment of volunteers and projects via the HLF-funded Isle of Axholme and Hatfield Chase Partnership.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Bunting is a project partner of The Reconstructing the Wildscape project, which is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is co-produced through the participation and commitment of volunteers and projects via the HLF-funded Isle of Axholme and Hatfield Chase Partnership.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kimberley Davies is a project partner of The Reconstructing the Wildscape project, which is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is co-produced through the participation and commitment of volunteers and projects via the HLF-funded Isle of Axholme and Hatfield Chase Partnership.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicki Whitehouse is a project partner of The Reconstructing the Wildscape project, which is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is co-produced through the participation and commitment of volunteers and projects via the HLF-funded Isle of Axholme and Hatfield Chase Partnership. She also receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the European Research Council.</span></em></p>
A lesser known aspect of bogs is their remarkable potential to preserve both environmental and archaeological records.
Henry Chapman, Professor of Archaeology, University of Birmingham
Benjamin Gearey, Lecturer in Environmental Archaeology, University College Cork
Jane Bunting, Reader in Geography, University of Hull
Kimberley Davies, Research Assistant, Wildscape Project, University of Plymouth
Nicola Whitehouse, Associate Professor (Reader) in Physical Geography, University of Plymouth
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/91937
2018-02-26T10:03:45Z
2018-02-26T10:03:45Z
What three landscapes tell us about English identity
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207003/original/file-20180219-116365-5vh4xh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/landscape-view-white-cliffs-dover-sea-102077893?src=g2-x_zrDd64OVVkO6laYxQ-1-4">TTStock/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The relationship between landscape and English national identity goes back at least to the 18th century, when aficionados of the picturesque and the sublime made places such as the Lake District objects of patriotic pride even before Wordsworth declared them “a sort of national property”. Today, links between landscape and nation are charged with new significance in the context of debates about Brexit and Scottish independence. The nature of Englishness has never been more topical.</p>
<p>But what, exactly, can landscape tell us about Englishness? This was the question I explored in my new book, <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/british-history-after-1450/storied-ground-landscape-and-shaping-english-national-identity?format=HB#K8LZMAVikLAgVToI.97">Storied Ground</a>. In order to do so, I looked at a number of particular case studies. Here are three of them: </p>
<h2>The cliffs of Dover</h2>
<p>In a recent speech, Boris Johnson <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2018/feb/14/boris-johnson-brexit-is-not-a-v-sign-video-highlights">claimed</a> that Brexit was “not some great V-sign from the cliffs of Dover”. Whether or not you were wooed by his words, the foreign secretary’s choice of image is telling. The cliffs of Dover are powerful symbols of the nation, and specifically its insular character. </p>
<p>Surmounted by an ancient castle, they have long been associated with defence and defiance: metaphorically as well as physically, they are ramparts, keeping out the rest of the world. Across the 19th and 20th centuries, the cliffs were described as “white walls”, as “natural defences”; in 1878, Black’s Guide to Kent called Dover a “fitting symbol of English Power”, with “its walls of glittering chalk, majestic and impregnable”. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207006/original/file-20180219-116346-hy8u5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/207006/original/file-20180219-116346-hy8u5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207006/original/file-20180219-116346-hy8u5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207006/original/file-20180219-116346-hy8u5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207006/original/file-20180219-116346-hy8u5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207006/original/file-20180219-116346-hy8u5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/207006/original/file-20180219-116346-hy8u5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The gates of Dover Castle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrzej Sowa/Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a more peaceable vein, the cliffs have also functioned as markers of home – familiar, historic, reassuringly unchanging. But something like the V-sign has persisted throughout. When the French European Commission president, Jacques Delors, announced his plans for European unity in autumn 1990, The Sun told its readers “to face France and yell ‘Up Yours, Delors’”. And where better to “bawl at Gaul”, the paper suggested, than from the cliffs of Dover? </p>
<p>Indeed, page three on November 1 that year featured no underdressed young lady, but a portly bearded man in a hat and black leather jacket, draped in a Union flag, holding a half-drunk pint of beer and shouting out at France while sitting atop Dover cliffs.</p>
<h2>The Scottish border</h2>
<p>As The Sun’s injunction to what it called “true blue Brits” suggested, the patriotism associated with the white cliffs is British as well as English. This is true of other English landscapes, one notable example being that of the Northumbrian border with Scotland. </p>
<p>Here, the history of conflict between the two nations is indelibly inscribed in the landscape, with its ruined castles and blood-soaked battlefields. Yet, for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, this environmental heritage of enmity supported a form of Englishness quite different from any stereotypical ideal of pastoral, cottagey tranquillity. This was a grittier Englishness — one of romance, valour and derring-do; but it was not one that cast the Scots as a national “other” in any very antagonistic sense. Instead, in concert with a complementary variant of Scottishness, it conscripted the divisions of the past into the service of unionism. It was, to use the historian Graeme Morton’s <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Unionist_Nationalism.html?id=vahnAAAAMAAJ">helpful term</a>, a variety of “unionist-nationalism”. </p>
<p>Take Flodden Field, site of the terrible Scottish defeat of 1513, which was reimagined as a place of “splendid past bravery and present unity”. There, in 1910, an Anglo-Scots committee erected a great cross, hewn from Aberdeen granite and dedicated “to the brave of both nations” who had fallen on that bleak Northumbrian moor. The cross stands there still. Today it also memorialises the unionist identities now in retreat on both sides of the border. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206828/original/file-20180217-76003-4t86fs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206828/original/file-20180217-76003-4t86fs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206828/original/file-20180217-76003-4t86fs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206828/original/file-20180217-76003-4t86fs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206828/original/file-20180217-76003-4t86fs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206828/original/file-20180217-76003-4t86fs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206828/original/file-20180217-76003-4t86fs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Flodden Memorial, Branxton, Northumberland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Land/Wikimedia Commons.</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Manchester: shock cityscape</h2>
<p>The historian Asa Briggs has called Manchester the “shock city” of the Victorian age. Its landscape of “dark, satanic mills” is often contrasted with a supposedly dominant, countrified ideal of Englishness: as the sociologist Krishan Kumar has said, by the 1880s “the essential England was rural”. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206831/original/file-20180217-75961-7osc41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206831/original/file-20180217-75961-7osc41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/206831/original/file-20180217-75961-7osc41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206831/original/file-20180217-75961-7osc41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206831/original/file-20180217-75961-7osc41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=993&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206831/original/file-20180217-75961-7osc41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1248&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206831/original/file-20180217-75961-7osc41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1248&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/206831/original/file-20180217-75961-7osc41.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1248&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adolphe Valette, India House, Manchester (1912).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But was it? Manchester suggests otherwise, or at any rate that landscapes of industry and commerce were integral to the geography of Englishness. Throughout its Victorian and Edwardian heyday, Manchester’s architecture of enterprise was aestheticised by artists and a focus of both tourist interest and local pride.</p>
<p>Bradshaw’s famous railway handbook reckoned a visit to a factory was “one of the chief sights” of the place. The city’s warehouses were said “to rival in architecture the palaces of Venice”, and its public buildings were acclaimed as powerful emblems of the national importance of the metropolis of cotton. In the landscape of Manchester could be read the story of the nation’s rise to economic greatness, and as such — as one observer noted in 1900 — it was “a microcosm of England”. </p>
<p>These three examples illustrate how Englishness has been found in diverse places and has taken diverse forms — urban as well as rural, northern as well as southern. Indeed, this very diversity has been a major source of the integrity and resilience of English national identity — and indeed of the English nation — throughout modern history. </p>
<p>And so whatever side Britons might choose to take on Brexit or the issue of Scottish independence, they would do well to remember that.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91937/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Readman is Professor of Modern British History at King's College London. This article is on the topic of his new book, Storied Ground: Landscape and the Shaping of English National Identity, which is published by Cambridge University Press. He is a member of the Labour party.</span></em></p>
Englishness has been found in diverse places and has taken diverse forms.
Paul Readman, Professor of Modern British History, King's College London
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/80861
2017-08-03T01:00:21Z
2017-08-03T01:00:21Z
Soundscapes in the past: Adding a new dimension to our archaeological picture of ancient cultures
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180405/original/file-20170731-22169-j5elmn.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=312%2C0%2C2759%2C1811&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What sounds did the people of Chaco Canyon hear during daily life?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">David E. Witt</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Picture an archaeological site, what comes to mind? Sandstone walls, standing in the desert heat? Stonehenge, watching over a grassy field?</p>
<p>When thinking about archaeological sites, we tend to conceive of them as dead silent – empty ruins left by past cultures. But this isn’t how the people who lived in and used these sites would have experienced them. Residents would have heard others speaking and laughing, babies crying, people working, dogs barking and music such as drumming. These sounds could be heard from close by, and perhaps coming from distant locations as well. </p>
<p>Putting sound back into the archaeological landscape is an important part of understanding how people lived, what they valued, how they shaped their identities and experienced the world and their place in it. This growing field is called acoustic archaeology, or archaeoacoustics. By considering the sounds heard by people moving through the landscape, we’re able to more fully understand their culture, and thus better relate to them as human beings.</p>
<p>We <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2017.05.044">recently modeled an ancient soundscape</a> at the landscape level for the first time. What can our ears tell us about the way the Anasazi, or Ancestral Puebloan, people lived in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon more than a thousand years ago?</p>
<h2>Modeling ancient sound</h2>
<p><a href="https://uofupress.lib.utah.edu/chacos-northern-prodigies/">Chaco Canyon was the center</a> of <a href="https://sarweb.org/?sar_press_a_history_of_the_ancient_southwest">ancestral Puebloan civilization</a>. It’s famous for its great houses – large, multistoried structures, some the size of football fields – built and used from approximately A.D. 850-1150. Archaeologists have studied how the Ancestral Puebloans <a href="https://uofupress.lib.utah.edu/the-architecture-of-chaco-canyon-new-mexico/">built the structures of Chaco Canyon</a> and <a href="https://sarweb.org/?sar_press_chaco_experience">placed them in relation</a> to each other and <a href="http://www.solsticeproject.org">to astronomical alignments</a>.</p>
<p>To add a new dimension to our understanding of this time and place, we investigated how sounds were experienced at these sites. We wanted to know how a listener would have experienced a sound from a specific distance away from whatever was producing it.</p>
<p>To explore sound physics and its application to archaeology, we first developed an Excel spreadsheet. Our calculations described linear sound profiles, similar to a line-of-sight analysis; this took into account a straight path between the person or instrument making the noise and the person hearing it. However, this approach was limited because the results applied to only one listener standing at a very specific location a set distance away.</p>
<p>Our research truly blossomed when we wondered if we could apply the same sound physics calculations to an entire landscape simultaneously. We turned to a type of computer program called Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that allows us to model the world in three dimensions.</p>
<p>The software package we used, ESRI’s ArcGIS, offers anyone the option to create customized tools, such as the Soundshed Analysis Tool we created, to do calculations or create geographical data and images. The Soundshed Analysis Tool is derived from an <a href="http://www.acousticecology.org/docs/TWS_SPreAD_usersguide.pdf">earlier modeling script</a> “SPreAD-GIS” developed by environmental scientist Sarah Reed to measure the impact of noise on natural environments, such as national forests. That tool was itself adapted from SPreAD, or “the System for the Prediction of Acoustic Detectability,” a method the U.S. Forest Service devised in 1980 to <a href="https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/19811878509">predict the impact of noise</a> on outdoor recreation. </p>
<p>The Soundshed Analysis Tool requires seven input variables, a study location and elevation data. Variables include the sound source height, frequency of the sound source, sound pressure level of the source, the measurement distance from the source, air temperature, relative humidity and the ambient sound pressure level of the study location. We gathered this information from a variety of sources: open-source elevation data, archaeological research, paleoclimatological research and historical climate data. We also gathered from the relevant literature the decibel levels of crowds, individuals and the conch trumpet instrument ancestral Puebloans used.</p>
<p>Once the input variables are entered, it takes the Soundshed tool less than 10 minutes to crunch through this complex math for every point on the landscape within two miles of the spot where the sound is produced. Our model then creates images that show where and how sound spreads across the landscape. This gives us a way to visualize the sounds people would have experienced as they moved through the landscape, going about their day. </p>
<h2>Who could hear what, where</h2>
<p>We focused on culturally relevant sounds and how they would have spread throughout the Chacoan landscape. These could be the voices of people, the sound of domestic animals like dogs and turkeys, the creation of stone tools or the sound of musical instruments. Within the American Southwest, these instruments include bone flutes, whistles, foot drums, copper bells and conch shell trumpets. </p>
<p>Soundshed maps reveal that a person standing at either of two neighboring great houses, Pueblo Alto and New Alto, located approximately 500 feet from each other, can hear a person shouting or speaking to a group at the other site. The patterns differ between the two maps because the terrain differs slightly between the two locations, and because the structures themselves block sound.</p>
<p>A third map models someone blowing a conch shell trumpet from immediately north of Casa Rinconada, a large ceremonial structure, at dawn on the summer solstice. </p>
<p>The sound spreads throughout the canyon, traveling to a number of mesa top shrines that often marked sacred locations and high points on the landscape. Perhaps audibility influenced the positioning of the shrines so ritual events occurring at Casa Rinconada could be heard? </p>
<p>Investigating how sound interacts with the built environment can reveal details about the importance of ritual. It can show us if sound was considered important by the ancestral Puebloan people, especially if shrines are consistently found in locations where people could hear rituals that were performed at a distance.</p>
<h2>The future of archaeoacoustics</h2>
<p>Our research presents a first step in the archaeoacoustic study of landscapes. Now we hope to expand our research by visiting Chaco Canyon to perform sound studies and record measurements in the field. We also plan to apply our model to other cultures, geographic areas and time periods. </p>
<p>Acoustic studies combined with other archaeological research contribute to a more holistic understanding of past cultures. The field has grown as more researchers expand their multidisciplinary pursuits, combining other fields of study with their archaeological approach. For example, advances in geography, physics, psychology, computer programming and other fields made our acoustic study possible. Previously, the study of archaeoacoustics at the landscape level had been out of reach due to technological limitations and a lack of tools. It is only now that computer processing power has caught up to our dreams. </p>
<p>Modeling tools like this one also offer the added benefit of allowing us to study what people heard at a site in any place or time without the need to travel to those locations. Instead, researchers can apply existing data found through a literature search, or measure the sound levels of noises or musical instruments to use as model inputs. This opens up new areas to be explored and studied.</p>
<p>Sound modeling can help researchers ask questions, and help everyone understand and relate to the ways that other people experienced their world. A sound model opens a new door into our understanding of the past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80861/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kristy Primeau is currently employed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). DEC data was used in the article "Soundscapes in the Past: Investigating Sound at the Landscape Level". </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>David E. Witt is currently employed by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). DEC data was used in the article "Soundscapes in the Past: Investigating Sound at the Landscape Level". David is also currently a member of the Government Affairs Committee of the Society for American Archaeology.</span></em></p>
We tend to think of archaeological sites as dead silent – empty ruins left by past cultures. But this isn’t how the people who lived in and used these sites would have experienced them.
