Mother Country
Reflections of Australian rural life
H E L G A L EU N I G
AUSTR
­ ALIAN PHOTOGRAPHIC GALLERY
Contents
Introduction by Cate Kennedy
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Home
16
Community
52
Miracles
76
Loss
102
Peace
132
Helga Leunig
159
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Introduction
An excuse to be fully present
I’ve just returned from nearly a year living on a tropical island and, armed
only with an iPhone, I seem to have managed to snap off nearly 3600
images during that time. I was shocked when I realised this – didn’t
realise it, in fact, until I received an alert that my Dropbox, that home
in the clouds for our terabits of data, was full. And 3600 photos? That
works out to something like thirty pictures a day. You’d think I never
moved that camera from the front of my face, and yet I can honestly say
it felt like I took photos only on occasional days, faced with exceptional
vistas and once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
No matter what it felt like, though, here I am now, back home,
confronted with thousands of photos stored in a microchip, about
to consign them to a giant file somewhere thanks to the unlimited
storage available to me and everyone with digital technology at their
fingertips. And thus, in the age of the selfie and the smartphone, those
moments become units of data, and ‘memory’ a word that means storage
capacity, and it becomes harder and harder, as we glut ourselves on selfdocumentation, to drag our eyes from the screen.
The image defines; the frame, still or moving, corroborates and certifies
our attendance somewhere. And in a world that seems bent on now
strapping on a GoPro and filming everything everywhere to stream it to
the world, intent in fact on commodifying our own lives as content for
mass consumption, it comes as a kind of sobering shock to be brought
back to our senses by photographs which quietly but insistently ask us to
pay attention to something entirely different.
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‘I don’t tend to plan or orchestrate pictures, I like to walk and look
and see what catches my eye,’ says Helga Leunig of her work. ‘It can be
anything. That’s the beauty of photography: it can help you to be totally
present to where you are, looking with an alert, open and feeling mind
and heart. Any situation can becoming interesting; the camera is really
just an excuse to be fully present to what’s happening around me…I’m
able to totally immerse myself in the visual world and allow myself to
respond intuitively to what I see around me, and express or make sense of
it with my camera.’
This meditative approach is imbued in these serene images. They slow us
right down. They make us look again at what we may, in our default state
of hurried distraction, have initially overlooked. To be alert, open and
feeling; to look with the mind and the heart simultaneously in raising
a camera lens to record a moment: what a universe away this is from
the compulsive daily snapping of thousands of snapshots and the aptly
named status updates. It demands a trust that our true subject matter is
out there, if we can just remove ourselves a little more mindfully from
the frame.
‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ said philosopher Henry David Thoreau in his
famous quote about trusting the state of mental openness, ‘and if I can
only walk with sufficient carelessness, I am sure to be filled.’
Looking through these photographs has been a homecoming of sorts for
me, as I have left the Pacific and returned to the northeast of Victoria,
where both Helga and I live. She has captured so perfectly the region’s
particular characteristics that my own homesickness for place struck me
with a visceral force as I sweated under tropical coconut palms, scrolling
hungrily through her images of foggy mountain tracks and dry golden
fields of grass which reminded me so intensely of the flora and fauna of
The last time it really snowed
Previous page: Plum tree
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Afternoon tea
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my own home, marvelling over her uncluttered, austere depiction of a
place where hillsides, remote roads, and small churches and halls are the
modest landmarks that create memory and meaning.
Life in the natural world seems balanced in an equipoise which is not
always readily apparent – the universe being a work in progress like
everything else in existence, including ourselves – and the photographs
in this collection honour both sides of the balancing scale – both the
transience of a captured, never-to-be-repeated moment (a cloud passing,
a rainbow, a snowfall) and the objects and places which have weathered
time’s passing and are testament, now, to a kind of worn, useful simplicity.
Helga has commented that her work is influenced by the Japanese
concept of wabi-sabi, the aesthetic principle that there is a beauty and
integrity in things which are imperfect, impermanent or incomplete.
‘If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene
melancholy and a spiritual longing,’ goes one definition, ‘then that object
could be said to be wabi-sabi.’ The concept has no exact translation into
English – indeed, it is a word widely regarded as being untranslatable –
but is generally understood as an appreciation of rustic simplicity,
modesty and quietness, along with a sense of the transience of existence
and an appreciation of the attrition that comes with time and use.
