A photographer's vision and a novelist's musings give an insight into an Australia far from the tourist trails.
“Everyone’s a photographer.” You hear that a lot these days; sometimes (accompanied by a sigh) from professional photographers. It is certainly true that the ubiquity of point-and-shoot cameras and mobile phones with in-built lenses means that most people have the capacity to take and share pictures. Good for them, too. Many will be delighted with their results. But that doesn’t make them photographers.
What’s the difference? You can argue for hours about this. In the end, though, it comes down to a simple concept: seeing things. For all the advances in camera technology, one thing hasn’t changed – that mysterious, sometimes mystical, thing called the photographer’s eye.
Sometimes it’s about angles: Elliott Erwitt getting down to ground-level to photograph a dog. Sometimes it’s about seeing beauty or patterns in an urban streetscape: Trent Parke playing with patterns of shadows and light in downtown Sydney. Sometimes the critical factor is being there: Paul Featherstone positioning himself in the right place to capture, with his camera, the expression on Stuart Diver’s face after finally being freed from his tomb on Thredbo in 1997.
Often it’s all about the light. One of the striking things about Martin Mischkulnig’s photographs in Smalltown is that a great many have been taken in direct sunlight. No eyesore or blemish can be hidden in such unforgiving light. And this is largely the point. Its publishers describe Smalltown as “a beautiful book about ugliness”. This oversimplifies things and does Mischkulnig an injustice. His mission was not to seek out either beauty or its opposite. Instead, he has said, he “set out to document the feeling and quality of what small-town Australia is. I don’t believe that Australians have comfortably settled into their environment and from this I sense a yearning for place”.
These are not photographs likely to be used on tourism posters or record covers. They are pictures, often, of emptiness – huge skies, distant horizons, seemingly endless roads or railway lines. People appear in just a handful, and only a few of them are smiling for the camera. Yet the impact of people on the natural environment is everywhere – sometimes as obvious as a graveyard of rusted cars; at others it is more subtle, such as a lone McDonald’s sign in an otherwise featureless landscape beside a NSW highway. Mischkulnig, whose heritage is Austrian, had parents who ran motels in South Australia. Perhaps this explains his fascination with roadhouses, cafeterias, takeaway joints, petrol stations – places where people stop for a while and then move on.
Often there is much more in his photographs than is first apparent: they repay close attention. Look closely at a graffitti-covered wall in what looks like a kitchen in Mannahill, South Australia and you see WE’RE GEOLOGISTS, NOT ECOLOGISTS! A small sticker on a vehicle towing fairground equipment in Roxby Downs, also in SA, says GIVE BLOOD RIDE BULLS. Amongst the everyday names (Roy, Jack, Dave) on a blackboard by a pool table in South Queenstown, Tasmania, is Goose. Mischkulnig sees things others wouldn’t even notice: an incongruous toy car by the roadside in a deserted street; spectral goalposts guarding an empty footy field without a blade of grass.
He shares this perceptiveness eye for detail with Tim Winton, who has written a rather earnest essay that precedes the photographs in Smalltown. Winton describes how he came to live in “a town of six hundred people [in WA]…beyond the reach of the dozen tawdry franchises that constitute civilization as we have come to know it.” He loves, he writes, “the tat that coastal people people drape from their eaves and nail to their walls… I take an interest in what locals leave on their windowsills and doorsteps. A jar full of sea-glass. An arrangement of dried sponges. A nest of abalone shells.”
Such things would also interest Mischkulnig – except that, in Smalltown, his focus is inland. There is no water in these photographs. The sea-monster – or could it be Nessie? – made of tyres and metal that features on the book’s cover rises from an arid sea of bleached sand in Lochiel, South Australia. It’s a wonderful, wry image, yet it will never, ever, be used as a backdrop for a choir of kiddies in pristine white shirts singing about calling Australia home.
For this is an Australia foreign to most Australians. Winton can number himself among the fewer than 14 per cent of the population who live outside the coastal cities. To those in such cities – where, of course, most decisions about the Australian media are made – many of the scenes in Smalltown will seem as foreign as pictures from, say, Alaska or Siberia. It is generally only when small-town Australia is hit by either natural disasters or crime that mainstream (metropolitan) media takes notice. How many people would have heard of Snowtown, in South Australia, if not for an especially gruesome series of murders? Play a word association game with Port Arthur and the response is less likely to be “convicts” or “Tasmania” than “massacre” or “shooting”. The scars of crime are indelible.
Mischkulnig looks at remote, though far from untouched, parts of Australia with an unblinking gaze. While the photographs are non-judgemental, Winton decries “an implacable ugliness that cannot be blamed on the natural environment”. People stuff places up, he argues, especially where pragmatism counts for more than aesthetics. “Cross any desert in the interior and you will eventually come to a town with fuel and water – just don’t expect it to be any kind of oasis.” But this outback Australian ugliness, transporting Robin Boyd into the sticks, is not unique to remote parts of the country. In every major city in Australia there are places that are never featured on postcards sold at souvenir stalls. In outer suburbs and industrial estates you encounter an empty ugliness that even a wordsmith like Winton would struggle to render as poetry.
He does not try to romanticise the Australia portrayed by Mischkulnig in Smalltown. But nor does he want to come across as a knocker. “There’s no antipathy here, no assumption of superiority,” Winton writes. “These are not the musings of a visitor so much as the uncomfortable impressions of someone talking about home.” He is an Australian, reflecting on places that Qantas passengers will fly over but seldom see. To some degree, he understands why remote places are as ugly as they are. But, rather like a teacher in a school report, Winton believes that residents could do better. “Living in a tiny community in a rugged landscape requires a form of hardiness I admire. My hope is that soon the hardy will not fear beauty but expect it.”
It’s a shame that Winton doesn’t directly refer to any of Mischkulnig’s photographs. The text and pictures coexist between the covers rather like two strangers on a train sitting silently on either side of an aisle. I would have welcomed some commentary by Mischkulnig himself about his work, and how the photographs were taken, although a desire to let the striking images speak for themselves is understandable. I suspect it was either him, or the book’s designer, who insisted on the (very brief) captions being down the down the back of the book, separate from the photographs. While this may be aesthetically pleasing, it is also inconvenient and leads to a lot of flipping back and forwards.
Mischkulnig has roamed far and wide across Australia, yet his focus is on a handful of states. More than two-thirds of his photographs were taken in either Western Australia or South Australia – the majority in the west. What does it say about Australia that the biggest state may be the spiritual home of small towns?
In this sense, Smalltown is not representative of Australia. Then again, it’s not trying to be. And it’s almost certainly a more accurate depiction of this country than anything you’ll see as backdrops behind those kiddies singing about calling Australia home. Or, for that matter, what you’ll see presented as “national” news on major TV stations in any capital city.
Smalltown, photography by Martin Mischkulnig, essay by Tim Winton, is published by Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin Australia, rrp $75.
Alan Attwood is a Walkley Award-winning journalist. A former New York correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, he has been editor of The Big Issue since 2006
All images by Martin Mischkulnig.