Kristy E. Primeau, Registered Professional Archaeologist, PhD Candidate, University at Albany, State University of New York
David E. Witt, Research Associate, University at Buffalo
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/75223
2017-05-21T20:10:46Z
2017-05-21T20:10:46Z
Decoding the music masterpieces: Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164230/original/image-20170406-16614-1kes7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Composing a symphonic landscape: Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 oil painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic reality”, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/293954-he-who-climbs-upon-the-highest-mountains-laughs-at-all">said</a> the prophetic protagonist in the German philosopher Nietzsche’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51893.Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra">Thus Spoke Zarathustra</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Richard Strauss in 1918.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Richard Strauss, who had already produced an orchestral work inspired by that book, seemingly took this injunction to heart when composing An Alpine Symphony (1915), which despite the title is better considered as the last of his “tone poems”. </p>
<p>The eight earlier tone poems, single-movement orchestral pieces with titles and prefaces linking the music to literature or other subject matter, had made Strauss one of the most celebrated (and controversial) composers of his day. However, although he continued composing until his death in 1949, he concentrated thereafter on opera rather than orchestral music. </p>
<p>Consequently, An Alpine Symphony marks the end of an era, both for the composer and for German symphonic music more generally, because after the First World War big romantic works like this went severely out of fashion. Though this tone poem was completed while the horrors of war dominated the news, it does not suggest any awareness of its larger political or historical situation. Rather, An Alpine Symphony remained focused on the representation of a landscape through music.</p>
<h2>Tragic inspirations</h2>
<p>Strauss first began working on what would become An Alpine Symphony in 1900, under the title “Tragedy of an artist” - a reference to the suicide of Swiss-born painter <a href="http://spartacus-educational.com/ARTstauffer.htm">Karl Stauffer-Bern</a>. In the following decade he set the project aside and seemingly swapped orchestral composition for opera, achieving enormous success on stage with the scandalous <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViLcRFqtTpk">Salome</a>, and the still darker <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqWbxitsIvM">Elektra</a>, before he turned back to more accessible musical fare with the waltz-filled <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi810zB3L04">Rosenkavalier</a>. </p>
<p>The immediate impulse for Strauss’s return to An Alpine Symphony was the premature death in 1911 of his friend, the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler too had bid farewell to the German symphonic tradition in his Ninth Symphony, which expires exquisitely into nothingness at the end of the fourth movement. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No.9.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even when Strauss took up work on the project again, its name was still in flux. He envisaged calling it “The Antichrist” (after <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18304.The_Anti_Christ">Nietzsche’s book</a> of the same title), since it “represents moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, [and] worship of eternal, magnificent nature”, as Strauss wrote on <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=ijEp8a7FawEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA93#v=onepage&q&f=false">his diary</a> in May 1911. But when this title was dropped in favour of An Alpine Symphony, the link to Nietzsche was obscured. </p>
<h2>Man vs. wild</h2>
<p>On the surface then, the final form of An Alpine Symphony is a sonic portrait of an unidentified protagonist successfully conquering a mountain. By this point in his career, Strauss was living at least part of the year in the southern Bavarian town of Garmisch (today Garmisch-Partenkirchen), within sight of Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak. Strauss loved to go rambling in the alps. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=444&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165020/original/image-20170412-25894-g798yz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=558&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Strauss in Garmisch, Germany in 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Strauss_1938.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The unbroken 50 minute tone poem contains 22 parts describing a variety of landscape features on the route to and from the mountain summit: the climber passes through the woods, by a stream, near a waterfall, across flowery meadows and pastureland, through thickets, and onto the glacier before reaching the top, each of these suggested by some sonic analogue. </p>
<p>Nature’s temporal and climatic changes are also prominent: the events of the day are bordered by sunrise and sunset, and the hiker encounters mist and a storm. </p>
<p>The composer’s customary skill at representing non-musical entities through music is on full display here: the waterfall is a particular highlight in its imaginative rendition of the water’s spray.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DJYMdiB6fME?wmode=transparent&start=806" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p><br></p>
<p>To suggest the sound of Bavarian mountain pastures, Strauss used cowbells – an instrument which had been memorably featured by Gustav Mahler in his Sixth Symphony.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DJYMdiB6fME?wmode=transparent&start=920" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p><br></p>
<p>Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6 (known as the Pastoral symphony) is in some ways a precedent for Strauss’s work. Both compositions feature a brook, and later a violent storm followed by a beatific calm. <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians/Pastoral_Symphony,_The_(Beethoven)">Beethoven</a>, however, claimed that his Symphony contained “more expression of feeling than painting”, and the title of his first movement (“Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country”) bears out its focus on the emotional journey of experiencing the landscape, rather than on painting the landscape itself. </p>
<p>Strauss, on the other hand, wanted to represent nature in sound, but also to show the human protagonist who experiences it. In this sense, he goes beyond Beethoven in the boldness of his depictions.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Strauss conducting in 1917.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_orchestra_and_its_instruments_(1917)_(14780185164).jpg">Esther Singleton, Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The climber is introduced in the third section in a bold striding theme, which confidently traces a jagged ascending course – until it pulls up briefly a few bars later, as the climber runs out of breath. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DJYMdiB6fME?wmode=transparent&start=290" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p><br></p>
<p>This theme was actually modelled on an idea from the finale of Beethoven’s <a href="https://youtu.be/hsuwwzthcA8?t=9m22s">Fifth Symphony</a>, although scholars only discovered this much later. Ingeniously, Strauss later flips his theme upside down as the mountaineer descends in haste through the storm.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DJYMdiB6fME?wmode=transparent&start=2290" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p><br></p>
<p>In between, the climber manages to <a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=23m0s">attain the summit</a>. Here Strauss swaps landscape painting for evoking feelings of triumph that he himself would have experienced many times in his mountain wanderings. </p>
<p>Yet again, the opening of this new theme is a borrowing, this time from the <a href="https://youtu.be/RxJJYdG1_E8?t=6m30s">second movement</a> of German composer Max Bruch’s beloved Violin Concerto no. 1. Strauss freely reshapes this idea into a passage of sublime magnificence – symphonic music at its most monumental.</p>
<h2>Playing with history</h2>
<p>There are other, looser connections to earlier music. The opening of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJYMdiB6fME">Strauss’s tone poem</a> recalls the Prelude of Richard Wagner’s opera, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1zsSaLiD7Q">Das Rheingold</a>, the opening drama of his <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-ring-cycle-7999">four-part Ring Cycle</a>. </p>
<p>Both works start out from a place of quiet stillness, from which the music gradually grows in loudness and liveliness. The two composers were trying to represent nature in its most primal form, and the burgeoning of life that arises from it. Interestingly, when a teenage Strauss was caught out a storm in the mountains, he channelled the experience into an improvised piano composition: “naturally huge tone painting and smarminess à la Wagner”, the precocious 15-year-old wrote, being no fan of Wagner’s music at the time. </p>
<p>But by the time he wrote An Alpine Symphony, Strauss had been a card-carrying Wagnerian for many years. It is likely that this was a deliberate homage to the effect Wagner created – although the actual themes in both passages are quite different.</p>
<p>Yet another sort of allusion is found in the <a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=14m39s">flowery meadows passage</a>, where the accompanying plucked strings (“pizzicato”) and mellifluous string writing strongly recall a texture typical of German composer Johannes Brahms. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Y1E6FBi-AJw?wmode=transparent&start=217" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture conducted by American composer Leonard Bernstein.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even Strauss’s earlier works are revisited: the explosion into life at the “<a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=3m12s">Sunrise</a>” in An Alpine Symphony is akin to one of his previous, and more famous, openings: the start of <a href="https://youtu.be/ETveS23djXM?t=56s">Also Sprach Zarathustra</a> – where the prophet greets the sun. This passage has become iconic, thanks to its use in Stanley Kubrick’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/">2001: A Space Odyssey</a>.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/e-QFj59PON4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra makes for a memorable intro in 2001: A Space Odyssey.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And finally, the opening of An Alpine Symphony, with its slow descending scales, directly quotes from the start of Strauss’s much earlier <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO22oE7jZ4c">F minor Symphony</a>. Here, Strauss returns to his beginnings for what turned out to be his last major orchestral tone poem.</p>
<h2>Down to earth</h2>
<p>So what do all these borrowings and allusions signify? First, they cement the picture of Strauss as heir to the German music traditions. Before he decisively transferred his allegiance to Wagner, Strauss had undergone a brief Brahms infatuation, and this, too, had left its mark. Nonetheless, Strauss did not reproduce earlier ideas in a passive fashion in his Alpine Symphony. Rather, he transformed and reworked a wide range of source materials. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Strauss in 1922.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ferdinand_Schmutzer_-_Richard_Strauss,_1922.jpg">Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More radical still was Strauss’s larger agenda, where he parts company from his symphonic precursors. Since at least the time of Beethoven, the symphony had been treated as a semi-sacred genre. It was perceived to have metaphysical significance. The writer and <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=UmYZzMF1oiUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false">critic E.T.A. Hoffmann</a> expressed it thus in a famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1810: “Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him.”</p>
<p>In recent decades, musicologists such as <a href="http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=21904">Charles Youmans have recognised</a> that Strauss’s agenda in his orchestral compositions was deliberately at odds with this. He rejected these metaphysical pretensions, and his explicit tone-painting in works like An Alpine Symphony expresses a more grounded, earthly agenda. Nietzsche <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/563547-i-beseech-you-my-brothers-remain-faithful-to-the-earth">called in Also sprach Zarathustra</a> for mankind to “remain true to the earth; do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes”. In nature, Strauss had found an earthly object that was worthy of worship. </p>
<p>A few decades later, Strauss envisaged writing one more tone poem called Der Donau (the Danube), a tribute to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. But he never got further than the preliminary sketches. </p>
<p>An Alpine Symphony therefore remains his last substantial output within this arena. There are many ways to approach this work: we can rejoice in the sonic gorgeousness of its surface, or admire how cleverly Strauss has re-imagined of nature in musical terms, or hear in it a farewell to a tradition Strauss himself had subtly subverted. </p>
<p>It’s a more complex composition than it appears to be. And as it fades away enigmatically into <a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=47m2s">nocturnal darkness</a>, so too did a glorious chapter in German symphonic music pass with this work into history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75223/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Larkin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
With An Alpine Symphony, Richard Strauss achieved something remarkable: the painting of the German alps, complete with cow meadows and waterfalls, in sound.
