Max Dupain, page 33
The Paris experience was wonderful and did everything to consolidate my thinking. Thanks to you again …
Every good wish
Max Dupain23
Back on home ground, Dupain had regained his equilibrium. But his positive reassessment of the Paris trip in his letter to Seidler did not indicate a change of heart, either about the experience itself or the prospect of future international travel. Perversely, the consolidation of thinking he mentions confirmed views he had held since the Second World War, rather than any new perspective the trip to Paris had generated. His conviction that travelling overseas was totally unnecessary did not falter and he never left Australia again. In 1991, a few months before his death, he told journalist Peter Ross that the trips to Paris, Bangkok and other places ‘only reinforced my belief that we have it all here’.24 Dupain never spelled out what ‘it’ constitutes – what exactly we have in Australia – but it does not matter. His phrase ‘it all’ is capacious and he redefined it at will.
What was consistent was his view of Australia as a settler culture whose national identity was too young to have fully developed and whose First Nations history was not recognised (but rather was excluded). He said, for example, ‘We haven’t got anything to compare with the tradition and flavour of Europe, but that’s not the point. We’re aware of the land here . . . we are aware of the country itself; but the finer sensibilities are still missing in Australia whereas they’re two bob a dozen in Europe.’25
The so-called ‘Paris experience’ showed that Dupain’s third world, involving his construction of self, was entangled with a deeply conservative view of Australia as a place, a culture and a society (but not necessarily as a nation). Staying home was his way of remaining authentic and keeping his true self intact. Leaving home was frightening and exacerbated his feelings of self-doubt. In 1980 he justified his stance, again from a defensive position, saying: ‘I figure that whatever quality you have, it is within yourself. You won’t get it, no matter how far you go for it. I stayed in Australia because I wanted to work out my own [inner] resources.’26
The landscape
Landscape is the one constant in Dupain’s oeuvre that until the 1960s was characterised by its eclecticism. (Experimental photography, photographs of people, and nude studies were not part of his later work, which split more neatly into photographs either of the natural or built worlds.) His landscape photography also stands out for its consistency across several decades in which major changes in political and cultural attitudes occurred in Australia. These culminated in the success of the 1967 referendum, which empowered the federal government to formally acknowledge that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were members of the Australian population (until then they had not been included in the census); the rise of Indigenous self-determination and Land Rights movements; and the election of the socially progressive, reformist Labor government (1972–75) led by Gough Whitlam.
Dupain was interested in and supportive of Aboriginal people, their art and culture, and contributed to fundraising efforts for land rights in the early 1980s. But, as was standard across media in settler landscapes from the late 1920s to the 1970s, acknowledgement of the 65,000 years of the continuous history of First Nations peoples was not apparent in his imagery. This absence was pervasive – related to what in 1968 anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner famously termed ‘the great Australian silence’, writing: ‘What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale. We have been able for so long to disremember the aborigines [sic] that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so.’1 Dupain’s friend Axel Poignant was an exception in his concern with representing contemporary Aboriginal life and its traditions in Arnhem Land in sympathetic documentary images.
Canberra landscape, c.1941–1948, image from Dupain’s negative, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
In common with the paintings of Hans Heysen and Elioth Gruner, which Dupain admired as a young man, and the pictorialist photographs of Harold Cazneaux and J.B. Eaton, Dupain’s imagery present a settler’s ‘god’s-eye’ perspective of a landscape. His vision is expansive and accommodating – taking in evidence of human habitation (small towns, houses, roads) and productive, utilitarian activity (farming animals and crops, timber felling, and mining). His book Max Dupain’s Australian Landscapes (1988), which is the summation of his landscape photography, treats the category of landscape loosely. Several industrial and mining scenes are featured along with the expected images of the settled landscape. Dupain described the CSR oil rigs he photographed in 1987 as being ‘set in the wilds of the Simpson desert’ and without any apparent irony gave works such titles as Landscape with power pole (1940s).
