Ecology - Martin Walch

Thanks. First I'd like to acknowledge the Kaurna people for their invitation for us to speak here. I'll start off by showing you these images that were taken in 1863, Lake St. Clair in the middle of Tasmania. These are supposedly the first wilderness photographs. They were done by Morton Alport who was a very keen amateur scientist and artist and he loved his stereo camera just like I do. He was very much involved in a gentleman's exploration of the environment - the picturesque - and in a lot of ways they were camping trips but also legitimate explorations. These works are a way of leaping from Hobart to the area around Queenstown where I work. I guess I've chosen to focus on a dystopia here because that's what drew me to Queensland as a working environment in the first place.

In fact it was the physical shock I experienced in visiting that place for the very first time that really motivated me to deal with issues of landscape use, environmental sustainability and ecology through the medium of photography. This image was taken in about 1833 by a photographer, John Watt Beatty who worked in Tasmania. He had an interesting relationship between industrial work and the environment. He was commissioned to take photographs for the Mt Lyell Mine (in Western Tasmania) which was established in about 1884 and has been continually worked since that point. That was part of what attracted me to working in this environment - there is this 120 year photographic history that really needed a contemporary update.

I've been trying to kick against these glossy commercialised photos that try to make extractive industries look OK, it's all part of this clean green clique we're all hearing and which you see in Tasmania all the time. As I said Beatty was brought out as a photographer to document the development but was also involved as an environmentalist. He attempted to get the Tasmanian Government to declare a reserve along the banks of the Gordon River as it was being heavily logged for pine and there were really no controls in that area. While he was working for the Mt. Lyell Mine, he found a strange ally in a man called Robert Stitch, a German immigrant who'd been employed to come out to Mt Lyell. Stitch's main claim to fame was his development of a pyretic smelting process which allowed the ore, once it was at a critical temperature, to sustain the smelting process. Because the ore is based on massive amounts of sulphur which were generated by this smelting process. That's what caused the deforestation along with removal of trees to actually fuel the furnaces as well as timber to provide supports within the mines.

The next twenty photos are a series of before and afters. The originals are also from this 1893 excursion. Each of the second shots are shots that I've taken with a large format camera in 2000/ 2001. So I'll just run through those. Can you see a lake in the foreground of this one? And the results of mining. This image particularly motivated me to work on this project. The thing that struck me about this was the incredible similarity between this image and the images of the Somme and the French battlefields of the First World War and the ironic similarities of men with explosives pitted against the landscape. But I guess the thing that is missing from this story and I guess it comes to a focus when you actually visit this place is that people actually live here and in the paradigm that they lived in their lack of knowledge and the fact that they were focusing on a small part of the system, they were just trying to extract something. Not a lot of concern was given to the consequences down the line.

In a contemporary sense, the people who live and work there have been demonised as red necks because of what they've done to their environment. However these people lived in that space, they were part of the Ecology of that place. They dug their little houses in the sides of these hills and it wasn't just the men's stories that sustained the people and their livelihoods but the incredible job the woman did of trying to run a house and keep it all going. They were all slopping around in acidic mud and it was very brutal. So there is an incredible dignity associated with these people, a great sense of their own hard work and the constant fight against their media image as red necks and as people who's belief system is based on, 'if you can't root it or shot it then it's not worth worrying about'.

This has focused the problem on the emblematic hills of Queenstown - the moonscape of Queenstown as people refer to it - and it's quite interesting to talk to the locals about how they feel about the local environment. It's a running debate about whether to reforest the hills or whether they should be pulling out the re-growth to maintain the moonscape, because it is a serious tourist drawcard and a lot of people visit for that very reason. Tourists often end up in a state of shock as they drive through town and try to get out as quickly as possible. They are unable to engage with the personal stories or to look at the place as a real lesson about industrial processes gone rampant without any view for the future. So I'm very worried that the popular notion of sweeping these problems under the carpet in order to generate more tourism is really going to loose an opportunity to create not only a powerful monument to the folly but also to the peoples' hard working life, and the dignity of people who are caught in a system where they're not actually responsible for the damage they've been a part of. Quite a complex issue and talking to those people at ground level has made me feel quite passionate about projecting their view.

Now this image is from the 1880s, when mining was all push carts and hand work drills. This is from about 1900 when the smelters were working. They're not in full blast. They actually created more muck than this when they were really going flat out. And you can see how the forests have been pushed back up the hills already. The foreground is a large slag head?.This is a picture that I really love. It's a group of men underground in about 1928. They've just completed a two mile piece of tunnel through the mountain and this is the joining point. They worked at both ends and they came together within an inch of perfect alignment. And that was all done with conventional strings and surveying levels. And this is the same area in about 1935 where it's starting to look really grim. This is an aerial view of the open cut. For those of you who may not have seen the work in ConVerge, the stereo photos that I've exhibited there are all from around this site. And the animation is also from this mountain and shows the surface area as well as the underground tunnels at this mine. I have a friend who works with Parks and I took him up to have a look at this place. He loved it. He thought it was like Geology on fast forward. There were all these processes that he could see in action up there and we'd go back a month later and it's accelerating. They are actually extracting rock from underground here so the surface is collapsing down in to that little hold that you saw in the previous images. It's not actually the kind of place that you would want to hang around in for very long. It's one of those places where you think if I'm going to die in the next five minutes so be it I'll take that risk.