David Larkin, Senior Lecturer in Musicology, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/74581
2017-03-24T04:41:05Z
2017-03-24T04:41:05Z
From waterfalls to snowy forests, Egyptian posters show what exotic looks like from the desert
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161777/original/image-20170321-5395-1v25k0l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Not what most Egyptians see when they look out their windows.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://vbat.org/spip.php?article644">Vincent Battesti</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Egypt is a tourist destination famous for its archaeological sites, natural beauty and ancient culture. But fascination can be found even in more mundane places, as in an unusual form of wall art ubiquitous in Egyptian apartments and small businesses.</p>
<p>Not quite photographs, the posters are photoshopped representations of numerous natural environments or differing architectural styles, juxtaposed in improbable ways. These made-in-Egypt <em>mandhar ṭabīɛī</em>, or “natural landscapes” – which range in size from small, 50-by-35 cm framed images to wallpaper-scaled – reveal a particularly Egyptian form of exoticism. </p>
<p>All the posters illustrating this article <a href="http://vbat.org/spip.php?article644">come from my 2009 fieldwork in Cairo</a>, purchased for just a few Egyptian pounds (less than $US1). These idealised images are displayed across the country, in private indoor spaces, coffee shops, restaurants, hairdressers, and rural and urban areas, but are especially common in the arid Sinai countryside, Libyan desert and west Mediterranean coast.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161622/original/image-20170320-9114-1vvf8rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161622/original/image-20170320-9114-1vvf8rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161622/original/image-20170320-9114-1vvf8rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161622/original/image-20170320-9114-1vvf8rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161622/original/image-20170320-9114-1vvf8rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161622/original/image-20170320-9114-1vvf8rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161622/original/image-20170320-9114-1vvf8rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161622/original/image-20170320-9114-1vvf8rm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A lighthouse borrowed from Scandinavia enhances this 2009 poster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://vbat.org/spip.php?article644">Maktaba al-Maḥaba/Vincent Battesti</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The posters depict a version of the “exotic” not centred on ordinary date palms, flat fields or mundane sand dunes – all clichés used in tourist catalogues to attract visitors to Egypt. Instead, they express a more local aesthetic form, far removed from Western standards. </p>
<h2>Nature’s Photoshop artisans</h2>
<p>I at first incorrectly assumed that these posters were cheap Chinese products filling a niche Egyptian market. In fact, they are designed and produced in the Shubra neighbourhood of Cairo or the nearby suburbs. Maktaba al-Maḥaba, a major Coptic Christian bookstore (مكتبة المحبة القبطية), distributes their catalogues across Egypt (and apparently throughout the North Africa region, as I have since noticed some posters in Tunisia’s Jerid oasis and the Moroccan Rif). </p>
<p>The main design tool in these Egyptian cut-and-paste compositions is clearly Photoshop (or a similar software). The craftsmen show great mastery of pasting, fusion, blurring, cropping, scaling, duplication and other techniques, creating on their computer monitors three-dimensional scenes encompassing all the best of different continents – even if it means implausible coexistences and genuine problems with scale. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161621/original/image-20170320-9108-1tfx97a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161621/original/image-20170320-9108-1tfx97a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161621/original/image-20170320-9108-1tfx97a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161621/original/image-20170320-9108-1tfx97a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161621/original/image-20170320-9108-1tfx97a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161621/original/image-20170320-9108-1tfx97a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161621/original/image-20170320-9108-1tfx97a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161621/original/image-20170320-9108-1tfx97a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=522&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Though humans are rare in these posters, here we see the known Copt saint Tamav Irene (1936-2006) and the Pope Pope Cyril VI (1902-1971).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Maktaba al-Maḥaba/Vincent Battesti</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The artisans of the Maktaba al-Maḥaba shoppe, who don’t hesitate to cater to the Christian community by printing Jesus Christ or the late Pope Shenouda III in these bucolic settings, undoubtedly inherited the Coptic iconographic know-how behind the store’s endless production of pious images depicting triumphant saints, benevolent popes and monks, and suffering martyrs. </p>
<h2>Snow, rainforests, Christs and Chinese pagodas</h2>
<p>Water is everywhere in these posters, its presence seemingly required by consumers. It may be a sea, a lake, a river (sometimes with fanciful route), or, of course, those elaborate fountains.</p>
<p>The other prerequisite is greenery and a rich palette of florals – regardless, again, of botanical, agronomic or ecological incongruities and impossibilities. The posters are saturated with garden motifs, leaving some space for the sky but very little room for humans or animals. </p>
<p>Architectural elements reflect not just Islamic motifs (columns, ceramics) but also styles quite foreign to Egypt, such as Californian villas, Chinese pagodas and Scandinavian lighthouses. Other exotic landscapes include reproduction photos of snowy Swiss mountains with equatorial rainforest waterfalls, punctuated by the palace of Versailles or other Renaissance-style building, plus Islamic ponds with lush floral arrangements – and perhaps a yacht or ice floe in the background. </p>
<p>Sometimes, there’s a photographic enlargement of an English garden in its autumn glory. But, in general, natural nature is not enough, and the thirst for exoticism triumphs. </p>
<h2>What is exoticism? What is ‘natural’?</h2>
<p>These posters are prominently displayed across Egypt, offering visual delight in gas stations and local eateries. In Siwa, a remote oasis in the Libyan desert of Egypt, I spotted them in the <em>marbūɛa</em> (living room) of houses.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161619/original/image-20170320-9121-1k9i3dg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161619/original/image-20170320-9121-1k9i3dg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161619/original/image-20170320-9121-1k9i3dg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161619/original/image-20170320-9121-1k9i3dg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161619/original/image-20170320-9121-1k9i3dg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161619/original/image-20170320-9121-1k9i3dg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161619/original/image-20170320-9121-1k9i3dg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161619/original/image-20170320-9121-1k9i3dg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The living room interior in a newly built home in the Siwa Oasis of Egypt’s Libyan Desert.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Vincent Battesti</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Siwa inhabitants do not see <a href="https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00004050">their landscape as particularly original</a> or interesting. Meanwhile, tourists who come to Siwa do not focus on the area’s true agro-ecosystem but look beyond at a more familiar scene, the <a href="https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00569247">“already known” oasis of their Western imagery</a>, an iconic Eden landscape that conforms with <a href="https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00350921e">their own perception of exoticism</a>.</p>
<p>This observation supports <a href="http://books.openedition.org/editionsmsh/654">social anthropologist Gérard Lenclud, who said</a> that landscape is: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“the product of the view of someone who is ‘foreigner’ to it. Man doesn’t think of elaborating a landscaped representation of the place to which he is attached and where he works or lives.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Exotic is always found elsewhere, beyond the horizon.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161775/original/image-20170321-5408-1k87c76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161775/original/image-20170321-5408-1k87c76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161775/original/image-20170321-5408-1k87c76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161775/original/image-20170321-5408-1k87c76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161775/original/image-20170321-5408-1k87c76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161775/original/image-20170321-5408-1k87c76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161775/original/image-20170321-5408-1k87c76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161775/original/image-20170321-5408-1k87c76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=518&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Fountains are recurrent elements of Egyptian posters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Maktaba al-Maḥaba/Vincent Battesti</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What does this reveal about Egyptians’ ideal of nature? In accumulating images from other eras and places, these posters create an exotic space located somewhere between the nostalgia for a lost Eden and the promise of Paradise. The inclusion of Islamic golden-age gardens, Swiss chalets and Atlantic lighthouses also reveals the attractiveness of a globalised world. </p>
<p>The amassing of elements speaks for itself: saturation is probably the key concept of <a href="https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00842075">popular aesthetics, part of the pursuit of sensorial experience</a>. The beholders of these <em>mandhar ṭabīɛī</em> constructions do not distinguish between “natural” nature and artificial renditions. In interviews I found that Siwa residents either do not notice this phoney flavour or do not care about its inauthenticity.</p>
<h2>Dreams of lush gardens</h2>
<p>What Egyptian consumers do clearly prefer is that the posters’ iconic jumble should be organised according to repeating patterns of three main elements: flora, water, and architecture. Some of these elements reappear from poster to poster – the same fountain can be recognised stretched a bit here, or with a different basin there. </p>
<p>I could unwittingly track the biography of some key patterns as I vainly sought evidence of a similar craft around the world. <a href="https://medihal.archives-ouvertes.fr/medihal-00455926">The mill</a> sometimes seen in the midst of a lush tropical vegetation, for example, is “sampled” from a poster entitled “<a href="http://www.babcocksp.com/gristmill.html">Glade Creek Grist Mill, Babcock State Park, West Virginia</a>” (credited to Robert Glusic). The original is an already romanticised depiction of a tourist attraction in Babcock State Park in West Virginia, United States.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161625/original/image-20170320-9147-1ve9vhe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161625/original/image-20170320-9147-1ve9vhe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161625/original/image-20170320-9147-1ve9vhe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161625/original/image-20170320-9147-1ve9vhe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161625/original/image-20170320-9147-1ve9vhe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161625/original/image-20170320-9147-1ve9vhe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161625/original/image-20170320-9147-1ve9vhe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161625/original/image-20170320-9147-1ve9vhe.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This West Virginia waterfall is sampled in some Egyptian posters, including the one in the Siwa home, shown above.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screenshot-AllPosters.com/Vincent Battesti</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Egypt, a simple reproduction of this image does not suffice. That distinguishes its popular aesthetic tradition from Europe’s, where, according to Jean-Claude Chamboredon in the collective book, <a href="http://www.persee.fr/doc/rfsoc_0035-2969_1987_num_28_2_2409">Protecting Nature: history and ideology</a>, “the countryside as an idyllic social setting results from a long process of progressive disappearance of the rural proletariat … since the second half of the 19th century”. </p>
<p>The French countryside has become an ideal, neutral space whose very construction (via a history of social struggles) is erased and replaced with a narrative of an authentic, traditional and beautiful seasonally-changing subject. (I recall now the plywood-mounted poster of a continental forest that my parents proudly displayed in our living room in Le Havre, France.)</p>
<p>Not so in North Africa and Egypt. In deserts, it seems, the people dream of lush gardens and Italianate palaces that allow them to be swept away, if only for a moment, from arid native soil.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74581/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Vincent Battesti does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The pastiche-style poster art ubiquitous in Egyptian houses and businesses reveals how locals imagine far-off landscapes, idealise nature and define beauty.
Vincent Battesti, Chercheur CNRS en anthropologie sociale (au Musée de l'Homme), Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN)
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/74464
2017-03-17T11:03:12Z
2017-03-17T11:03:12Z
New research indicates that Alfred the Great probably wasn’t that great
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/160577/original/image-20170313-9600-fqevef.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Last Kingdom. BBC/Carnival/Des Wille</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Last Kingdom – BBC’s historical drama set in the time of Alfred the Great’s war with the Vikings – has returned to our screens for a second series. While most attention will continue to focus on the fictional hero Uhtred, his story is played out against a political background where the main protagonist is the brooding and bookish mastermind Alfred the Great, vividly portrayed in the series by David Dawson.</p>
<p>But was Alfred the Great really that great? If we judge him on the basis of new findings in landscape archaeology that are radically changing our understanding of warfare in the Viking Age, it would seem not. It looks like Alfred was a good propagandist rather than a visionary military leader.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161301/original/image-20170317-6097-1njiqmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161301/original/image-20170317-6097-1njiqmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161301/original/image-20170317-6097-1njiqmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161301/original/image-20170317-6097-1njiqmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161301/original/image-20170317-6097-1njiqmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161301/original/image-20170317-6097-1njiqmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161301/original/image-20170317-6097-1njiqmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161301/original/image-20170317-6097-1njiqmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alfred the Great statue, Winchester.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tony Baggett / Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The broad outline of King Alfred’s wars with the Vikings is well known. Oft defeated by the great army of the Vikings, he took refuge in a remote part of Somerset before rallying the English army in 878 and defeating the Vikings at Edington. It was not this one victory that made Alfred great, <a href="https://archive.org/stream/asserslifeofking00asseiala/asserslifeofking00asseiala_djvu.txt">according to his biographer Asser</a>, but the military reforms Alfred implemented after Edington. In creating a system of strongholds, a longer-serving army and new naval forces, Asser argues that Alfred put in place systems which meant that the Vikings would never win again. In doing so, he secured his legacy.</p>
<p>It is a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DZIqAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT143&lpg=PT143&dq=Alfred+was+a+beacon-light,+the+bright+symbol+of+Saxon+achievement,+the+hero+of+the&source=bl&ots=DgPZwFDfA9&sig=5112cxJg2H537z9iBMnUPXjm6ic&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiN4rK54NXSAhUrBMAKHckoD6kQ6AEIHTAB#v=onepage&q=Alfred%20was%20a%20beacon-light%2C%20the%20bright%20symbol%20of%20Saxon%20achievement%2C%20the%20hero%20of%20the&f=false">well-known story</a>, but how accurate is it? Research by <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/research/projects/burghalhidage">a team at UCL</a> and another at the University of Nottingham into the archaeology and place-name evidence for late Anglo-Saxon civil defence presents a slightly different picture.</p>
<h2>Alfred’s strongholds</h2>
<p>Many towns <a href="http://www.wallingfordmuseum.org.uk/wallingfords-history.html">claim</a> to have been founded by Alfred as part of his plan for defending England. This idea rests largely on a text known as the Burghal Hidage, which
which lists the names of 33 strongholds (in Old English <em>burhs</em>) across southern England and the taxes assigned to their garrisons, recorded as numbers of hides (a unit of land). According to the list, under Alfred a military machine was created whereby no fewer than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burghal_Hidage">27,000 men</a>, some 6% of the total population, were assigned to the defence and maintenance of what has been described as “fortress Wessex”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161297/original/image-20170317-6119-1lorfmh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161297/original/image-20170317-6119-1lorfmh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161297/original/image-20170317-6119-1lorfmh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161297/original/image-20170317-6119-1lorfmh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161297/original/image-20170317-6119-1lorfmh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=394&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161297/original/image-20170317-6119-1lorfmh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161297/original/image-20170317-6119-1lorfmh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161297/original/image-20170317-6119-1lorfmh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Strongholds listed in the Burghal Hidage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Over the past 40 years, much archaeological evidence has been gathered about the Burghal Hidage strongholds, many of which were former Roman towns or Iron Age hill forts that were reused or refurbished as Anglo-Saxon military sites. Others were new burhs raised with an innovative design that imitated the regular Roman plan. </p>
<p>It <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquaries-journal/article/late-saxon-planned-towns/F1B8D737B1118D62B654D9662E6D77F9">has been argued</a> that the latter represent an “Alfredian” vision of urban planning. But the evidence doesn’t entirely bear this out. For example, in Winchester radiocarbon and archaeomagnetic dating <a href="https://library.thehumanjourney.net/663/16/Scientific_Dating_Report.pdfA.pdf">suggests</a> the new urban plan was probably built around 840–80, almost certainly, therefore, before Alfred’s victory of 878 and probably before he even became king. Excavations in Worcester, by contrast, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Urban_Growth_and_the_Medieval_Church.html?id=_ApxsZdMNWMC">show</a> that the distinctive “Alfredian” street plan there only came into use in the late tenth or early 11th century, around 100 years after Alfred’s death. </p>
<p>Archaeological evidence shows that many Bughal Hidage strongholds started as defensive sites which only later developed into towns. Sometimes this occurred at the same location, but in the case of strongholds at Iron Age hill forts, such as Burpham (Sussex), Chisbury (Wiltshire), and Pilton (Devon), more suitable locations for defended towns were sought nearby. While the general development of early emergency measures – where defence policy was determined by inaccessibility and expediency – are testimony to Alfred’s civil defence strategy, the more long-term development of purpose-built towns, around which England’s economy and administration became organised, only took place during the reigns of Alfred’s successors. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161296/original/image-20170317-6100-19tcffv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161296/original/image-20170317-6100-19tcffv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161296/original/image-20170317-6100-19tcffv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161296/original/image-20170317-6100-19tcffv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161296/original/image-20170317-6100-19tcffv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=576&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161296/original/image-20170317-6100-19tcffv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161296/original/image-20170317-6100-19tcffv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161296/original/image-20170317-6100-19tcffv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=723&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Late Anglo-Saxon Winchester showing the characteristic arrangement of streets and town defences often accredited to Alfred the Great.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Landscapes of defence</h2>
<p>The major strongholds listed in the Burghal Hidage have received much attention, but <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GG3fCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85&dq=baker+and+brookes+danes+in+wessex&source=bl&ots=LFZvlKWktA&sig=08EPD7JWL3KSgyqq6CHFh1UhGBA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjVjrvN7tXSAhWHAsAKHWyxD38Q6AEILjAD#v=onepage&q=baker%20and%20brookes%20danes%20in%20wessex&f=false">landscape research</a> is also now helping to provide a fuller picture, allowing us to identify important early route-ways and river crossing-points. </p>
<p>Place-names containing such compounds as Old English <em>here-pæð</em> or <em>fyrd-weg</em>, both meaning “army road”, are especially important. But place-names also suggest the existence of <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/early-medieval-atlas/ema-news-publication/BeaconLighting">elaborate systems of beacons and lookouts</a>, often spaced at regular intervals, visible to each other and to known strongholds, and providing control over important route-ways. Written sources and archaeological excavation confirm that beacons were in use in the early 11th century. Landscape analysis is also helping to identify the <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/anglo-saxon-england/article/div-classtitleexplaining-anglo-saxon-military-efficiency-the-landscape-of-mobilizationdiv/3F7F1803847AD7A1807C8EF7E65038BC">important mustering sites</a>, crucial to mobilisation, without which the military system would not have worked. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161295/original/image-20170317-6119-100lwfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161295/original/image-20170317-6119-100lwfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/161295/original/image-20170317-6119-100lwfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161295/original/image-20170317-6119-100lwfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161295/original/image-20170317-6119-100lwfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161295/original/image-20170317-6119-100lwfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161295/original/image-20170317-6119-100lwfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/161295/original/image-20170317-6119-100lwfm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=534&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Aerial view of the Burghal Hidage site of Wallingford with the Thames in partial flood. Outline of the Saxon ramparts and ‘Alfredian’ streetplan is clear.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of the Environmental Agency</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Putting all this evidence together makes it likely that Alfred the Great’s military innovations were part of a continuing development, that <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0254.2007.00198.x/full">started in the eight century in Mercia and continued long after his death</a>. Alfred built on existing structures, at first using what was already in place, such as hilltop defences and mustering sites of the eighth and early ninth centuries, but many of the most innovative developments in defensive organisation clearly occurred in the reign of his son, Edward the Elder (899–924). Indeed, the little closely datable evidence that can be gleaned from the major burhs, all points to a long chronology of stronghold construction.</p>
<p>Alfred’s defensive genius lay not in the creation of burhs, then, but in the way he adapted earlier strategies to suit the drastically altered military demands of the Viking age. His first steps towards a reliable and more constant system of military service ensured the continuous availability of troops. But the glories afforded him in popular imagination as the architect of “fortress Wessex” no longer, it seems, stand.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74464/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stuart Brookes receives funding from The Leverhulme Trust</span></em></p>
New research suggests his military achievements might have been exaggerated.