From the well-loved, well-used teacups which have survived generations
to the old fenderless car body slowly disappearing into the vegetation,
Helga’s images are permeated with this understanding. There is not
just an overriding feeling of serene melancholy, though, but something
steadfastly respectful in the ordinariness of her subject matter. These
objects have their custodians; the invisible hands that use them over
many years with care and tenderness, that keep plain, humble things
burnished with use. The floors that have been mopped and swept in the
aftermath of a celebration lie ready, clean and shining, for the next party.
The modest farmhouse that emerges out of the fog is not derelict, but
somebody’s haven. The beauty that catches Helga’s eye lies in austerity
rather than excess, or sometimes just a pleasing arrangement of lines
or soothing contours of a familiar landscape. Whatever she finds, the
beauty of her subject matter – its patterns, colours and contrasts – lies
in acknowledgement of impermanence. Things age, not always elegantly
or picturesquely. They deteriorate. Human treatment and the elements
cause them to rust, warp, crack, peel and fall apart, but still, they retain
some essential integrity that we cannot help but respond to.
If we can believe what scientists tell us – that at least half of the
human brain is dedicated to the task of attaching meaning to visual
signals – it doesn’t come as a surprise that visual imagery, unbound
by the constraints of language, plays such a major part in our shared
comprehension and the rush of pleasure and recognition that comes with
this connection. A photographer invites a viewer to share this ‘jolt’, to see
momentarily through their eyes, using the photograph they have made as
a conduit. When we engage in this way, the power of imagery is so strong
we can’t help but follow its resonance into our own lives: so much of
what is memorable is our own subjective reaction the image has triggered
in our thoughts as we’ve pondered it. Metaphor surges beneath our
response. Stories and impressions we thought we’d forgotten rise to the
surface. ‘It touched my soul’ people say in response to great art – another
concept which is indefinable and mostly untranslatable into words.
One of my favourite images, Bachelor’s pantry, with its glowing clutter of
enamel teapots, Pyrex glass jug, kerosene lantern and saved jars, has this
effect on me. This assemblage of humble items in a cupboard summons
all other senses upon viewing: the scent of wood fire and tea-leaves and
candlewax, the sound of cutlery scraping on china plates through long,
unhurried conversation, the burred feel of a scarred tabletop. There is
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no place this filling in of sensory detail could have come from except my
own consciousness, memory or imagination, but it is roused by a single
vivid image taken in a place I have never physically been. The art is in the
noticing; the gift of honouring the overlooked corners of the world with
compassionate attention.
Many years ago I bought an old house very like some of the cottages
depicted in this collection and a place in which the spirit of wabi-sabi,
I see now, was perfectly embodied. The first time I walked through it,
I reached out to grasp the dented brass doorknob leading into one of
its four rooms. Its battered metal surface, where countless hands had
touched it, still shone with use. At the same moment I looked down
to see I was standing on a wooden doorstep worn down into a deep,
smoothly cupped curve. How could this not be taken as a liminal
moment of symbolic significance? There I was in a doorway, standing on
a threshold, in a house which felt empty but at the same time absolutely
inhabited. Mentally, I felt myself adjusting focus. I was one of many.
It was my hand’s turn now, to burnish that old doorknob, still sound
and useful and lovely, my turn to tread a passage. There were plenty of
renovated houses with slick and fashionable remodellings, including
reproduction door hardware fashioned into facsimiles of this one, even,
as time went on, a marketed fashion of ‘shabby chic’ in which brand
new materials were deliberately ‘distressed’ to acquire the appearance
of being aged, as if that delusion would be enough to comfort us, but
nothing had the hold on me that this dented knob and worn-down step
provided. It’s the silent, useful, imperfect objects which resonate with
meaning, because they have been used and lived in, and endure. Now
I live in another weathered and well-used building, an old farm dairy,
not far from Helga Leunig’s farm in Victoria’s northeast. The floor dips
unevenly with a reminder of its previous incarnation, when it was daily
hosed out after milking. I sleep in the old feed loft, and wash clothes in
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the room where the milk and cream were separated. I touch each day in
passing, and with a kind of absent pleasure, the bricks of the wall with
their residual paint and soot, rebuilt from other, lost buildings, used
again now.