This photo was taken quite recently in the same area. It was sold to a company called Copper Mines of Tasmania in about 1996. The previous owners were given environmental dispensations by the Government and when the new owners took over they were able to develop an agreement whereby they were not responsible for anything that had gone on previously on the site. So this accident of political incorrectness has really saved a lot of the industrial heritage up there This is quite a steep hill heavily eroded, you can see the stumps of the original trees and wooden slooses that they used to build to try and control the erosion. All of the run off and tailings went into one river - the King River - which then goes into Macquarie Harbour, tone of heavy metal laced sands and slag. The entire hilltop ended up in the river, so there is now a river delta of about 250 hectares where previously there wasn't. In the last few years the Department of Water and Environment have done a series of regeneration tests using different plants that are tolerant to heavy metals.

So another issue for these people is to do with youth. I've worked on a couple of community projects out there and we've gone out and talked to the young people and surveyed what they do and how they feel about their place. There's this really interesting schizophrenia about how they feel. If you are sitting in the mall and you ask them how they feel about their local place, they refer to it in negative terms - it's a hole, it's a dump, I just want to get out of here. They feel that there's no future for them. However if you take them out into the landscape and actually go places with them, they have this very strong connection with where they live. They know where all the water holes are, they play out in the bush and they desperately love it, so I started wondering about what was going on. I believe it's a psychological preparation for leaving after all it's much easier to leave a place if you believe it's a shit hole. They spent a lot of time reinforcing each other in this belief that there is nothing there so that they can leave with a smaller feeling of loss. Interestingly enough the older people who have worked in this environment understand that quite clearly but feel quite powerless about how to effect change. How to offer some sense of future for people to stay in this environment - it's quite a small town so it's not an easy thing to do. Running art projects up there has offered those people some outlets but really it's no solution to the longer term problem and neither is tourism. People are hoping this is going to be the thing that will take over from the mine. The mine was a great paternal figure, it provided everything. If you wanted a community hall you just went to the mine manager and asked for somewhere to play billiards. So now the people who have grown up in that environment find it quite difficult to be proactive about changing their own environment. That's another shot of the foot hills of Mt Owen at the outskirts of Queenstown. This is a bunch of guys working at the mine when I first, it was about a year after I first started working there. One of the difficulties I've had in running this project over the last four or five years, and doing various activities up there. They've had five general managers over that period. As an artist I don't really rate a letter or an email every time the manager changes. So you go back up there to do the project and they provide me with in kind use of vehicles, accommodation etc like that. And you walk in and there's another guy there who doesn't know you from a bar of soap. He's never seen your work. He doesn't even know why you're there. So it's quite interesting trying to work through those dilemmas. I've succeeded so far but it was pretty frightening the first time it happened. This was the morning that the Copper Mines of Tasmania was bought by an Indian company and so it is now run remotely. Another strange work of this process is that I've become an old hand. I'm fortunate enough to be able to have access to all areas of the mine lease and having been there for five years and the turn over of staff there are only a few guys there now who know the site as well as I do. And that's pretty bizarre when you are only there part time.

I recently formed an organisation called Ecotone with two friends and we're trying to solve some of the problems that we've been discussing or at least attempt to develop solutions about how to educate people about the complexity of these dilemmas. We've been taking groups on field trips up the West Coast and various areas of Tasmania. Mining areas, hydro areas, logging areas and getting guest speakers who live and work in these environments to come and speak to our mixed group of national and international cross disciplinary professionals - journalists, environmental scientists, artists, writers etc. We get them to keep a journal during these trips and at the end of this process they produce a work of art, whether it's written or visual and that's an amazing process for most of these people who have never made a work of art before, particularly if they come from fairly conventional back ground.

It's also physically very challenging. I've been able to get them access to Mt Lyell, and quite an interesting process occurs when you take them to the site. They're initial response is shock and horror at the kind of ground zero nature of the place. There is at first glance, nothing redeeming about it at all and it's physically dangerous because you are always looking out for cracks in the ground, places to fall down, acid/toxic run off etc. They go into an internalised shock state. Then after an hour or so you leave them making art, doing drawings, reading and they start to engage at ground level and start noticing the little bits of wire and objects that have been left behind from 120 years of work. They start to pick up rocks and find that there is regrowth - this regenerative power that's coming back through the ground and they ultimately end up feeling quite optimistic and charged up by the fact that this natural process is capable of dealing with such a heavy blow. That's been the most rewarding function of running these courses.

© Martin Walch 2002