Stuart Brookes, Senior Research Associate in Archaeology, UCL
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/68599
2016-11-27T10:13:08Z
2016-11-27T10:13:08Z
Black smoke rising: Under the influence of … Berni Searle’s video ‘Lull’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147546/original/image-20161125-32049-17dnhnd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Water’s Edge II (2009) - a print related to the 'Black Smoke Rising' series.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://bernisearle.com/">from http://bernisearle.com/</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our regular series, “<a href="https://theconversation.com/africa/topics/under-the-influence-31577">Under the influence</a>”, we ask experts to share what they believe are the most influential works of art or artists in their field. Here academic and artist Sharlene Khan, explains why she finds Berni Searle’s video “Lull”, a hugely influential work.</em></p>
<p>The video “Lull” (2009), from the “<a href="http://bernisearle.com/videos/">Black Smoke Rising</a>” series, opens up with a “garden scene”. In the middle of the frame, a person with her back to us – presumably the artist <a href="http://bernisearle.com/">Berni Searle</a>, herself – quietly and gently swings on a cut tyre that has been strung up for such a purpose.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OrRW9sLlNqg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Lull’ from Berni Searle’s ‘Black Smoke Rising’ series.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She faces the trees and body of water in front of her, humming, lulling us into the serenity that is on offer to our gaze. Words such as “idyllic” and “picturesque” come to mind, as does <a href="http://www.artble.com/artists/jean-honore_fragonard">Jean-Honoré Fragonard</a>’s 1767 painting entitled <a href="http://www.artble.com/artists/jean-honore_fragonard/paintings/the_swing">“The Swing”</a>, which exemplifies the frivolity of the <a href="https://news.artnet.com/market/a-brief-history-of-rococo-art-32790">Rococo art movement</a>. </p>
<p>In it we see a young rosy-cheeked maiden being pushed high into the air on a swing by an older gentleman. The setting is a beautiful garden with statues of cherubs. The woman’s excitement is uncontainable. It leads to an abandon of proper conduct as there is a suggestion that we could get a little peek under her ample dress and petticoat. As does the young gentleman lurking in the garden below, and we can perhaps guess that it is not so much the swing that has set her aflush as the little peekaboo game she and her lover are playing.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147150/original/image-20161123-19712-1qsgma9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147150/original/image-20161123-19712-1qsgma9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147150/original/image-20161123-19712-1qsgma9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147150/original/image-20161123-19712-1qsgma9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=770&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147150/original/image-20161123-19712-1qsgma9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147150/original/image-20161123-19712-1qsgma9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147150/original/image-20161123-19712-1qsgma9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’, 1767.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Searle’s video, however, has none of this romance. A minute into the video the artist disappears from the swing, her humming eerily continues for a short while after she has gone, and reappears at the water’s edge to the left of the screen as if she is now part of the picturesque.</p>
<p>Moments later, her empty seat – what use is a swing if it’s not doing that? – fades away only to be replaced by the violent swinging into frame of a full tyre on fire. What was initially a scene of quiet contemplation, as we visually consumed both Searle and nature, has turned into a setting of seemingly unprovoked violence.</p>
<p>The buzz of insects, the call of geese and the endless noises we associate with the quiet of nature is overcome by the crackling of the fire emanating black smoke. The artist continues to stand apart from this violence, seemingly unaware, unaffected, back still to the threat behind her. </p>
<p>For the rest of the video, the tyre rests in the middle of frame being consumed by the flames. Curiously, even though the tyre eventually falls out of frame, clouds of black smoke emanate from somewhere outside the frame of our vision, the mechanised eye of the camera is shaken and we become aware that like Searle, there is a fire threatening us from behind while we’ve been watching this scene.</p>
<h2>Landscape art as veneers of violence</h2>
<p>The picturesque and the idyllic as represented in landscape art, as art historian <a href="https://sfaiph304.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/landscapeandpower.pdf">W.J.T. Mitchell</a> and cultural geographer <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24396679?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">John Wylie</a> remind us, are veneers which hide scenes of grotesque violence and inequalities. Both theorists posit the concept that “landscape” is not just simply a physical entity “out there”, but is a construction of gazing and consuming that human beings have developed in relation to “nature”.</p>
<p>It is as an ideological construct of power which frames nature in very particular ways and for specific reasons. As people dependent for our survival on land, our cosmologies and spiritual practices teem with ways in which to appease the land to our favour. As we became industrialised, we could hide our anxieties of not being in complete control of nature by, in fact, seeming to control nature through borders we erect, through pretty gardens, through landscaping. Western fine art, as well as Chinese and Japanese landscape art, is filled with scenes in which “man” escapes from the hassles of his society back into nature, that one finds oneself in relation to/within nature.</p>
<p>As European nations developed their modern sense of nationalist pride, they did this against their colonial exploitation of lands in other spaces – scenes of a quiet pastoral England, Italy, Belgium or France were set against the primitive or exotic “elsewhere” where natives and nature where in harmony (and available for conquest). That is unless said natives were shown naughtily killing each other awaiting colonial rule to restore order to their chaos.</p>
<p>Nature was chaotic, as were those deemed closest to them: natives, women, homosexuals. When nature was unruly in Europe, it was only to fulfil the need for the sublime – the excess of Self – that always lurked within the reasoning man, that frightened and enchanted him and made his pulse run, so that he was always in search of it, even as he sought to dominate it. </p>
<p>Gardens have a long history in many cultures. They could be places of contemplation and self-reflection. Gardens could have streams which meant when one crossed over them, one was cleansed spiritually. They were sites of prestige in which the wild could be shown to be controllable; in smaller households they were a sign of stature, of a rising class level. Colonial gardens abroad were a sign of their administrative order and cultural values. </p>
<p>Hidden underneath painting codes are the violence and bloodshed of colonial exploitation done in the names of foreign kings and queens. Like a family album and photos of tourist trips, where everyone smiles and nobody can tell the irritations, abuse and pathologies that may lurk behind the photographic surface.</p>
<h2>Why is Searle’s work still relevant?</h2>
<p>Searle’s work is a daunting reminder of this. She violates the image through the burning tyre. For South Africans, the burning tyre is a strong reminder of a very recent past. A past that is always threatening to engulf the country: the burning tyre of the townships shown on the state broadcaster’s, the SAUK’s, news as South Africans were told their defence force was again trying to restore order to townships on fire.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147547/original/image-20161125-32049-gepgcj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147547/original/image-20161125-32049-gepgcj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147547/original/image-20161125-32049-gepgcj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147547/original/image-20161125-32049-gepgcj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147547/original/image-20161125-32049-gepgcj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147547/original/image-20161125-32049-gepgcj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/147547/original/image-20161125-32049-gepgcj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Water’s Edge III’ (2009), a print from Berni Searle’s ‘Black Smoke Rising’ series.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">From http://bernisearle.com/</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In more recent years, it is the SABC (what the SAUK has morphed into) telling the country how its police service is trying to bring peace to disgruntled township residents. Amid the pretty rhetoric that is South African tourism and former president Thabo Mbeki’s “African Renaissance” <a href="http://www.soweto.co.za/html/i_iamafrican.htm">speech</a> (“I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land”), there are tyres burning. Their black swirls reaching high into the sky right in front of Rhodes University’s Drama Department in Grahamstown.</p>
<p>Authoritarian backs straighten. The colonial imagination is invoked – if they could do that to a tyre, then they could do that to a white body. The tyre burns until only a ring of blackness marks a scene of signification, of seasons of discontent.</p>
<h2>Arson attacks</h2>
<p>Two weeks ago I arrive to invigilate an exam under stressful circumstances. In ensuring that exams continue regardless of student protests for free higher education, the Academic Registrar has decided that the building which seats 400 students will be locked and surrounded by private security and police in light of three different arson attacks. I make sure the fire exit doors are functioning only to discover that the alley into which both doors lead is closed off by high gates and locked from the outside. </p>
<p>In response to my disbelief against the blatant violation of fire regulations, I am told the guards posted outside the gates will hold keys. I leave the exam in protest and report the matter to the local Fire Chief. When he arrives he has the locks cut off the gates. Despite repeated emails to the university, the Registrar refuses to acknowledge emails calling for proper safety regulations. </p>
<p>I am reminded of the film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976051/">“The Reader”</a>, where Kate Winslet portrays a Nazi official who is brought to trial many years later for her part in an event where Jews were locked in a building and it burnt down with all the occupants inside. When asked why she had not opened the doors when she realised that the place was burning, Winslet’s character uncomprehendingly answers that there would have been chaos. I am reminded of such Nazi reasoning and illusions of order and rationality when empathy no longer resides in us, when fear rules.</p>
<p>Rhodes is no exception though. It doesn’t take a philosopher to understand that as many liberal ears close to the cries of the majority of people unable to progress in post-apartheid South Africa, our country will burn physically and metaphorically. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/">“Hunger Games”</a> fictional character Katniss Everdeen’s words to dictator President Snow might be worth hearkening to: “Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68599/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sharlene Khan receives funding from the National Arts Foundation and the National Research Foundation. </span></em></p>
Hidden underneath painting codes are the violence and bloodshed of colonial exploitation. ‘Lull’ is a daunting reminder of this.
