the translation of photography

LAST YEAR I was lucky enough to attend a Jewish wedding of two close friends in Alice Springs. We danced on the red dirt while it was raining and until we ran out of breath. The bride hitched up her dress, knotting it at the hem, and swapped her Vivienne Westwood heels for cowboy boots. We were terrorised by oversized moths dive-bombing us in the marquee beneath the lights, while the groom’s family were making speeches. Nature was an active player at the wedding. We were visitors, acclimatising.

Before the wedding, a group of us drove countless kilometres to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. After we’d set ourselves up at our Yulara campsite, I went for a walk. There were surprisingly few people around on the path I took, which lead to the top of a lookout. It was peaceful and vast at its peak, as I stood disarmed, looking out across the red undulations and sparsely populated land. I took a photograph.

The desert I saw was nothing like I thought it would be. The desert around me wasn’t at all empty, as the term ‘deserted’ has come to mean; it was full – not just with animals and plant life – it was thick with a resonance and intensity that conjured a wonder unlike anything else. I had forgotten this picture until I looked through my images recently, and was struck by the likeness the scene had to a Fred Williams painting. I have always admired Fred Williams’ work. His dabbed impressions move me inexplicably.

A few months later these same friends moved north to Darwin, and I paid a visit. One weekend we took in the sunset at Mindil Beach. A popular spot for market shopping and sunset viewing, the beach becomes crowded as day ends, and people settle in along the sand. Corks are popped on champagne and beer bottles get kitted out with stubby holders. I wondered what could be special about sunset here. What I witnessed was a glowing orb dipping gradually, almost ceremonial in the way it captured the audience’s attention, and falling to the water beneath it.

When I look at this picture, what is striking to me is how much it resembles the Aboriginal flag. The colours of red and black are reversed, of course – and the black is water and red is sky – but the sun itself is what holds the image together, resounding, powerful and assertive, burning at the centre of the elements.

Sitting on the beach, it didn’t strike me this way at all. Looking out across the earth from Yulara, I didn’t immediately think of Fred Williams. Something particular happened when the image was translated by photography. It took these images for me to be able to see the environment in this particular way. Fred Williams and Harold Thomas saw this first, unaided by the camera, and gave these images to us, populating the Australian imagination.

desert dreaming

For an hour or more I have forgotten my destination, lost in the fog of a pre-dawn departure, contenting myself with aerial routine – settling in, taking off, drinking unremarkable airline coffee and then reading. In time though, to no apparent call, I look up from my page and turn to look out the window. Immediately I am presented with an altered landscape. Beneath me lies a pale ochre expanse. It is mostly flat but not undifferentiated. In fact, deep grooves and rises feature across the surface, twisting, wending and doubling back. A ridge pushes its way through the earth and presides reptilian-like, archaic, knobbly like an ancient spine with no head nor tail to be found.  

We are heading for the first time to Alice Springs, to the Northern Territory, to the heart of this country: a place as yet known to us only through myth and dreams. We are flying above the desert. Everything is new and unknown to me. Is that a lake to my west? My companion shrugs, also a novice. And that expanse, blueish, pale. Is it dried, desiccated? Sand, salt?

I look to the horizon, and through the clouds the hazy orange meets the blue and merges, opalescent. Creases in the earth appear like long, thick folds in a dress. Elements collide. We fly now for certain above a body of water. A river claws its way across the land, nubile, its tributaries like limbs outstretched from its winding body and angling for grip. Or, wait: is it a river of trees, a dry ravine, arid but full of growth?

The desert is no desert from above; it is full of treasure and mystery and later I will understand how naive it was to expect barrenness. This is semi-arid terrain sustaining much life. Ravines spill across the land beneath me like long, dark, wet hair splayed down a back; like a rope untwisted and separated into parts and lain down, dropping anchor. Why these water images for a dry land? I wonder. They come perfectly formed like snapshots, paintings, poems prepared and left in my path. These are stories communicated from the land.

Later, settling in with friends in Alice, I learn the lake I spotted is indeed a dry salt lake. A mirage that appears on the long, hot terrestrial traverse to Alice Springs. I picture the travellers who encounter it after driving for hours, who press hard on the car brakes, alight keenly and run for the water, hoping to relieve their overheated bodies, only to realise the error upon reaching its edge. Disappointment is a dryness in the throat, the rasping of parched lungs; the body remains pushed to its limit in the heat, veins swollen and visible beneath the skin. 

My friends tell me one day they will be considered Alice locals when they witness the Todd River flowing for the third time. Driving to Uluru, up close to the red dust and cracked earth, we encounter tourists at a roadhouse sunbaking on a green patch of grass beneath sprinklers, amply cooled by the extensive subterranean Artesian water source. At home, in Melbourne, we have water restrictions; children grow up not knowing the pleasure of sprinklers and water fights.

The desert, I realise, is an enigma; elusive, contradictory, lawless, magical. In all my imaginings, I never dreamt of water.

Flying home, I look out the window again and watch the shadows of clouds across the pigmented earth. I try to spot the same ravines, the river with its tributaries, the salt lake, but the desert keeps its secrets this time. There is a perfect, defined line where blue meets orange and the horizon appears before us.