The Pilbara Project 2010

Les Walkling, The Pilbara Project 2010,
Pigment print, 977mm x 1118mm

The image was taken on my Hasselblad H4D during our third trip to the Pilbara in September 2010 from the front seat of a Cessna 172 out of Karratha airport. While our accompanying curators, William Fox (Nervada Museum of Art) and Mollie Hewitt (FORM) observed from the rear seats, the three photographers (myself, Christian Fletcher, and Tony Hewitt) took turns tightly strapped in the front passenger seat with the door removed, and only a narrow gap between the wing strut and undercarriage for unimpeded photography. This restricted point-of-view was a powerful metaphor for my myopic engagement with this land, its settlement, industry and purpose.

With the pilot we had mapped out a circuitous sunrise route out over Dampier Salt, the largest evaporative salt field in the southern hemisphere, across the Dampier Archipelago and Port, the Woodside Gas Plant, and down the Burrup Peninsula before returning to the airport. I’ll never forget being trapped in this tiny plane, stranded between the continuous blue sky above and its disrupted reflection bouncing off an invented landscape below, with barely time to compose an image let alone think about it before disappearing from view. The image therefore represents my increasingly uneasy relationship between our history, industry and displacement, where the past has been more effectively colonised than the land, and a ritual of repetition paves over any desire to rethink Australia’s beginnings.

The image is cropped towards a square format to emphasise the false balance between a massively altered landscape and the erased undulations of the distant Archipelago, and its enduring though uneasy cultural significance. The omnipresent colour cloaks the selective blindness of a new nationalism, a transfer of power that reveres the land but not its country.