Sharlene Khan, South African visual artist and senior lecturer of Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University, Rhodes University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/56933
2016-04-26T10:30:54Z
2016-04-26T10:30:54Z
How an 18th century landscape architect influenced housing estate design
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119675/original/image-20160421-26981-5dnda5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Skowronek/Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="http://www.capabilitybrown.org/">Lancelot “Capability” Brown</a> is credited with transforming the English landscape during the 18th century. This year marks the 300th anniversary of his birth. With his trinity of design features – grass, trees and water – Brown created an enduring image of England, and Englishness.</p>
<p>His style was a reaction against the formal parterres and clipped topiary reminiscent of Versailles, and the classically-inspired allusions of the previous age.</p>
<p>The landscapes he created were simple, uncluttered and restrained. During his lifetime, Brown worked on over <a href="http://johnphibbs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Landscapes-attributed-to-Brown-3rd-ed..pdf">250 landscapes</a>, including at <a href="http://www.blenheimpalace.com/attractions-and-events/park/capability-brown-300-festival-2016.html">Blenheim Palace</a>, <a href="http://www.burghley.co.uk/capability2016/">Burghley</a>, <a href="http://www.chatsworth.org/attractions-and-events/events/capability-brown-talk-and-tour">Chatsworth</a>, <a href="http://www.comptonverney.org.uk/park/capability-brown/">Compton Verney</a>, <a href="https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/croome/features/the-very-capable-brown-creator-of-croome">Croome</a>, <a href="http://www.highclerecastle.co.uk/events/capability-brown-highclere">Highclere Castle</a>, <a href="http://www.miltonabbey.org/capability-brown-milton-abbey.php">Milton Abbey</a>, <a href="http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/events/73d0b3bc-e326-4f8e-a915-d7f354310ba0/pages/details">Stowe</a>, and <a href="http://www.weston-park.com/news/weston-park-celebrates-300-years-of-capability-brown-1716-2016/">Weston Park</a>. He created an aesthetic product that was exported across Europe as “<a href="http://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover-the-estate/le-domaine-de-marie-antoinette/the-queen-hamlet/the-english-garden-">le jardin anglais</a>” and “<a href="http://www.schloesser.bayern.de/englisch/garden/objects/mu_engl1.htm">der englischer garten</a>”. And as part of the original British Invasion, he influenced the design of Central Park in New York, long before the Beatles and Rolling Stones took America.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119934/original/image-20160424-22354-d3odqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119934/original/image-20160424-22354-d3odqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119934/original/image-20160424-22354-d3odqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119934/original/image-20160424-22354-d3odqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119934/original/image-20160424-22354-d3odqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119934/original/image-20160424-22354-d3odqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119934/original/image-20160424-22354-d3odqu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Denham Place, Buckinghamshire (ca. 1695) – what Brown’s landscapes replaced.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Yale Center for British Art</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But I worry that Capability Brown has become a bit too much of a tea and crumpets vision of Englishness – the England of Merchant Ivory films, Jane Austen adaptations and wet-shirted Colin Firths. We’re in danger of overlooking what a massive change he brought upon the social and economic landscapes of 18th century England. </p>
<p>This enormous influence was not only felt in his own time. Between the 1930s and 1950s, the architects and planners who wrought a significant upheaval in British architecture and design looked back to “tea and crumpets” Capability Brown for inspiration. They scoured the 18th century to find answers to the suburbanisation of the English countryside. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119012/original/image-20160417-26305-1kybzpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119012/original/image-20160417-26305-1kybzpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119012/original/image-20160417-26305-1kybzpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=144&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119012/original/image-20160417-26305-1kybzpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=144&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119012/original/image-20160417-26305-1kybzpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=144&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119012/original/image-20160417-26305-1kybzpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=181&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119012/original/image-20160417-26305-1kybzpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=181&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119012/original/image-20160417-26305-1kybzpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=181&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Blenheim Palace.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Oliver Cox</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By 1939, over <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/homes/design/period_1930s.shtml">4m new suburban homes</a> had been built. One commentator remarked how:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The suburban building which has taken place since the war covers an area out of all proportion to the people housed, and is completely out of scale with the urban centres to which it is attached.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The landscape architect Christopher Tunnard <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gwwSBAAAQBAJ">lamented</a> how modernist architects had been unable to find a way of working with the historic landscapes. As Alexandra Harris suggests in her recent book, <a href="http://www.thamesandhudson.com/Romantic_Moderns/9780500251713">Romantic Moderns</a>, European architects such as Le Corbusier even struggled to tether their buildings to the ground – preferring concrete over local stone, and “levitating mezzanines” rather than patios. What Tunnard suggested instead, was the creative reuse of the aristocratic landscapes of the 18th century.</p>
<p>Tunnard argued that 18th century manor houses and landscapes – such as Capability Brown’s Claremont in Surrey – could be re-purposed to provide the answers to housing an increasingly urban population. Where once a country house might have stood, this group of architects and planners argued that its place must be taken by tower blocks, so that “more people might be housed … and virtually the whole estate might be left open for the benefit of the residents and the public”. Tunnard borrowed Brown’s techniques for a new purpose – but replaced aristocrats with ordinary homeowners. The architects Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry suggested a similar scheme for Windsor Great Park.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120037/original/image-20160425-22360-1eh0fik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/120037/original/image-20160425-22360-1eh0fik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120037/original/image-20160425-22360-1eh0fik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120037/original/image-20160425-22360-1eh0fik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120037/original/image-20160425-22360-1eh0fik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120037/original/image-20160425-22360-1eh0fik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/120037/original/image-20160425-22360-1eh0fik.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Windsor Great Park today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kanuman/Shutterstock.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although the destruction of World War II rendered these imaginative schemes of the 1930s unnecessary, it also thrust Capability Brown into a new phase of influence. In his 1955 <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00h9llv">Reith Lectures</a>, Nikolaus Pevsner stressed that in a post-war world of ongoing reconstruction, the English needed to look back, and within, and by doing so, they would take the aesthetic lead:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The genius of the place … is the character of the site, and the character of the site is, in a town, not only the geographical but also the historical, social and especially the aesthetic character.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pevsner was asking his audience, and the architectural and planning professions, to think like Capability Brown, and work with the capabilities of the site. What is particularly significant is Pevsner’s plea that “functionalism” – 1950s town planning speak for “each case on its own merit” – be the guiding principle behind the building of new towns, and the reconstruction of old.</p>
<p>He speaks of the “visual blessings” provided by “variety and surprise”, and how these find their first expressions in the English landscape garden. The future then, for Pevsner, lay in the past. “There is plenty of precedent to make use of in our situation today,” he wrote, “not by copying but by applying the same principles, the same great English principles.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119936/original/image-20160424-22396-jidzvo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/119936/original/image-20160424-22396-jidzvo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119936/original/image-20160424-22396-jidzvo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119936/original/image-20160424-22396-jidzvo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119936/original/image-20160424-22396-jidzvo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119936/original/image-20160424-22396-jidzvo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/119936/original/image-20160424-22396-jidzvo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alton Estate, Roehampton.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">diamondgeezer/flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Pevsner suggested that by building new towns such as Stevenage and Harlow, clumps and concrete could be combined to create a better place to live. Brown’s landscapes, with their extensive vistas, mature planting and rolling lawns, created not only a sense of place, but were also a valuable amenity – a point frequently returned to in parliamentary debates about national infrastructure – and a point worth remembering as the future for urban parks in the UK and USA looks <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7b238d6e-c51d-11e5-808f-8231cd71622e.html#slide0">increasingly bleak</a>.</p>
<p>As we celebrate the life and work of Capability Brown this year, we should remember that during the middle of the 20th century he was a powerful inspiration for change. The <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01rtkbd">Alton East Estate in Roehampton</a>, designed by the late architect Oliver Cox, is a testament to the mid-century belief that clumps and concrete were by no means mutually exclusive. This housing estate was the most successful attempt to harness the beauty of the aristocratic landscape, which was re-imagined as a socially democratic setting for a new postwar society.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/56933/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Oliver Cox is a member of the Research Group for Capability Brown 300. He receives funding from the Higher Education Innovation Fund, and is a Trustee of Compton Verney. </span></em></p>
The tea and crumpets vision of Englishness that Capability Brown brings to mind does him an injustice.
Oliver Cox, Knowledge Exchange Fellow , University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/44763
2015-07-17T03:19:55Z
2015-07-17T03:19:55Z
Congratulations Natasha Bieniek, but the Wynne Prize is deeply flawed
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88744/original/image-20150717-5111-10muzj0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=265%2C1142%2C2444%2C1293&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The 2015 Wynne Prize winner is Natasha Bieniek, with Biophilia, oil on dibond.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Natasha Bieniek. Photography courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Today, Natasha Bieniek won the 2015 AU$50,000 Wynne Prize for her work, Biophilia (main image). This is happy news, considering the prize has been hounded by a history of gender inequality. Her work is a miniature painting, smaller than a Polaroid photo. It represents the artist’s love of the minute biological details of nature. </p>
<p>The nexus of science and art is a rapidly growing area of contemporary art and, as such, the winning work reflects a major BioArt trend around the world. It addresses an important theme in contemporary life: how do humans relate to nature in an increasingly digitised world. </p>
<p>Since 1897, the Art Gallery of NSW’s <a href="http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/wynne/">Wynne Prize</a> has been awarded for “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists”. </p>
<p>While this prize has consistently been a strange mash-up of media (painting and sculpture) and concept (landscape and figuration), the hybrid structure of the prize is the least of its worries. So what are the main ones?</p>
<p>The first is that, since 1900, 105 men have won the prize, as opposed to only 10 women (including Bieniek this year). Is that because women can’t understand the idea of nature? Is it because women are not muscular enough to be sculptors? The poor representation of women artists in this category is more bewildering than anything. The gender politics need to be redressed, as they have been this year, at least, with Bieniek’s work.</p>
<p>And if we look at the <a href="http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/wynne/2015/">2015 short-listed</a> Wynne entries, there were three major women artists whose works were equally deserving of the main prize.</p>
<p>First there was <a href="http://kwgallery.com/artists/aida-tomescu">Aida Tomescu</a>’s entry, Bribie (below). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88721/original/image-20150716-5092-1i17k97.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88721/original/image-20150716-5092-1i17k97.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88721/original/image-20150716-5092-1i17k97.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88721/original/image-20150716-5092-1i17k97.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88721/original/image-20150716-5092-1i17k97.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88721/original/image-20150716-5092-1i17k97.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88721/original/image-20150716-5092-1i17k97.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88721/original/image-20150716-5092-1i17k97.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Aida Tomescu - Bribie, oil on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Aida Tomescu. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2001, Tomescu <a href="http://archive.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media/archives_2001/2001_wynne_prize_winner/">won</a> the Wynne, and deservedly so. She paints hedonistic landscape experiences. Heavy applications of oil are palette-knifed or brushed onto the surface, exposing the layers of earthy sediment or the currents of seawater. </p>
<p>Her paint is sucking mud, salty claypan or icy aquamarine water. Her work gives us a sensuous and material experience of the environment. They are stories already inscribed on the land, in the marks left by crabs at night in the sand, or in the scribbly bark of the gum tree. </p>
<p>Tomescu’s paintings are rakings in the soil, stories that are dug up along with the minerals in the earth, they are stories that pile up like hills of landfill or are buried in graveyards. These are the complex stories, already there on the earth.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.jobertini.com.au/">Jo Bertini</a> was also shortlised this year, for Mound Spring (below).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88619/original/image-20150716-32638-1r9nc21.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88619/original/image-20150716-32638-1r9nc21.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88619/original/image-20150716-32638-1r9nc21.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88619/original/image-20150716-32638-1r9nc21.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88619/original/image-20150716-32638-1r9nc21.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88619/original/image-20150716-32638-1r9nc21.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88619/original/image-20150716-32638-1r9nc21.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88619/original/image-20150716-32638-1r9nc21.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=639&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Jo Bertini - Mound spring, oil on canvas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Jo Bertini. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bertini’s paintings are the result of expedition trips to isolated regions of the Australian desert alongside biologists, botanists and environmental scientists from universities and museums around the world. </p>
<p>She heads off with satellite phone and a string of camels and paints the experience of isolation and loneliness that is the Australian interior. She comes home afterwards, muscled, her skin tanned and a new knowledge in her eye (a wildness) that is slightly frightening. </p>
<p>When she returns from her trips she talks about the bounty of the desert, its benevolence. This cornucopia is so contrary to the way we have understood the isolated interior, as painted by historical male counterparts such as <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/drysdale-sir-george-russell-12439">Russell Drysdale</a> or <a href="http://www.sidneynolantrust.org/about/sidney-nolan">Sidney Nolan</a>. </p>
<p>There is sometimes a bleak quality to Bertini’s work but it is both emotional and scientific, both empathic and measured. It is fiercely female. </p>
<p>Her work this year, Mound Spring (as pictured above), is a vertiginous desert edifice with a sole tree, stuck on its cliff edge. The tree is a forlorn and lonely reminder of the history of landscape painting, where an identifiable trope (a fallen tree, a tree stump or a view through trees) needs to be abandoned. </p>
<p>Nature, now, is a devastated, compromised and annihilated concept.</p>
<p>The third strong female contender for the Wynne Prize this year was <a href="http://www.kateshaw.org/">Kate Shaw</a>, with her work Anthropocene (below). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88606/original/image-20150716-26296-1s7bw5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88606/original/image-20150716-26296-1s7bw5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88606/original/image-20150716-26296-1s7bw5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=301&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88606/original/image-20150716-26296-1s7bw5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=301&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88606/original/image-20150716-26296-1s7bw5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=301&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88606/original/image-20150716-26296-1s7bw5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88606/original/image-20150716-26296-1s7bw5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88606/original/image-20150716-26296-1s7bw5s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=378&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Kate Shaw – Anthropocene, acrylic and resin on board.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Kate Shaw. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Shaw uses acrylic and resin to create reflective and mesmerising prisms of colour. This is landscape as kaleidoscope of fluorescent pinks. Colours bleed into one another on the painting surface in a swoon of childhood memories of the entire collection of Derwent coloured pencils. </p>
<p>But Shaw’s work is not merely a nostalgic tour of “colour-love”. Her work is perversely environmental. Perverse, because she creates an artificial world. Her luminous reds, lurid greens, high-vis yellow and patchwork pinks are man-made. Her trees leak into their background, her ice scenes are melting in a critical climate change epoch. </p>
<p>The title of her shortlisted work, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/16/-sp-scientists-gather-talks-rename-human-age-anthropocene-holocene">Anthropocene</a>, refers to a theme in philosophy, art and science in recent times. It is the period of time, since <a href="http://www.britannica.com/topic/industrialization">Industrialisation</a>, as measured by the top geological layer of the earth. </p>
<p>There, in the soil, littered with plastic refuse and a century’s worth of discarded machinery and an equivalent layer of harmful carbon, is the story of mankind’s effect on the landscape. </p>
<p>The painting is a view through the cave-like mouth of deep time. The earth is alive. It is monstrous and the gaping lips of death look out onto an idyllic view or scene that may not last for as long as we hope.</p>
<p>So what do these powerful examples of landscape painting, by women, tell us? </p>
<p>They tell us to stop overlooking women who paint vast scenes that are a challenge in different ways. These artists deserve closer attention.</p>
<p>The second problem with the Wynne Prize is that it always looks truly terrible, in situ. </p>
<p>A bit of figure sculpture (which the <a href="http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/about-us/people/agnsw-trust/">Trustees</a> clearly have trouble defining), a bit of landscape painting (and the parameters are becoming increasingly unbounded each year), and the result is no less than a mess. </p>
<p>From its inception until 1928, the prize was not exhibited at the Art Gallery of NSW. Instead, the winners were selected by the gallery Trustees, who travelled to local exhibitions and studios and selected the winner, personally.