Photographs taken at the coast, which Dupain also categorised as landscapes, often have people in them – running and walking on the beach, swimming, or exploring rock pools on the shoreline. These beachgoers are not the subjects of the images, nor are they intruders into or disruptors of the scene. Instead their presence is shown to be natural and acceptable; they are the coastal equivalents to the campers and hikers who appear as incidental details in other landscapes taken inland and in the bush.
The uniformity of Dupain’s landscape imagery from its inception in the late 1920s to the 1970s is disrupted only twice – first by a small group of pictorialist photographs, and then more than a decade later by his views of Central Australia in 1943, when he was working as a camouflage officer. The pictorialist photographs, including Flight of the spectres, are not of immediately recognisable Australian scenes and in Dupain’s assessment were excessively emotional, whereas the photographs of Standley Chasm Angkerle Atwatye and Simpsons Gap Rungutjirpa display an alien grandeur. Dupain later explained that travelling through Central Australia in the Northern Territory in the 1940s, he was struck by the ‘unforgettable sights for which, as coastal inhabitants, we were totally unprepared. Great rearing cliffs of red granite arching into pure cobalt, and white-trunked eucalypts sprouting from their flanks. It was like grand drama of the highest order, and of course I photographed it thoroughly before a reluctant departure.’2 He also enjoyed the ‘wonderful, luscious landscape of the Cairns area’.3
The point about being a coastal inhabitant is crucial, for the bulk of Dupain’s landscape photography was concentrated in a relatively small geographical area along the coast of New South Wales. Newport and the Hawkesbury area north of Sydney, Toowoon Bay on the Central Coast, and Culburra Beach on the South Coast were places he knew exceptionally well through repeat visits and extended periods of leisure. He referred to such beautiful sites as the ‘balm of hurt minds’4, relating Macbeth’s plea for untroubled rest to his own.
In his landscape photography in the post-war years Dupain did not seek wildness or the sublime, but familiarity and stability. Reassuring bucolic, sometimes bland scenes predominate. The lessons of Henry Gibbons, who taught him painting at the Julian Ashton Art School, were habitual by this point, evident in compositions structured in a clear, logical way, with the viewer’s eye being led mostly from a dark foreground to a lighter background (occasionally the reverse, but for a dramatic rather than disorienting effect). There is a pleasing spaciousness to the scenes, with their extensive tracts of land and big, often cloud-filled skies, and textures abound – of grass, rock, timber, water, usually rendered in raking light. Tones vary across the spectrum but, as is typical of Dupain’s mature work, the blacks are strong. These strategies work together to ensure the images have immediate impact.
However, in the late 1970s, Dupain’s landscape photography took an imaginative leap – surprisingly so for a man not prone to changing his mind or direction. He may have been spurred on by the recognition that the 1975 Australian Centre for Photography retrospective had conferred on him and the desire to make new work, but he also had to adapt to issues associated with his age and health. Walking long distances across rough country, carrying heavy equipment, and setting up his tripod and large-format camera had become too taxing, so he was forced to reassess what he could physically achieve. His response was inspired – he turned to his immediate environment and redefined his landscape photography in the process. Around 1979 Dupain started photographing in urban gardens, including his own, at night, works he entitled collectively Landscapes by night. At the same time, he returned to still lifes of flowers, most of which he set up indoors in the Artarmon studio. Both series were physically less demanding to produce, but they still dealt with the natural world; they also saw the introduction of a heightened level of mystery.
The garden at Castlecrag came into its own as a site and subject for a compressed period, from 1979 to the early 1980s. Dupain knew every centimetre of the difficult, steep site intimately, having tended it for more than thirty years, but its significance shifted to something more abstract than previously. Less a theatre for the physical act of gardening and exercise of human control, and more a site for observation and reflection about nature. Gradually, his garden became transformed into a microcosm, a reduced, intense space in which he could closely study the natural world. Later Dupain explained, ‘This tiny fragment of landscape is but a symbol of the workings of nature in my own personal territory.’5 As a site and a symbol it stimulated his creativity.
