Ripped Apart: Photography Series

In 1854, the Victorian Gold Discovery Committee recorded the unearthing of the Victorian Goldfields as having ‘converted a remote dependency into a country of worldwide fame … and made this the richest country in the world’. The colonial success of the period undoubtedly set up the economic tunnel vision of this country. ‘Wealth for toil’ is a continual reminder of the devastation of Country that this purely capitalistic approach has left on the ecology of Castlemaine and its surrounds. The destruction of the landscape has stolen the land from the Dja Dja Wurrong people. The regrowth of the area has been enormously impacted and the disruption has forced Country to repair itself around, between, and on the remains of its horrifying past.  

As a nation, due to urban pull, we are displaced and hidden from our disrupted ecology. Through this series, I hope to uncover the past trauma of Country to capture the resilience of the environment. To follow the motif, the first layer of the image is a scene of the two components interlinked (colonial imprints and the environment). The second was to reveal a tear boundary between the two subjects to highlight the displacement that occurs in these images. The next step was a disruption in the form of colour and pixelation editing. This ensured there was a clear contrast between the two subjects to focus the attention on the damage of the colonial occupancy in the foreground and blur the landscape background with a pixelated effect to symbolise how we always seem to ignore nature for economic gain.