Perhaps this is the key to a re-invigoration of the Wynne Prize. Let’s not dump them all together like a horrifying kitchen table mess of spilt milk, soggy cornflakes and burnt toast. </p>
<p>Instead, let’s return to the original process of Wynne-awarding. Send the trustees out to select a winner and reward that work, alone. Hang it in the AGNSW, alone. </p>
<p>What gladdens the heart, this year, is that all four artists mentioned here (not least the wonderful winning work) managed to harness a love for painting and an equal love for the environment.</p>
<p><br>
<em>The Wynne Prize exhibition will show at the Art Gallery of NSW from July 18 - September 27. More details <a href="http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/archibald-wynne-sulman-prizes-2015/">here</a></em></p>
<h2>See the rest of the Wynne Prize finalists here:</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88732/original/image-20150717-5084-1c0h0bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88732/original/image-20150717-5084-1c0h0bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88732/original/image-20150717-5084-1c0h0bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88732/original/image-20150717-5084-1c0h0bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88732/original/image-20150717-5084-1c0h0bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88732/original/image-20150717-5084-1c0h0bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=665&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88732/original/image-20150717-5084-1c0h0bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=665&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88732/original/image-20150717-5084-1c0h0bi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=665&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Christine Fontana - Mappa mundi: the known world, mixed media on Japanese rice paper.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Christine Fontana. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Felicity Jenkins.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88733/original/image-20150717-5089-edt0ul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88733/original/image-20150717-5089-edt0ul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88733/original/image-20150717-5089-edt0ul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88733/original/image-20150717-5089-edt0ul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88733/original/image-20150717-5089-edt0ul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=778&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88733/original/image-20150717-5089-edt0ul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88733/original/image-20150717-5089-edt0ul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88733/original/image-20150717-5089-edt0ul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=978&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Robert Malherbe – Blackheath street landscape, oil on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Robert Malherbe. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88734/original/image-20150717-5114-n3zcup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88734/original/image-20150717-5114-n3zcup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88734/original/image-20150717-5114-n3zcup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=712&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88734/original/image-20150717-5114-n3zcup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=712&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88734/original/image-20150717-5114-n3zcup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=712&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88734/original/image-20150717-5114-n3zcup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88734/original/image-20150717-5114-n3zcup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88734/original/image-20150717-5114-n3zcup.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=895&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Guy Maestri – Black gold no. 5, oil on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Guy Maestri. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88735/original/image-20150717-5092-1ip98cb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88735/original/image-20150717-5092-1ip98cb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88735/original/image-20150717-5092-1ip98cb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88735/original/image-20150717-5092-1ip98cb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88735/original/image-20150717-5092-1ip98cb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88735/original/image-20150717-5092-1ip98cb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88735/original/image-20150717-5092-1ip98cb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88735/original/image-20150717-5092-1ip98cb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Max Miller –</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Max Miller. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88736/original/image-20150717-5080-z3zj2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88736/original/image-20150717-5080-z3zj2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88736/original/image-20150717-5080-z3zj2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=81&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88736/original/image-20150717-5080-z3zj2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=81&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88736/original/image-20150717-5080-z3zj2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=81&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88736/original/image-20150717-5080-z3zj2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=101&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88736/original/image-20150717-5080-z3zj2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=101&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88736/original/image-20150717-5080-z3zj2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=101&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Viola Dominello – On the river, watercolour on Moleskine diary.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Viola Dominello. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88620/original/image-20150716-32635-5ka8oc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88620/original/image-20150716-32635-5ka8oc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88620/original/image-20150716-32635-5ka8oc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=225&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88620/original/image-20150716-32635-5ka8oc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=225&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88620/original/image-20150716-32635-5ka8oc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=225&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88620/original/image-20150716-32635-5ka8oc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=282&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88620/original/image-20150716-32635-5ka8oc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=282&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88620/original/image-20150716-32635-5ka8oc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=282&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Karl de Waal – The channel series, mixed media.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Karl de Waal. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88737/original/image-20150717-24758-irzdwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88737/original/image-20150717-24758-irzdwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88737/original/image-20150717-24758-irzdwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88737/original/image-20150717-24758-irzdwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88737/original/image-20150717-24758-irzdwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=506&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88737/original/image-20150717-24758-irzdwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88737/original/image-20150717-24758-irzdwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88737/original/image-20150717-24758-irzdwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=636&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Susan J White – Approaching storm, acrylic wash, wax and watercolour on paper.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Susan J White. Photography courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88739/original/image-20150717-5092-98536i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88739/original/image-20150717-5092-98536i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88739/original/image-20150717-5092-98536i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88739/original/image-20150717-5092-98536i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88739/original/image-20150717-5092-98536i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88739/original/image-20150717-5092-98536i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88739/original/image-20150717-5092-98536i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88739/original/image-20150717-5092-98536i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=536&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Steve Burley – Chewton Bushlands, oilon board.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Steve Burley. Photography courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Jun Chen – Tropical forest II, oil on canvas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Jun Chen. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88740/original/image-20150717-24758-bkesdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88740/original/image-20150717-24758-bkesdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88740/original/image-20150717-24758-bkesdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88740/original/image-20150717-24758-bkesdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88740/original/image-20150717-24758-bkesdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=449&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88740/original/image-20150717-24758-bkesdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88740/original/image-20150717-24758-bkesdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88740/original/image-20150717-24758-bkesdb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=564&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist James Drinkwater – Encrusting the marvellous heart, oil and collage on headboard.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© James Drinkwater. Photography courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88741/original/image-20150717-5092-8azbs7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88741/original/image-20150717-5092-8azbs7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88741/original/image-20150717-5092-8azbs7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88741/original/image-20150717-5092-8azbs7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88741/original/image-20150717-5092-8azbs7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=725&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88741/original/image-20150717-5092-8azbs7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88741/original/image-20150717-5092-8azbs7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88741/original/image-20150717-5092-8azbs7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Niel Haddon - The first time again, oil and enamel paint on aluminium panel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Niel Haddon. Photography courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88743/original/image-20150717-5080-13gkmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88743/original/image-20150717-5080-13gkmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88743/original/image-20150717-5080-13gkmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88743/original/image-20150717-5080-13gkmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88743/original/image-20150717-5080-13gkmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88743/original/image-20150717-5080-13gkmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88743/original/image-20150717-5080-13gkmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88743/original/image-20150717-5080-13gkmno.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Nicole Kelly – Love letter to a friend, oil on polyester.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Nicole Kelly. Photography courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88618/original/image-20150716-32630-171rc1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88618/original/image-20150716-32630-171rc1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88618/original/image-20150716-32630-171rc1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88618/original/image-20150716-32630-171rc1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88618/original/image-20150716-32630-171rc1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88618/original/image-20150716-32630-171rc1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88618/original/image-20150716-32630-171rc1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88618/original/image-20150716-32630-171rc1s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=562&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Ildiko Kovacs – Sunlit, oil paint on plywood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ilkdiko Kovacs. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88747/original/image-20150717-5092-nqxcva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88747/original/image-20150717-5092-nqxcva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88747/original/image-20150717-5092-nqxcva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88747/original/image-20150717-5092-nqxcva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88747/original/image-20150717-5092-nqxcva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88747/original/image-20150717-5092-nqxcva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88747/original/image-20150717-5092-nqxcva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88747/original/image-20150717-5092-nqxcva.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Tim McMonagle – Bed & stretch, oil on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Tim McMonagle. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88614/original/image-20150716-26314-1nudbsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88614/original/image-20150716-26314-1nudbsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88614/original/image-20150716-26314-1nudbsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88614/original/image-20150716-26314-1nudbsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88614/original/image-20150716-26314-1nudbsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88614/original/image-20150716-26314-1nudbsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88614/original/image-20150716-26314-1nudbsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88614/original/image-20150716-26314-1nudbsj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Christopher McVinish – Quiet lives – Australia Day revisited, oil on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Christopher McVinish. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88748/original/image-20150717-5108-pgv3a6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88748/original/image-20150717-5108-pgv3a6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88748/original/image-20150717-5108-pgv3a6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88748/original/image-20150717-5108-pgv3a6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88748/original/image-20150717-5108-pgv3a6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88748/original/image-20150717-5108-pgv3a6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=630&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88748/original/image-20150717-5108-pgv3a6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=630&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88748/original/image-20150717-5108-pgv3a6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=630&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Julian Meagher – The fatal shore (island life), oil on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Julian Meagher. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88749/original/image-20150717-5108-1qr86aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88749/original/image-20150717-5108-1qr86aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88749/original/image-20150717-5108-1qr86aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88749/original/image-20150717-5108-1qr86aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88749/original/image-20150717-5108-1qr86aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=414&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88749/original/image-20150717-5108-1qr86aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88749/original/image-20150717-5108-1qr86aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88749/original/image-20150717-5108-1qr86aj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=520&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Celia Morgan – Terra nullius, oil on linen board.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Celia Morgan. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88617/original/image-20150716-32656-hcmbm3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88617/original/image-20150716-32656-hcmbm3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88617/original/image-20150716-32656-hcmbm3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88617/original/image-20150716-32656-hcmbm3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88617/original/image-20150716-32656-hcmbm3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=495&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88617/original/image-20150716-32656-hcmbm3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88617/original/image-20150716-32656-hcmbm3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88617/original/image-20150716-32656-hcmbm3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=621&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Michael Muir – Through the circle, oil on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Michael Muir. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88750/original/image-20150717-5080-1ggfdzq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88750/original/image-20150717-5080-1ggfdzq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88750/original/image-20150717-5080-1ggfdzq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88750/original/image-20150717-5080-1ggfdzq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88750/original/image-20150717-5080-1ggfdzq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=734&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88750/original/image-20150717-5080-1ggfdzq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88750/original/image-20150717-5080-1ggfdzq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88750/original/image-20150717-5080-1ggfdzq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist George Tjungurrayi - Untitled, acrylic on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© George Tjungurrayi. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88751/original/image-20150717-5111-c9b548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88751/original/image-20150717-5111-c9b548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88751/original/image-20150717-5111-c9b548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88751/original/image-20150717-5111-c9b548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88751/original/image-20150717-5111-c9b548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=847&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88751/original/image-20150717-5111-c9b548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88751/original/image-20150717-5111-c9b548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88751/original/image-20150717-5111-c9b548.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1064&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Robert Hague – Shutdown, Carrara marble, stainless steel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Robert Hague. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88752/original/image-20150717-5084-skemqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88752/original/image-20150717-5084-skemqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88752/original/image-20150717-5084-skemqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88752/original/image-20150717-5084-skemqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88752/original/image-20150717-5084-skemqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88752/original/image-20150717-5084-skemqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88752/original/image-20150717-5084-skemqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88752/original/image-20150717-5084-skemqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Peter Jones – Kandos, acrylic on board.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Peter Jones. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88753/original/image-20150717-24758-1xhhex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88753/original/image-20150717-24758-1xhhex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88753/original/image-20150717-24758-1xhhex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88753/original/image-20150717-24758-1xhhex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88753/original/image-20150717-24758-1xhhex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88753/original/image-20150717-24758-1xhhex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88753/original/image-20150717-24758-1xhhex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88753/original/image-20150717-24758-1xhhex.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Belynda Henry – Think about you, oil paint on canvas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Belynda Henry. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88610/original/image-20150716-26289-13l4jnm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88610/original/image-20150716-26289-13l4jnm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88610/original/image-20150716-26289-13l4jnm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88610/original/image-20150716-26289-13l4jnm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88610/original/image-20150716-26289-13l4jnm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=436&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88610/original/image-20150716-26289-13l4jnm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88610/original/image-20150716-26289-13l4jnm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88610/original/image-20150716-26289-13l4jnm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Jim Thalassoudis – The ‘Skipping Girl’, little Audrey, oil on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Jim Thalassoudis. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88754/original/image-20150717-5108-1fivkxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88754/original/image-20150717-5108-1fivkxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88754/original/image-20150717-5108-1fivkxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88754/original/image-20150717-5108-1fivkxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88754/original/image-20150717-5108-1fivkxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88754/original/image-20150717-5108-1fivkxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88754/original/image-20150717-5108-1fivkxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88754/original/image-20150717-5108-1fivkxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist what – Silver Birtch, oil on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© what. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88755/original/image-20150717-5074-1q72sr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88755/original/image-20150717-5074-1q72sr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88755/original/image-20150717-5074-1q72sr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=180&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88755/original/image-20150717-5074-1q72sr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=180&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88755/original/image-20150717-5074-1q72sr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=180&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88755/original/image-20150717-5074-1q72sr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=227&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88755/original/image-20150717-5074-1q72sr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=227&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88755/original/image-20150717-5074-1q72sr1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=227&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Philip Wolfhagen – Alpine transect, oil and beeswax on linen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Philip Wolfhagen Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88756/original/image-20150717-24758-1owh8ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88756/original/image-20150717-24758-1owh8ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88756/original/image-20150717-24758-1owh8ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88756/original/image-20150717-24758-1owh8ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88756/original/image-20150717-24758-1owh8ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88756/original/image-20150717-24758-1owh8ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88756/original/image-20150717-24758-1owh8ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88756/original/image-20150717-24758-1owh8ck.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Robert Ryan – Belongil Field, oil on canvas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Robert Ryan. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88757/original/image-20150717-5080-fgwtpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88757/original/image-20150717-5080-fgwtpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88757/original/image-20150717-5080-fgwtpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88757/original/image-20150717-5080-fgwtpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88757/original/image-20150717-5080-fgwtpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88757/original/image-20150717-5080-fgwtpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88757/original/image-20150717-5080-fgwtpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88757/original/image-20150717-5080-fgwtpf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Michael Zavros - Weeping, oil on panel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Michael Zavros. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88758/original/image-20150717-5104-18dsn8m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88758/original/image-20150717-5104-18dsn8m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88758/original/image-20150717-5104-18dsn8m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88758/original/image-20150717-5104-18dsn8m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88758/original/image-20150717-5104-18dsn8m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=555&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88758/original/image-20150717-5104-18dsn8m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=698&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88758/original/image-20150717-5104-18dsn8m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=698&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88758/original/image-20150717-5104-18dsn8m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=698&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Theo Papathomas – Constructed landscape, oil paint and enamel on canvas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Theo Papathomas. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88760/original/image-20150717-5111-6w7a8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88760/original/image-20150717-5111-6w7a8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88760/original/image-20150717-5111-6w7a8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88760/original/image-20150717-5111-6w7a8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88760/original/image-20150717-5111-6w7a8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=395&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88760/original/image-20150717-5111-6w7a8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88760/original/image-20150717-5111-6w7a8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88760/original/image-20150717-5111-6w7a8w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=497&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Luke Sciberras – Up Shit Creek, Gallipoli, oil on board.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Luke Sciberras. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88762/original/image-20150717-5108-v9enpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88762/original/image-20150717-5108-v9enpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88762/original/image-20150717-5108-v9enpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=292&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88762/original/image-20150717-5108-v9enpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=292&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88762/original/image-20150717-5108-v9enpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=292&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88762/original/image-20150717-5108-v9enpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88762/original/image-20150717-5108-v9enpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88762/original/image-20150717-5108-v9enpb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist John R Walker – Flood Creek approaching Summer I, archival oil on polyester.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© John R Walker. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88763/original/image-20150717-5089-1zje4r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88763/original/image-20150717-5089-1zje4r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88763/original/image-20150717-5089-1zje4r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88763/original/image-20150717-5089-1zje4r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88763/original/image-20150717-5089-1zje4r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=973&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88763/original/image-20150717-5089-1zje4r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1223&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88763/original/image-20150717-5089-1zje4r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1223&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88763/original/image-20150717-5089-1zje4r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1223&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Ulan Murray – Vita in extremis, copper, stainless steel and black steel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ulan Murray. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88764/original/image-20150717-5092-elu6ym.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88764/original/image-20150717-5092-elu6ym.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88764/original/image-20150717-5092-elu6ym.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88764/original/image-20150717-5092-elu6ym.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88764/original/image-20150717-5092-elu6ym.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88764/original/image-20150717-5092-elu6ym.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1046&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88764/original/image-20150717-5092-elu6ym.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1046&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88764/original/image-20150717-5092-elu6ym.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1046&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Louis Pratt – King Coal, coal, resin, fibreglass and steel.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Louis Pratt. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88766/original/image-20150717-5108-7ykh9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88766/original/image-20150717-5108-7ykh9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88766/original/image-20150717-5108-7ykh9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=332&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88766/original/image-20150717-5108-7ykh9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=332&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88766/original/image-20150717-5108-7ykh9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=332&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88766/original/image-20150717-5108-7ykh9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88766/original/image-20150717-5108-7ykh9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88766/original/image-20150717-5108-7ykh9h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=418&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Angus Nivison – Poet, acrylic and pigment on canvas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Angus Nivison. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88767/original/image-20150717-5104-1xp9zre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88767/original/image-20150717-5104-1xp9zre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88767/original/image-20150717-5104-1xp9zre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88767/original/image-20150717-5104-1xp9zre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88767/original/image-20150717-5104-1xp9zre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88767/original/image-20150717-5104-1xp9zre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88767/original/image-20150717-5104-1xp9zre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88767/original/image-20150717-5104-1xp9zre.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah – In the name, tinted silicone, urethane, steel gambrel and galvanised chain, editiion 1/3.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Abdul-Rahman Abdullah. Photography courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/88615/original/image-20150716-32625-1mu01yg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">2015 Wynne Prize finalist Jun Chen – Tropical forest II, oil on canvas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Jun Chen. Photograph courtesy of © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44763/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Prudence Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The Wynne Prize has been notoriously male-dominated. What does this year’s winning artwork by Natasha Bieniek tell us about the nature of this particular award and how we can improve it?