The night photographs have no concern with intimacy, specificity or detail – place is unidentifiable, and neither people nor signs of their habitation are evident. To achieve drama and mystery he used floodlighting, which allowed him to ‘isolate the subject from its context’ and ‘get down to the bare essentials, just the necessary bits. It is the reduction of complexity to simplicity.’6 The essentials were confined to rocks and trees or other vegetation. Magnification also has a vital role. Looking at these images is like looking through a telescope or microscope – you lose a sense of the size of things and how they relate to human scale. Landscapes by night celebrates the impersonality and indifference of nature; the images are disorienting, grand, sublime.
Some of the night photographs of landscapes were exhibited in Max Dupain: New Work, Old Work and Very Old Work at the ACP in 1983. In the accompanying brochure Dupain referred to the famous lines from William Blake’s poem ‘Auguries of Innocence’ – ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a WildFlower’ – which had virtually become his credo. He drew a connection between the rapturous encounter with nature and the ‘mightiest achievement of man’, both of which ‘can stir the photographer to an infinite depth of feeling. What matters is not what is out there but in here in the mysterious effervescences storming around in the solar plexus.’7 The night photographs and flower studies attracted a positive critical response from Robert McFarlane, who saw ‘real kinship’ between the two groups. He particularly admired the night photographs, which depict ‘an ancient landscape with earth-scars measured in millennia’, and speculated they might be ‘the key to a future evolution of Dupain’s vision’.8
The night photographs represent one of the biggest shifts in Dupain’s thinking across his long career – from an overtly nationalistic to a more universalistic position. This universalism is based on an attraction to what is permanent, enduring and elemental, and a desire to represent the wonders of nature, universal Nature. Rocks were therefore ideal subjects. Those Dupain discovered at South West Rocks on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales had the requisite qualities. Of them he wrote: ‘These rocks of the sea are different [from those in Hawkesbury sandstone country] . . . they are worn and more prostrate, having been bashed by the sea for thousands of years. Their textures haunt me as the forms float in a storm-wracked and sullen sea.’9 Despite the onslaught from waves and weather they have not been obliterated, thus symbolising the heroic survival Dupain normally attributed to animate beings.
In 1988 – the two hundredth anniversary of the British invasion of Australia and the peak of nationalist pride – Dupain published Max Dupain’s Australian Landscapes, which was squarely aimed at the popular market. It includes his important essay, aptly titled ‘Harmonious confrontations’, in which he invokes nature rather than nation. He hoped the ‘book will bring a deeper awareness of natural forces to all who view it’ and reiterated his belief that ‘peace . . . and involvement with the natural environment [is] necessary for civilised man’s survival’.10 He was very aware of the groundswell of conservation and environmental activism in Australia, whether the campaign against the Tasmanian government’s plan to dam the Franklin River to generate hydro-electricity (1978–83), or the Green Bans movement in Sydney in the early 1970s formed to protect urban bushland and ensure sensitive development. But, as Gael Newton observed, Dupain ‘was not a joiner or follower of teams’.11 He was a Labor voter but kept his politics to himself. His book of Australian landscapes was the closest he came to aligning his work with contemporary politics, albeit in generalised terms. He concluded his text with a statement that echoes Llewelyn Powys, proclaiming, ‘Nature, forever unvanquished by the ages, is a bounteous blessing to the life of man. We all need nature far more than nature needs us. This indifferent unstoppable movement between man and nature will continue to the end of time.’12
Ahead of the book’s publication Dupain drafted a letter to Australian poet, conservationist and campaigner for Indigenous rights Judith Wright, inviting her to write a foreword (it is not known if he sent the letter or if she replied). He told Wright that he admired and honoured her activism for the protection of rainforests and the Great Barrier Reef.13 When his proposal did not progress, he turned to another major literary figure – poet Rosemary Dobson, a friend of Wright’s. In her eloquent foreword Dobson speaks of Dupain’s recognition of the threats posed by ‘the materialism and manipulations of our society’ and offers a poetic response to the illustrations.
