Shooting the Sunburnt Country, the Land of Sweeping Plains, the Rugged Mountain Ranges: The Role of Australian Landscape and Wilderness Photography in Promoting Environmental Sustainability and in Forming a New National Identity

Abstract

Australian landscape and wilderness photography has played an important role in the formation of Australian national identity and in wilderness conservation. These two uses of photography are diametrically opposed as the former celebrates the conversion of the Australian bush into farmland whereas the latter promotes the conservation of the Australian bush as it was at some arbitrary point in the past. Yet despite these opposing political ends, Australian landscape and wilderness photography employs a similar aesthetic drawn from the traditions of American landscape and wilderness photography and of European landscape painting. The aesthetic modes of the sublime and the picturesque are used across all three with no regard for their nationalistic politics. This chapter critiques these politics of pictures focussing on three prominent examples in the photography of Frank Hurley, Peter Dombrovskis and Steve Parish among some others. It also considers the uncanny in the photography of Simon Neville, among other photographers, of wetlands. It concludes by arguing for photography for environmental sustainability.