Prudence Gibson, Art writer and Tutor, UNSW, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/43671
2015-06-24T05:16:12Z
2015-06-24T05:16:12Z
Architecture: how public space in India was refined by Charles Correa and Nek Chand Saini
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86074/original/image-20150623-19415-jra197.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C1024%2C680&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Pots, pillars and electric bulb sockets at the Nek Chand Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/appaji/2205213181/in/photolist-4mSi3V-jKFt3b-jKDqsM-jKFCoL-jKDntR-jKFCg1-jKFEwy-jKEabk-jKFGEG-jKFwMW-jKE7fv-jKDcQT-jKE7Av-jKDek6-jKGjjQ-jKGjE9-jKFtnE-jKGjWG-jKGhNo-jKDh5K-jKFxTd-jKGp25-jKDep4-jKE54B-jKFHFE-jKDncZ-jKDn8v-jKGt9J-jKFCGS-jKFFNS-7hThhq-pKU317-pDDePb-pgNuzr-pxirz8-5StmJd-aovtaF-5Sp2LK-5Stmt1-5StmmS-5StmSj-5Sp2u6-jKEfNx-jKDn4x-jKFEkw-jKEdr8-jKFFKf-jKGqrE-jKDq3t-jKGsTo">Giridhar Appaji Nag Y</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In a single week this June, the world of architecture lost two artists who celebrated modern India through buildings, landscape, sculpture and gardens. Charles Correa, India’s best known architect, died on June 16 in Mumbai. Nek Chand Saini, the creator of the Rock Garden in Chandigarh, died on June 12. A self-taught artist, he created art work out of junk. </p>
<p>My research in India has taken me to some truly wonderful sites, not least the <a href="http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/255">16th-century city of Fatehpur Sikri</a>, near Agra, commissioned by Mughal emperor Akbar. Well-designed spaces bring pleasure and even improve health and well-being, rather like a good piece of music. </p>
<p>Like those at Fatehpur Sikri, Correa and Nek Chand simply made structures and spaces that feel “better” than others. Despite hailing from opposite ends of the social spectrum, both reached shared conclusions about what makes a space work. But more than this, through their lives and work, they tell us something of the story of India. </p>
<h2>Honouring nature and values</h2>
<p>Born in 1930 in the colonial town of Secunderabad, Correa studied architecture at MIT in the US before returning to India in 1954. He immediately set out to develop an architecture that responded to climate, rejecting the US euphoria for air-conditioning. Instead, he sought solutions that would exploit cool breeze and shade. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86005/original/image-20150622-17743-1uqoffq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C600%2C794&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86005/original/image-20150622-17743-1uqoffq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C600%2C794&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86005/original/image-20150622-17743-1uqoffq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86005/original/image-20150622-17743-1uqoffq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86005/original/image-20150622-17743-1uqoffq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86005/original/image-20150622-17743-1uqoffq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86005/original/image-20150622-17743-1uqoffq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86005/original/image-20150622-17743-1uqoffq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Courtyard cafe of architect Charles Correa’s Jawahar Kala Kendra in Jaipur, built in 1993.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/meanestindian/219634617/in/photolist-kpFHK-kpFHQ-kpFHN-7YLbnZ-kkQPK-bpMdxc-bpMdAg-kkQPJ-kkQPH-6vzCUs-6vzCUw-ceJGs5-ceJGnh-8VPe2F-qrn7D6-qrfGn3-qrn5TT-qHJQH1-qHDpz4-qrfFpG-qreV33-qHDoLv-qreUG3-e6Y27U-e6Y28w-e6Y29h-9Yys58-qHDpG8-oyyDQv-qHJPZh-qB9XSQ-qrouSF-qDnhe9-qrfFYs-qDrawX-pLP1d7-qDgzbX-7Wz1Q4-pGroKE-pGrpRh-qmZA9z-qreVkY-aZKwEV-qFwehG-qmSsW1-pGrndS-qmZxRZ-qmSuPE-qmSv7o-qrouXa/">Meena Kadri</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86157/original/image-20150623-19415-1w31c39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86157/original/image-20150623-19415-1w31c39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86157/original/image-20150623-19415-1w31c39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=649&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86157/original/image-20150623-19415-1w31c39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=649&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86157/original/image-20150623-19415-1w31c39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=649&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86157/original/image-20150623-19415-1w31c39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86157/original/image-20150623-19415-1w31c39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86157/original/image-20150623-19415-1w31c39.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charles Correa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://src.holcimfoundation.org/img/eef28515-9e21-4966-aa49-f4fbcb5bb43b/A09_GlobalJury_Portrait_Correa_5.jpg">Holcim Foundation</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Correa was also pursuing an architecture that would respond to India’s recent independence. He sought to introduce notions of “Indian-ness” into his proposals. His architecture is not overly concerned with elaborate forms, rather it seeks to create a series of flowing spaces often centred around an “open-to-sky” element. The visitor moves through the buildings blurring divisions between inside and outside, taking in carefully incorporated views.</p>
<h2>Art out of waste</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86140/original/image-20150623-19386-18swus4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86140/original/image-20150623-19386-18swus4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86140/original/image-20150623-19386-18swus4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=680&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86140/original/image-20150623-19386-18swus4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=680&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86140/original/image-20150623-19386-18swus4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=680&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86140/original/image-20150623-19386-18swus4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86140/original/image-20150623-19386-18swus4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86140/original/image-20150623-19386-18swus4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nek Chand, creator of the Rock Garden in Chandigarh.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Iain Jackson</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="http://nekchand.com/">Nek Chand</a> took a less conventional approach. Often referred to as an outsider artist, he received no formal training. Born in 1926 in what is now Pakistan, the son of a farmer, he was forced to flee his home in 1947 as a result of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/partition1947_01.shtml">India’s Partition</a>. </p>
<p>In 1951, Nek Chand obtained work at the construction site that was Chandigarh – a new city to replace the loss of Lahore – designed by the modernist architect Le Corbusier. He worked as a road inspector by day. By night, he created a secret sculpture park full of figures made from found objects, broken ceramics and the remnants of the villages demolished to make way for Chandigarh. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/O-_XD70-aUw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Nek Chand’s Rock Garden.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He also crafted the landscape to include waterfalls, courtyards and caverns clad in river rocks and broken sanitary ware fittings. Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, a truly wondrous place invoking playful narratives at every turn, now receives thousands of visitors every day. </p>
<h2>Space that evokes and engages</h2>
<p>Both Correa and Nek Chand were concerned with the notion of promenade, where the visitor is taken on a journey through a series of enclosed spaces, proceeding spaces hidden from view and revealed suddenly to dramatic effect. Both exploit a site’s natural attributes, responding to contours and always incorporating sculpture and artwork. </p>
<p>Both make a subtle reference to the past, often suggestive of village life, not in a sentimental manner but rather as an integral part of the design. Use of devices such as a space to talk and meet with friends, or a spot to sit quietly with strangers to share a view, have a profound effect. The powerful experience of simply walking through a courtyard clad in a careful selection of materials whilst admiring nature, landscape and artwork, cannot be understated.</p>
<p>Both Correa and Nek Chand were deeply affected by India’s independence and sought to contemplate this event through their work. For Correa, it was a time to rebuild and rethink the nation, to debate what it meant to be both modern and Indian. At the same time, his use of <a href="http://historylists.org/architecture/7-finest-examples-of-mughal-architecture.html">Mughal-inspired</a> red sandstone demonstrates the idea that India’s pre-colonial past was to be celebrated. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86117/original/image-20150623-19386-o4n5s8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86117/original/image-20150623-19386-o4n5s8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/86117/original/image-20150623-19386-o4n5s8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86117/original/image-20150623-19386-o4n5s8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86117/original/image-20150623-19386-o4n5s8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86117/original/image-20150623-19386-o4n5s8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86117/original/image-20150623-19386-o4n5s8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/86117/original/image-20150623-19386-o4n5s8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, India.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dharmesh84/8600150500/in/photolist-p5RfhL-kpFHK-kpFHQ-kpFHN-pZxb19-kkQPK-p5U1Ki-kkQPJ-kkQPH-e6Y27U-e6Y28w-e6Y29h-o7VXJT-pKfmvY-nQwPjk-o7They/">Dharmesh Thakker</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a migrant to the symbol of India’s political ambition, Nek Chand was also well aware of the changes afoot. In his work there is a sense of loss, a longing to remember the past, as well as a childlike desire to recreate mythological scenes from folk tales and epics.</p>
<p>After their deaths, the works of Charles Correa and Nek Chand will remain wonderful tributes to their passion to improve built urban space in modern India. There can’t be many better legacies than the simple fact that we can learn much about space, light, form and beauty from the spatial experience of joy which their creations have given us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43671/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Iain Jackson receives funding from AHRC, Leverhulme Trust, RIBA, UKIERI</span></em></p>
The country lost two utterly different, and utterly compelling interpreters of India’s urban world this month. They left a legacy rich with beauty and meaning.
