Peta Clancy

Confluence photographic series was created in response to historic photographs taken at the Merri Creek and Birrarung confluence that are held in the State Library of Victoria collection. Generally thinking, historic photographs of the Australian landscape were ‘taken’ through a colonialist objectifying lens depicting the land as devoid of knowledges, narratives, histories of Country and Place and without consultation with Traditional Custodians. They are taken using an extractive perspective and convey land as something which can be owned, altered or overcome.

Confluence was premised on an in-depth depiction of Place where two bodies of water, the Merri Creek and Birrarung, come together on a culturally significant part of Wurundjeri Country. As Tony Birch wrote: This is an ancient landscape with rock formations between 100 to 400 million years old, yet it is also “a very recent landscape. There’s also a touch of geographical deception here. What we think or what is, in fact, today’s meeting of two waterways, is a very recent phenomenon in regard to Aboriginal Deep Time.” The trajectory of the waterway was altered in the 1970s when the land was gouged away by earthworks during the development of Melbourne’s eastern freeway, undertaken with little regard for the cultural and environmental significance for Wurundjeri Country or people.

The photographs were created utilising a performative process of returning to the exact same location with large-scale prints. On Country the photographs are attached to a frame, the print is cut into and then rephotographed. The process of layering evokes multiple time frames and perspectives. As such it reflects on the experience of Aboriginal people looking at Country. Bundjalung writer Melissa Lucashenko wrote; “It is like having double vision. We see the world that white people see but we are also seeing a mythic landscape at the same time and an historic landscape.” The photographs reflect on the complexities of photographing Country and the impossibility of a photograph to record or reveal memory, history and narratives of place or temporality from the past two hundred and fifty years (since invasion), around 80,000 years (for Traditional Custodians) or 100 to 400 million years (the age of the geological formations).

Confluence was developed following cultural consultation from Wurundjeri Traditional Custodians Aunty Julieanne Axford and Aunty Gail Smith from the Wurundjeri woi-wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation. Peta Clancy would like to thank Les Walkling for his collaboration with the production of the prints. The series was first shown in a solo exhibition at Dominik Mersch Gallery in Sydney in 2022 and subsequently further developed for the group exhibition Slippery Images, Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria in 2023.