Again and again one looks at these photographs and thinks, ‘Yes, that’s how it is.’ That is the way the timbered mountains slope to the water as though dipping paws in the ocean. Yes, here is the immensely complicated structure of bare willow branches. This is the way the early morning sunlight shimmers on the sea. And here, not seen in this way before, are the tenderly grouped flowers of the blueberry ash. And just so are the cracks and fissures of immense rocks, thrown about by a glacier a million years ago. There are surprises and recognitions, and confirmations here.14
Max Dupain’s Australian Landscapes points to the environmental turn in Dupain’s thinking but, as mentioned, it is within a framework riven with contradictions and compromises. After all, he was working as an industrial and corporate photographer who documented the devastation and destruction of the natural environment caused by his clients’ activities. He alluded to this conundrum in some of his captions, with statements such as ‘Animal life has receded as man has advanced’ and ‘Mammon prevails’.
The personal identification with nature’s suffering at the hands of humans culminated in his series Death of a tree (1986). Dupain could not have known it at the time – he was still hoping to get back into landscape photography a few months before he died – but the series marked an end to his long devotion to the genre. He had come across dead trees, felled trees, charred trees on a hillside at Kangaloon in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, where Diana had a property (originally owned by Rex), and explained what motivated him to photograph them in an emotional statement: ‘I was moved to sympathy and anger by the thoughtless destruction of what must once have been gigantic and proud trees. Death in a landscape, in no uncertain terms. I was fortunate in having cloud patterns to enhance the silhouettes of writhing limbs. I shuddered at the barbarism of man.’15 The trees’ trunks and limbs are a grotesque mess that he made no attempt to prettify: the light is harsh, the trunks’ textures are hard, and the tones are black.
Death of a tree, Kangaloon no. 1, in Australian Landscapes, Viking, Victoria, 1986, page 58
In the mid-1980s Dupain also contextualised the assault on nature that so distressed him, in terms of the stark differences in approaches between settler Australians and First Nations peoples.
Man’s intrusion into the land, his rape of it, his ignorant, blustering unsympathetic attitude to the land is a story that would fill volumes. The Aboriginals . . . instinctively did the right thing and moved from site to site . . . They never ate a place out but moved judiciously allowing a worked-out place to recuperate.16
There was wildness in the garden at Castlecrag and an uneasy detente between humans and nature. As Dupain saw it, the terms of co-existence were inherently short term and provisional – he believed that nature’s powerful forces inevitably triumph over humans and the human dimension (his loose reference to the built world). At Castlecrag, ensconced in a comfortable domestic realm, he witnesses nature’s phenomenal power and is thrilled by it. He writes vividly of violent storm activity – when ‘lightning splits the sky in forms of brilliant yellow. Roaring bull-thunder follows fast’ and ‘all [is] humid, torrid, windless, mindless’.17 This display of ‘nature’s excess’ and its assault on the senses awes him, prompting him to dismiss something as minor as photography and by implication human artistic endeavour: ‘How marvellous!’ he exclaims. ‘Why do we need picture shows and circuses? It is all too sacrosanct to photograph, too amorphous and too vast.’18
Outside in his garden he watches the ceaseless struggle for survival occurring on a micro level, but not merely as a passive observer. He is also a violent actor, a self-described murderer who feels the pain of his actions.
In our native home garden, utterly passive in appearance and character, tiny worms eat their way into the thryptomene bushes; they build a wonderful protective wall around their entrance. It is faultlessly camouflaged. Civilised man enters the scene. He loves the thryptomenes and hates the death-dealing worms. He wipes away the soft protective wall and pierces the entrance hole with a fine copper wire. Up and up it goes, this destroyer of worm life; the contact can be felt as the point penetrates and it kills the worm instantly. There is no pain except in the heart of the murderer. A week later the cosy, wet timber nest is inhabited once more by a brother worm, and the whole cycle starts all over again. Survival, survival, survival at all costs. It is total cut and thrust or else.19