Iain Jackson, Architect and Senior Lecturer, University of Liverpool
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/25111
2014-04-02T08:59:58Z
2014-04-02T08:59:58Z
Recent wind brings sand and thoughts from the Sahara
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45330/original/d6rnv8qr-1396368754.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Saharan sands.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-93404287/stock-photo-moroccan-desert-landscape-with-blue-sky-dunes-background.html?src=SIhU-UErwuvL1RE4NYiU8Q-1-32">Shutterstock/apdesign</a></span></figcaption></figure><figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45330/original/d6rnv8qr-1396368754.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/45330/original/d6rnv8qr-1396368754.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45330/original/d6rnv8qr-1396368754.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45330/original/d6rnv8qr-1396368754.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45330/original/d6rnv8qr-1396368754.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45330/original/d6rnv8qr-1396368754.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/45330/original/d6rnv8qr-1396368754.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Much nicer than smog.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-93404287/stock-photo-moroccan-desert-landscape-with-blue-sky-dunes-background.html?src=SIhU-UErwuvL1RE4NYiU8Q-1-32">Shutterstock/apdesign</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Drivers in parts of Southern England and Ireland have been finding <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/apr/01/london-smog-saharan-dust-storms-downing-street">fine red dust on their vehicles</a> – sand blown all the way from the Sahara desert. There is now even a pollution warning because of the stuff. There’s always something intriguing about particles of a distant, vast arid space finding their way to our temperate climes – they remind us of how interconnected our world truly is and bring to mind a landscape that has so often been a source of fantasy.</p>
<p>European explorers have been drawn to the Sahara since the eighteenth century, but it was with French colonisation from 1830 that it began to really capture the European imagination. The writer <a href="http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G2-2591302604.html">Isabelle Eberhardt</a>, for example, left her birthplace of Geneva, longing to be “a nomad camped in life’s great desert”, and travelled to Algeria in 1900 where she settled and married an Arab man. </p>
<p>It’s possible her story inspired E M Hull’s notorious best-seller <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7031">The Sheik</a> (1919), in which a young aristocratic heroine ventures into the Sahara, only to be kidnapped and seduced by a desert chieftain whom she eventually marries. Despite (perhaps even, disconcertingly, because of) its undercurrent of sexual violence, the novel sparked sheik mania in the 1920s. The <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0012675/">1921 film</a> starring Rudolph Valentino sent women across Britain and America swooning. More desert romances from Hull and her contemporaries followed, and to this day, the Sahara remains a popular setting for erotic fiction. (Take, for instance, Loreth Anne White’s <a href="https://www.librarything.com/series/Sahara+Kings">Sahara Kings</a> series published only this year.)</p>
<p>But what precisely is so enthralling about the Sahara is difficult to pinpoint. For those early writers, it promised unbridled sexual desire, as well as other kinds of freedom and adventure. There’s the attraction of the wide-open space, “the great, silent emptiness” as Hull’s Diana Mayo puts it, in The Sheik. There’s the retreat from the modern world: what Rosita Forbes, a traveller through Libya in 1920, called “The essence of the untrodden, untarnished earth herself!” And the nomadic desert dwellers too seem to fascinate sedentary folk. Hull, recording her travel experiences in <a href="https://archive.org/details/campinginthesaha000880mbp">Camping in the Sahara</a> (1927), is delighted to discover “the genuine nomads, the true wanderers of the desert, who live always in the open”.</p>
<p>But those who live beyond state borders have often appeared to threaten the settled nation states, and our visions of the desert are never far from this sense of menace.</p>
<p>Even in Hull’s romance, the Sheik is after all a warlike nomad, and “a man of men” for it. The Sheik’s popularity following World War I owed much to its publication coinciding with public interest in the legendary exploits of T E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), who marshalled disparate desert tribes into an army that would overthrow the Turks.</p>
<p>Currently, it would seem our thoughts have again turned to the military might lurking in the desert. The UK Foreign Affairs Committee has just published <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/foreign-affairs-committee/inquiries1/parliament-2010/west-africa/">the findings</a> of its enquiry into the Sahel-Sahara region. The region’s economic and political instability has raised international concerns about “ungoverned spaces”, and the Sahara has been identified as “a new frontline in the global contest with religious extremism and terrorism”.</p>
<p>So do these winds from the Sahara also herald a shift in cultural perception - from erotica to extremism? Will the threat of terrorism diminish the Sahara’s popular appeal? Or has it always been the case that our fascination with it arises from a sense of pressing danger? Curiously, research shows that the popularity of the sheik romance <a href="http://romancing-the-desert---sheikh-books.blogspot.com/2010/02/sheikh-romance.html">has in recent years ostensibly grown</a> rather than waned with the intensified conflict between Western powers and Arab states.</p>
<p>So perhaps Tade Ipadeola, who was awarded the 2013 Nigeria Prize for Literature (the most prestigious and lucrative literary prize in Africa) last month for his epic poem The Sahara Testaments, offers a timely antidote to our oscillating perceptions of the Sahara as a romanticised and vilified space.</p>
<p>His poem maps the whole geographical and historical span of the world’s largest desert (outside the polar regions), from its prehistoric “verdant furrows” to its current conflicts in which “oil and race yield endless, deadly plots”. Even as he laments its transformation from “silent garden” into a space for capitalist exploitation and war-mongering, “the Golgotha of angry chants”, Ipadeola celebrates the desert’s striking and profound beauty. “What grew the desert was the wind”, he tells us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hot and dry and mangosteen – blowing<br>
With hidden answers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So perhaps when we find dust ourselves this week, and our minds wander far afield to contemplate the secrets of the Sahara, we might well think on these lines from Ipadeola.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/25111/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Drivers in parts of Southern England and Ireland have been finding fine red dust on their vehicles – sand blown all the way from the Sahara desert. There is now even a pollution warning because of the…
Lisa Regan, Lecturer of English, University of Liverpool
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/24026
2014-03-07T00:46:34Z
2014-03-07T00:46:34Z
Tracks, a film that lets a woman thrive in the outback
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43354/original/dp6q2nj8-1394155216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The film adaptation of Robyn Davidson's memoir Tracks explores how both travellers and tourists experience the Australian landscape.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>In the new film <a href="https://theconversation.com/margaret-david-wolf-creek-2-and-oh-torture-porn-23758">Wolf Creek 2</a>, the menacing outback serial killer Mick Taylor asks his unsuspecting tourist prey, “what the bloody hell are you buggers doing out here?” </p>
<p>This phrase could equally be used to describe Australian cinema at the moment. The Aussie outback has re-entered the cinematic spotlight with a couple of high-profile feature film releases: firstly Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek 2 and now <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2167266/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Tracks</a>, directed by John Curran and released nationally this week. Both films ask us to think about what it means to travel and know Australia and its landscape.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6-DiOyxCQQI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Tracks (2014).</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tracks is an adaptation of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tracks-Womans-Across-Australian-Outback/dp/0679762876">real-life memoir</a> of Australian woman <a href="http://www.apbspeakers.com/speaker/robyn-davidson">Robyn Davidson</a>, which was first published in 1980. In 1977 Davidson, at the age of 27, trekked mostly solo from Alice Springs to the Western Australian coastline with the help of tamed camels. </p>
<h2>Women in the outback</h2>
<p>Davidson wrote an account of her experience for <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/">National Geographic magazine</a> which made her personal journey famous. She was photographed on her trip at various stages by enamoured American photojournalist Rick Smolan. Mandy Walker’s cinematography draws upon these iconic 1970s images to set the visual tone of the film – an outsider’s perspective of an outsider.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43332/original/zgjjpc2v-1394145996.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43332/original/zgjjpc2v-1394145996.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43332/original/zgjjpc2v-1394145996.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43332/original/zgjjpc2v-1394145996.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43332/original/zgjjpc2v-1394145996.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43332/original/zgjjpc2v-1394145996.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43332/original/zgjjpc2v-1394145996.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43332/original/zgjjpc2v-1394145996.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tracks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Transmission Films</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tracks – both the film and the memoir – can be read as a lively feminist retort to the long-standing canon of outback/ bush literature, where often the colonial white woman was pitted as civilised and lonely contrast to the rugged bushman, waiting sadly in the homestead for her husband to return a ‘droving. </p>
<p>Many bush narratives depicted the colonial woman as an unnatural presence, and one essentially endangered. So unlike the doomed girls in Peter Weir’s 1975 film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073540/">Picnic at Hanging Rock</a>, in Tracks we find a narrative in which the young woman can survive – and even thrive – in Australian nature. This is still rare in Australian cinema and literature and welcome to see.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43330/original/7nfrfsnz-1394145857.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43330/original/7nfrfsnz-1394145857.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43330/original/7nfrfsnz-1394145857.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43330/original/7nfrfsnz-1394145857.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43330/original/7nfrfsnz-1394145857.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43330/original/7nfrfsnz-1394145857.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43330/original/7nfrfsnz-1394145857.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43330/original/7nfrfsnz-1394145857.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tracks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Transmission Films</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Films set in the outback often focus on strangers moving problematically through this space – which of course reflects the experience of the majority of people who visit it. An opposition is usually set up between locals and travellers, which in the Wolf Creek series makes an Aussie pig and roo shooter rampage against international backpackers, or “vermin” as Mick calls them. </p>
<p>Part of his outrage comes from what he believes is the tourists’ inability to understand place, but to range through looking for simple “thrill” and “adventure”. He even makes one poor British tourist undertake a perverse citizenship test, testing the man for knowledge of Australian culture and sports with the prize of remaining un-maimed. </p>
<p>The irony is that Mick himself does not even come from the outback he rampages through – in Wolf Creek 2 some unwitting policemen look at his license and notice that he has travelled a long distance. He is equally the tourist looking for “thrill” in the emptiness of the countryside.</p>
<h2>On the tourist trail</h2>
<p>Interestingly, in Tracks the tourists Davidson encounters fit into a similar representation. </p>
<p>While they are retro 1970s images, here they are shown as the ultimate rubberneckers: cameras out like paparazzi to capture images of the crazy camel lady. In their loud intrusive cars they are disrespectful of local custom and ignorant of the land they drive through at break-neck speed. </p>
<p>In one memorable scene Robyn’s Indigenous guide Eddie puts on a cynical performance to frighten them away, laughing with her at their stupidity. The tourist is the enemy, the person who will never “get” the outback.</p>
<p>Is Davidson also a silly tourist? </p>
<p>In Tracks we see that she understands herself differently from the rubberneckers. Her time spent in Indigenous communities and local camel trainers, and willingness to take on local knowledge and her slow journey à pied means that she can see the land differently. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43329/original/fpfc2vy2-1394145821.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43329/original/fpfc2vy2-1394145821.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43329/original/fpfc2vy2-1394145821.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43329/original/fpfc2vy2-1394145821.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43329/original/fpfc2vy2-1394145821.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43329/original/fpfc2vy2-1394145821.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43329/original/fpfc2vy2-1394145821.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43329/original/fpfc2vy2-1394145821.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tracks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Transmission Films</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In her memoir there is a beautiful passage about her newly enlightened perspective, which also harks to the Judeo-Christian Biblical tradition connecting desert journeys with introspection and personal growth:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>as I walked through that country, I was becoming involved with it in a most intense and yet not fully conscious way. The motions and patterns and connections of things became apparent on a gut level. I didn’t just see the animal tracks, I knew them. I didn’t just see the bird, I knew it in relationship to its actions and effects … a new plant would appear and I could perceive its association with other plants and animals in the overall pattern, its place.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I am usually sceptical of the clichéd traveller versus tourist distinction that appears in travel literature, as it is one that often smacks of class difference. </p>
<p>After all, the traveller is usually the more affluent figure who can afford to take time off from work, or not work at all. The poorer tourist only has limited time to experience a holiday, and therefore must work creatively to streamline travel experiences. Even young long-term backpackers usually come from relatively privileged backgrounds. In the Wolf Creek series the anger that Mick holds might also be about privilege and access.</p>
<p>Yet I see both Tracks and in Wolf Creek 2 as a kind of allegorical challenge that is being thrown out to the spectator, a.k.a. the virtual tourist. They both ask us to urgently consider how well we know Australia and place. They ask us to consider what the difference is between the conceptual “tourist” and the “traveller” and the ethical responsibilities that might lie between the two.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43328/original/sxhzgpkt-1394145772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43328/original/sxhzgpkt-1394145772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43328/original/sxhzgpkt-1394145772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=311&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43328/original/sxhzgpkt-1394145772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=311&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43328/original/sxhzgpkt-1394145772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=311&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43328/original/sxhzgpkt-1394145772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43328/original/sxhzgpkt-1394145772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43328/original/sxhzgpkt-1394145772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tracks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Transmission Films</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In an era of mass media and the “global village” the idea is that virtual travellers should be able to learn and understand local situations through reading, watching, acquiring knowledge. But is this really the case? </p>
<p>Another recent film, John Pilger’s 2013 documentary <a href="https://theconversation.com/review-pilgers-utopia-shows-us-aboriginal-australia-in-2014-21965">Utopia</a>, also examines this issue with a more deliberate political focus. Pilger is also the traveller to central Australia, visiting remote communities to document systemic Indigenous inequality and highlight cases of extreme violence and false history against First Australians. </p>
<p>His journey into the outback to impoverished communities is juxtaposed with scenes at designer beachside homes in Sydney, facing the ocean and away from all social and political problems of the interior. He suggests that there is a divide that has not been overcome by the media in Australia (but rather that the media are part of the problem). </p>
<p>There is a truly horrifying moment where a contemporary tourist resort at Rottnest Island is exposed as repurposed Indigenous prison camp. Again the naïve tourist is placed within a narrative of shame, in this case through unwillingness to learn about history and politics.</p>
<p>Ultimately all three of these outback films propose that continuous learning, observation of the local and adaptation are the keys to survival, whether this means walking through the harsh landscape, battling a psycho killer or considering the urgent political responsibilities of a nation.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43331/original/bh89hrx9-1394145922.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43331/original/bh89hrx9-1394145922.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/43331/original/bh89hrx9-1394145922.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=250&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43331/original/bh89hrx9-1394145922.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=250&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43331/original/bh89hrx9-1394145922.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=250&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43331/original/bh89hrx9-1394145922.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=314&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43331/original/bh89hrx9-1394145922.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=314&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/43331/original/bh89hrx9-1394145922.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=314&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tracks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Transmission Films</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><br>
<em><strong>Are you an academic or researcher working on Australian film? Would you like to write for The Conversation? Contact <a href="mailto:paul.dalgarno@theconversation.edu.au">the Arts + Culture editor</a>.</strong></em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/24026/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gemma Blackwood does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In the new film Wolf Creek 2, the menacing outback serial killer Mick Taylor asks his unsuspecting tourist prey, “what the bloody hell are you buggers doing out here?” This phrase could equally be used…
Gemma Blackwood, Lecturer in Communications, Charles Darwin University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.