SAMMY HAWKER

CATALOGUE ESSAY [EXCERPT]
Dr Martha Sear - Head Curator, Anthropocene Australia Centre, National Museum of Australia

‘Country that built my heart’ Judith Wright’s poem ‘Train Journey’ begins:

Glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon,
out of the confused hammering dark of the train
I looked and saw under the moon's cold sheet
your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart;

In this age of environmental disjunction and distress, it’s hard not to imagine us all aboard a train Wright prophesied. Her voice, in poetry and protest, sounded the clanging bells, warning of an approaching juggernaut. Fueled by burning coal and compressed white steam, pumping progress’s pistons along a track of infinite acceleration - the Anthropocene Express. But, as Wright so acutely observed, we are not waiting at the crossing for the locomotive to pass, belching soot and ash. We are on the train ourselves, hurtling through the dark, sleepy and dazzled and confused, and looking out over a land that we know has made us, but has the eerie pall of being un-made by us too.

The artists whose work comes together here are all pointing our attention out the train window at scenes of fragility and ephemerality, strangeness and change. But they are also reminding us of how country has ‘built our hearts’ – by each, in different ways, collaborating to make work together with active, expressive places and dynamic, multi-dimensional photographic forms.

Samantha Hawker’s Dieback plays with unexpected orientations and directions, this time in relation to the mass death of Eucalyptus viminalis in Ngarigo Country, the Snowy-Monaro region of NSW. Although the scenes are apocalyptic, I cannot escape the feeling that these trees, though dead, are joining in with Sammy’s choreography, advancing from an upturned sky, or pirouetting under a drone. Their presence in these images remains palpable – recalling the ways I understand some Aboriginal people still speak of the thylacine in the present tense, because to them it has not ‘gone’. In Sammy’s frames, the dead gum’s bare branches seem transformed into blood vessels, or tributaries that should combine and flow through the great trunk, filling up the country’s breast. But they are, as Wright saw from her train window, run dry.

The beauty and poignancy of all these works, created by four artists alive to the land’s expressive power, is proof that meaning and connection can still pulse through these channels. Each creator has brought photography’s great potential to frame the view out the train window, freeze time’s hurtle and blur, and capture moments otherwise indistinguishable to our dazzled eyes. From these exposures, we too can begin to collaborate with life and build new forms and flows that connect the country’s heart more closely to our own.