This picture was made whilst I was travelling along  the Sturt Highway  from Adelaide to Canberra  for a photo shoot along the Cotter River:

I'd stopped to take some photos of a silo just past Wagga Wagga in NSW with  the 5x7 Cambo monorail. I then wandered around the site and I saw this history of times past  in rural Australia. 

The silos for the storage of grain  prior to rail transport to markets  closed down at the start of the 21st century.  The Kywong  branch line   of the Main Southern Railway line in NSW, which services Wagga Wagga,  closed down in 1975. The closure of the branch lines --eg., the Tocumwal branch line which closed around 1988-- is an indication of the emptying out of rural Australia. 

It's a sad history of broken dreams and landscape and place in the form of place attachment that is concerned with the symbolic meaning in early settler Australia.  Place attachment is the “emotional bonds that form between people and their physical surroundings. These are powerful aspects of human life that inform a  sense of identity, create meaning in the  lives of human beings,  facilitate community and influence action.  

Photography has the  ability to aid and create place attachments. Photography  is also  valuable for  interpreting the erosion of Aboriginal culture form the Australian landscape. The  19th century image-makers document the land as the British  immigrants settled it, thereby   helping create meaning for the settlers and establishes the land as virgin by not effectively including Aboriginals in their narratives.

Photography helped represent  the land as empty and by extension created a culture of ownership, plenitude and expanse   for white settlement and so covered up the destruction of Aboriginal place attachments for the place creation and subsequent attachment of thew white British  settlers.  

 

The A32 is the highway from Adelaide to Sydney via Broken Hill.  Travelling on it is stepping back into history and  away from tourist photographic activity.  

We were tourists in our own country.  We had a few days holiday  in Mildura and had gone onto  explore Broken Hill for a few more days.  We then returned  to Adelaide on  the A32,  or the Barrier Highway. Taking everyday pictures for tourists is associated with holidays and travel and then linked to memory.   

This picture was made near Olary 

By now I'd bought a digital camera--a Sony DSC R1,  Adobe Lightroom, and an Epson V700 scanner.  The Sony  became my main everyday  point and shoot camera,  and I started using the film Leica less.  The main film work was being done with medium format cameras. Going digital did not alter  the stereotypical character of snapshot photography---they continue an already existing practice but allow for a vastly greater quantity.  

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Things have meaning in part because of the way we see things, based on our own historical context.  An example is the conception of Australia as the Lucky Country  because it was the world's quarry.  Donald Horne, who coined the Lucky Country phrase,   used it in an  ironical mode. 

Horne was critiquing an Australia that did not think for itself; a country manacled to its past; and 'still in colonial blinkers'. It was meant as an indictment of an unimaginative nation, its cosy provincialism, its cultural cringe, its second rate politicians,  and its White Australia policy.  Horne's irony is usually  overlooked. 

Old resource based Australia  is  a particular  historical pattern of vision. A week in Andamooka, in northern South Australia indicated that  it was a strange place--a frontier land. The town was full of mine tailings  as was the surrounding landscape. This was a quarry economy. It  indicated  mining's "boom and bust" economics,  and  that  mining, by its nature, involves the environmental damage to  the land. This  often has serious consequences for the surrounding environment. 

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