Travelling to the Macquarie Marshes

Over Easter I am travelling out to the Macquarie Marshes in central NSW. As there is very little water in the marshlands - we will be walking rather than Kiaking! The Marshes is a vast 200,000 hectare bird breeding and wilderness declared area, and I was speechless to discover that there are cotton plantations on the Macquarie river - upstream from the marshes. There are even cotton plantations extracting water in the centre of the marsh area. This is more surprising as the Marshes are a heritage listed site

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Near the town of Warren the Macquarie River divides into a series of channels, spreading out and creating the marshlands. In the top image you see the dark shapes of the marshes in the distance with the bulldozed areas of cotton in the foreground. The bottom image is south of the town of Warren (shown by the yellow flag)

The Wilderness Society are campaigning to stop the ongoing bulldozing of trees for even more lazer graded cotton 'farms'. I plan to make more images from the air using a kite to launch my reasonably new digi compact. Photos soon!! Charles C Benton the Californian maestro of 'kite aerial photography', (KAP) has a wonderful website which tells all about the follies of launching cameras into the atmosphere.

The image below is one of the Cotton plantations within the RAMSAR listed marsh area.

Inland Sea at Wagga Wagga

Ive just made a big discovery!! Maybe you know this already ... but, if you double click on the images - they enlarge to screen size. It is particularly effective for the stereo images in previous posts.




These are images from my current exhibition at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery down on the beautiful Murrumbigee River. Ive been making aerial photographs of the patterns made by native vegetation out on the Darling. So ... Ive been flying large kites with cameras attached. Yes ... its a good excuse to run about in the beautiful landscape out there! Out in this open grazing country - no checkerboard of ploughed fields out here - topography, water and wind create beautiful organic shapes and colours. Cutting through these patterns are the straight lines (yes humans are fairly blunt creatures) of fences and roadways and the electric grid. These two patterns, the organic and the linear, appear to have little relationship to each other.

This work is called Inland Sea and is a map-like pattern of the names of creeks and rivers which flow into the Darling. As i was pouring over maps i noticed that many have Aboriginal names and here, is an Aboriginal and colonialist history written into the landscape. The work suggests the flow of sustaining floodwaters across this vast semi-arid country. Baaka is the Bakindji word for the Darling.

In times when Queeensland rains come down the Cuttaburra channels and the Paroo, Warrego and Culgoa to the Darling a vast, expanse of water covers the country for miles in all directions. The explorer Charles Sturt fantasised about water of this dimension. An ardent ortholigist, he watched waterbirds setting off from Adelaide to the inland. He became obsessed with searching for these vast and unpredictable inland seas and continued to search the deserts of SA into his old age. (the link is to Sturts publication 'two expeditions into the interior of south australia')