Alice Springs

I used to live in Alice Springs, I know it well. It's like a second home and I return whenever I can to visit friends and reacquaint myself with the country. And so, in July I spent three weeks there with the added goal of extending my edge project. While I planned to take photographs, I was not at all sure what I would photograph. I knew that I wouldn’t be photographing landscapes, even though the country tempts you to do this at every turn. And when I thought about the township of Alice Springs no ideas came to mind immediately.

And so, I walked and looked and waited for the idea to emerge. It wasn’t long before the I noticed the ugliness of the ubiquitous metal fences. I realised that my aesthetic mind usually deletes these metal fences from my vision but now my inquisitive mind led me up and down every laneway in Old Eastside and after three weeks I was becoming an expert.

As I walked, photographing fences, I was thinking about the function of fences, both keeping in and keeping out. I was thinking about laneways as boundaries, in-between spaces and thoroughfares. And as I walked I found myself listening to the sounds as I passed, dogs barking, music playing and the sound of people going about their daily lives.

But things in Alice Springs are never one dimensional and several days after I arrived my thinking was challenged. I attended a floor talk by a group of artists whose exhibition, ‘Dream of Home’, was showing at the Araluen Art Centre. Jennifer Taylor and the indigenous artists that she had collaborated with talked about their project and their ideas about home. It was very moving. During the presentation a local Arrernte woman, Doris, explained how Alice Springs was her home, how it was her only home and that it had always been her family’s home. She described her struggle in coming to terms with the reality of settlers claiming land, building without consultation with the original residents,  destroying special places and irretrievably changing her home. She referred to her son, David Mpetyane, and his painting and linked poem (both titled Fertility). Together they express something about the their family's experiences. Now, as I walk, I sense a completely different map hidden underneath my feet as I traverse the gridded pattern of settlers' laneways.

 

While in Alice, I was also touched by other poets who write about the centre of Australia. I read Ali Cobby Eckermann’s Ruby Moonlight, a moving novel in verse about the impact of colonisation. Also, a small collection of poems In the Pink written during a cafe poet program led by Sue Fielding captured my imagination. This inspired me to find more poetry from the centre and thanks to Red Kangaroo Books I now have a small but growing collection of poetry publications from the centre.