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“Mount Bogong has a native name. ‘Bo’ is an Aboriginal word meaning ‘big’ and ‘Bogong’ is thought to be the Aboriginal equivalent of ‘the big one’.” Alan Fairley, A Field Guide to National Parks of Victoria, 1982.
Big: synonym of large, great, huge, giant, massive. Even in Bogong village, where the trace of human settlement are reduced to the minimum and the remains of an artificial past can be recognised, nature is mighty. Everything is powerful and at the same time fragile, familiar but rare, complex but naturally simple, exposed but sheltered, wrapped but at the same time naked. Nature is surrounded by artificial signs and the territory is controlled by human activity. Water is everywhere. It fills my eyes and my ears. In the dark of evening, when I arrived with Madelynne (residency facilitator) it was the first perceptible and audible presence. These days I am taking photos of the Kiewa hydro-electric scheme following lakes, rivers, waterfalls and dams. I look at the territory as a visual hieroglyph, in which everything is part of a larger symbolic whole connected by water. I isolate, preserve and show as one moment subtracted from a continuum. Capturing at the same time transforming the moment privileging an immersed point of view in a poetic union of solid and ephemeral.