It’s been a long year, 2020, what with the apocalyptic fires, the global pandemic and higher education (my industry) going into meltdown. Between the smoke, the worrying, the working twice as hard as usual, the home schooling, the doom-scrolling, the worrying about children worrying, there hasn’t been a lot of time for blogging, although there have still been moments of tranquillity and wonder on the water and and in the garden.

Bute and sunny trees

But something really good did happen, towards the end of the year, worth getting out of my rut to blog about: my first photography exhibition. I had opportunity to take over Hornsby Council’s Wallarobba Arts and Cultural Centre – closed for much for 2020 during the pandemic – for a couple of weeks.  The exhibition was called “Deerubbin at Dawn” and was part of Sydney’s annual Head On photography festival – which normally happens in May each year but was deferred this year, like so many other things.  But thanks to Hornsby Council and heaps of curatorial help from my fabulous  friend Jane Simon it did end up happening!

I was really lucky to have my colleague and friend, Dr Ian Collinson, polymath and environmental humanities guy, write a catalogue essay for the exhibition that we also put on the wall in the grand front entrance:

Deerubbin at dawn: river lives on the Hawkesbury reveals Nicole Matthews’ familiarity with her neighbourhood, a familiarity that is a product of the conscious and frequent ‘looking’ that landscape photography demands of its practitioners. Taking many pictures of the same landscape over a protracted time—in different seasons, from different vantage points—produces images that evince an intimacy and a local knowledge, as well as epic and aesthetic grandeur. These are pictures of home not a remote wilderness, even though some may stir a romantic desire for the distant, the untouched and the awe-inspiring. The exhibition speaks to the interconnectedness of what we unhelpfully label culture and nature as though one could exist without the other. 

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Taken from a kayak, these photographs alter our normal perspective as we see the River from a different viewpoint: from the inside out, from the River itself rather than a distant look-out. The images are also taken at an unfamiliar time of day. Through the floating eye of the camera we see the River at dawn with its soft, subdued colours and unique misty veils that tease and disappear as daybreak turns into day. Through this double shift of perspective and time the exhibition wants us to look again (and again) at what might be a familiar landscape to those who live in the embrace of the Hawkesbury River.

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Despite their romantic moments, these are pictures of a cultural landscape, landscape as everyday life as it is lived in a place, a life transformed by topography and a topography transformed by life. Deerubbin and its margins is an Indigenous ‘Country’, a national park, a suburb on Sydney’s northern edge, a landscape crafted by generations of human action and activity. The images speak to the labour and leisure that are intertwined and enabled by Deerubbin, of oyster-farming, the daily migration of commuters, and weekends spent sailing, motor-cruising or fishing. Humans are put in their place here; present but not overbearing, integral but not dominant.

Pixellated yachts

• 

  Mother of millions takes to the waves

Darting at the moon

Crossland reflections

Sky trees

 

The empty world

Inside

Take-off

Under the eves

The River also shapes and is shaped by lives other than human. The exhibition draw our attention to the many more-than-humans that dwell and have dwelt here, especially to the birds—darters, white-faced herons, cormorants and white-bellied sea eagles—who have fished in the drowned river valley for thousands of years, and who possess a stunning resilience to changes not of their making or for their benefit. 

Waiting to hunt

A cormorant considers the apocalypse

Ink and water

White on grey

Casuarina and saltmarsh

Mangrove hieroglyphics

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Thomas on the water

Tiki hut

The sandbank at high tide

According to art historian Rachel Mclean Sailor, ‘creating and sharing photographs are acts of place-making’. Pictures make the places they portray. Viewing these photographs also makes visitors (you!) part of this place-making process. The exhibition does not just record Deerubbin; it frames and feeds the Deerubbin of our imaginations, it moulds our encounters with the River, and the way we might value it. Matthews’ pictures are an invitation for us, in the words of biologist and naturalist E.O Wilson, to ‘affiliate with other forms of life’ (1984). Deerubbin at dawn: river lives on the Hawkesbury invites us to care for the River because, as the conservation biologist Michael Soulé has suggested, ‘we only protect what we love’.

Ian Collinson

Co-director of the Environmental Humanities Research Stream, Faculty of Arts
Department of Media, Communication, Creative Arts, Languages and Literature

And suddenly fishermen

If you’d like to get more of a sense of the atmos of the gallery, here are some little videos with some of the soundtrack I had playing in the space to make it seem a little more… estuarine.

Two weeks of chatting to friends and blow ins, of zoom meetings with real-life mansion background, of selling a surprisingly large number of prints and 2021 Calendars (thank you generous pals and hooray for Christmas) and it was all over.

But not completely!  Buoyed by how enjoyable I found the whole thing, and cheered that people seemed to like my pics, I have another, much smaller exhibition happening in the front room of the Dangar Island Depot from January 24-March 6 2021.   It’s not many islands in a major river in Australia that are accessible by public transport but Dangar Island is one of them – jump off the train at Hawkesbury River Station (with its spanking new lifts, opened only last week) and onto the Brooklyn Ferry Service and you’re there.

And if you’re too far away to come along, you can buy prints of any of the photos on this post. Prices are between $60 and $350, depending on size. Or you can buy a 2021 calendar for $30.  Check out the images in the calendar here:

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