Inflows: The Channel Country
By Mandy Martin, Jane Carruthers, Guy Fitzhardinge, Tom Griffiths, Peter Haynes
Waddi Wood, Acacia Peuce near Birdsville. 2001. Oil, ochre, pigment/linen. 90 x 330 cm.
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Enquiries to the publisher: Mandy Martin, PO BOX 35 Mandurama, NSW 2792 aldr.martin@bigpond.com
Inflows: the Channel Country begins with an artist's vision and adds the insights of four renowned writers to produce a travelling exhibition and accompanying publication. Between 1996-2001 Mandy Martin has worked in collaboration with pastoralist and environmentalist, Guy Fitzhardinge, historians, Tom Griffiths (History Program RSSS, ANU) and Jane Carruthers (University of South Africa) and art curator Peter Haynes to produce Inflows: the Channel Country.
The Lake Eyre Basin Coordinating Group has provided support, inspiration and information for the project since 1996 when Guy Fitzhardinge and Mandy Martin gave papers at the Windorah Scientific Workshop: An Ecological Perspective on Cooper's Creek. This gathering collected scientific evidence to submit to the Queensland government to counter an irrigation development application from Currareva station at Windorah.
The Cooper's Creek Protection Group sought an environmental study to help this fight, and this integrated project with its aesthetic, scientific and historical dimensions is the result. Five years later, the team found itself sitting on the bank of the Cooper on Currareva Station the very day the irrigation licence was finally revoked. Cotton will not kill this river system yet.
Inflows begins with Fitzhardinge's essay evoking the general sense of locale and the region at the heart of the project. In total, Lake Eyre Basin catchment covers 17% of the area of Australia. Cooper's Creek is one of its three major drainage systems. Beginning in the north with the desert uplands, the catchment collects run-off water that slowly flows towards Lake Eyre through a maze of waterholes, channels and ephemeral wetlands.
The area represents one of the world's most significant ephemeral wetlands as well as one of the best cattle-fattening areas in Australia. Through his experiences of running cattle in the upper reaches of the catchment and his passion for travel, Fitzhardinge speaks with not only an understanding of the landscape but an intimate love for the land and its peoples.
Mandy Martin's drawings and paintings of the Channel Country when placed in narrative sequence create a vibrant, visual map of a huge region. They capture the rivers and watersheds crossed, the special sites where locals took them and campsites where the team spent time together.
Jane Carruthers kept a journal of one of the Channel Country trips where Martin did the sketches for many of the finished paintings in Inflows. Her experience includes writing about another itinerant artist, Thomas Baines, a nineteenth-century explorer-artist whose career spanned southern Africa as well as Australia. Carruthers' journal, notating images with an international and comparative context and narrative, complements Martin's process of invigorating the landscape through art.
Peter Haynes, Director of the Canberra Museum and Gallery and the Nolan Galley, curated the exhibition, Inflows: the Channel Country. He has enthusiastically supported the concept behind the set of three environmental projects (Tracts, Watersheds and Inflows - see below). The three exhibitions have under his guidance travelled to sixteen regional galleries in the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland from 1995-2002. Gallery attendance during the first two tours was over forty thousand people. The third is now travelling. His essay offers insight into artistic motivations and practice.
Tom Griffiths in the final historical essay explores the way the past resonates in the present politics and ecology of the Channel Country. His account moves between personal anecdote and historical reflection in an attempt to articulate the social and natural systems that animate the channels and their culture, to map the flows of both water and feeling. His interest is in the creative tensions that are generated by contrasting perspectives of a regional landscape and its history, tensions between aerial and underground views, local and national, inside and outside, dreaming and analysis.
Inflows is the third in a series of environmental projects undertaken by the group between 1995- 2001, the first being Tracts: Back o' Bourke, which also involved historian Paul Sinclair, and the second Watersheds: the Paroo to the Warrego. Team members have worked in the communities and environments of the region, drawing on the inspiration of people and land, and they seek to return these perspectives to those sources, thus continuing the dialogue.
See also:
Martin, Mandy and Paul Sinclair, Tracts: Back O'Bourke (Canberra, 1996). Publications of artwork and essays on Social/Environmental Issues in Western NSW by Mandy Martin (artist) and Paul Sinclair (historian). ISBN 0646305352.
Martin, Mandy and Tom Griffiths, Watersheds: the Paroo to the Warrego (Canberra, 1999). Publications of artwork and essays on environmental issues in the Paroo/Warrego catchment by Mandy Martin (artist), Tom Griffiths (historian), Guy Fitzhardinge (environmental adviser) and Peter Haynes (art critic). ISBN 0957748108.
Enquiries to the publisher:
Mandy Martin,
PO BOX 35
Mandurama NSW 2792