Land of Oz
When answering her phone, the writer Dorothy Parker greeted her caller with, “What fresh hell is this?”. Today and in a rather different context, her words come to mind when I think of the state of our country. Like many of my fellow Australians, I worry about our future; about our moral compass as a nation and how, politically, we have arrived at what might arguably be the strangest yet most fragile of history’s intersections.
It’s through this looking glass, examining everyday life along Australia’s arterial highways and secondary roads, that this project is being explored.
Land of Oz is a work-in-progress that explores the surreal nature of the Australian landscape and the multiple and varied narratives of our past and present. I am particularly interested in stories that speak of connection to land and the ways in which this connection is integral to the formation of one’s identity. Our relationship to Australia’s many different landscapes is a fundamental part of how we occupy space in this country and more interestingly, perform who we (think we) are. These ideas are what interest me most and form the heart of this project, ie. how we perform our ‘Australian-ness’; how we mythologise our history and how the Australian landscape plays a key role in everything.
All histories are complex by nature: indeed, one might ask who holds the privilege of telling it? By documenting the quotidian and the obscure, my intention is to reflect a broader contemporary narrative about how we imagine ourselves in our own communities but also as a nation. “Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?” are age-old questions that underpin the premise of this work.
The overall project will form nine chapters: one for each state and territory.