Sometimes my wandering attention is caught by how a patch of sun
makes these old bricks glow or how a solid old lintel, now a windowsill,
houses a quiet collection of seashells, and I find myself mentally framing
it, thinking it would make a good photograph, because we are first and
foremost visual thinkers and it is so soothing to dwell on a peaceful
corner of a quiet old building. I am lucky enough to have on the wall a
print of a Helga Leunig photograph, masterful in its austere and restful
stillness, drawing the eye, like a visual meditation, over and over as
the sun moves across the bricks. When Helga wrote and told me her
publishers had chosen this one image as the cover of this book, I felt a
ridiculous, unwarranted spurt of pride.
‘When I take photographs, I become totally immersed in the experience,
a little like the Buddhist practice of mindfulness,’ explains Helga. ‘When
a photograph is really working, to me it’s almost like a visual haiku.’
In relating how all-consuming the rest of life can become when time is
taken up ‘making home, raising children and putting down roots’, she
stresses how organic this process has needed to be over years of taking
pictures.
‘There wasn’t much planning or returning to places to wait for the right
light,’ she says. ‘If I had a camera with me, which certainly wasn’t all the
time, and I’d respond emotionally to something I saw, if it created a
feeling in me because of the subject matter, colour or light, I would take a
picture – not many pictures, just a few usually. Taking pictures of my own
life, community and surrounds was in the realm of possibility.’
The morning after Black Saturday
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Lumila’s blouse
Now that her children have grown and become independent, she finds
this process hasn’t changed, and if anything, has become even more
intrinsic to her work. While spontaneity is still very important, if other
people are with her, she tends not to take photographs. It remains a
solitary process of immersion and intuitive concentration.
‘I’m not very good with words,’ she says. ‘My mother was German and my
father was Polish, so language was always a bit of a struggle in my home.
I never felt comfortable expressing myself in words but the language of
pictures was something I felt much more comfortable with.’ Lumila’s blouse, in its depiction of a lovingly handworked blouse carefully
placed in a drawer in the Benalla Migrant Centre, aches with the stored
and folded dreams of homesick, uncertain people in a new country.
Helga’s own parents spent time living in this centre, and she captures,
with this eloquent single image, volumes of stories of homesickness and
displacement. Equally poignant is the Polish folk costume hung behind a
door at the same location, its bright, saturated colours sharply contrasted
against the softer, more diffuse light pouring through the curtain hanging
in the window beside it.
‘My parents were terribly homesick and I really wanted them to love
Australia,’ Helga comments of her own childhood. ‘Some of my pictures
have a melancholic atmosphere which partly celebrates and partly
still feels alienated from the local culture. My parents really struggled
making Australia home, and I don’t think I felt like a proper Australian
because of that… Taking photographs was a way of understanding my
environment and being present to its beauty and reality.’
This visual language distils and embeds its own stories into these pictures,
opening a path for the viewer, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally.
In The morning after Black Saturday, a gate stands open to a stretching
horizon of smoke and obscured mountains. It’s been opened to allow
fleeing stock to escape the fire, most probably, but now it’s also standing
open for us, quietly urging us to enter that shocked, charred territory that
now confronts us. This photo stands in eerie, echoing juxtaposition to
another gate, this one framing a driveway full of bare trees. This time it’s
a chilly winter fog rather than lingering smoke that obscures what waits
down the track, but the effect is just as inexorable.
The sense of aftermath in these pictures, though, isn’t always sombre. The
morning after the dance, where celebratory streamers and still-buoyant
balloons defy the clean emptiness of the swept hall, make me wish I’d
been there for the party the night before.
Trees are captured bursting into blossom, a glory that happens reliably,
unobserved, every spring. Afternoon tea is a beautiful testament to
waiting, and the traditional pride involved in creating hospitality. Every
teacup has its handle carefully turned to the right, even if not all of the
cups match their saucers. Past attrition is acknowledged, incorporated;
the important thing is the hospitality itself.
Paper lanterns, lit from within, evoke a lived world we can confidently
guess at – an outdoor community party, decorations made by kids,
somewhere, a big bonfire burning – but the beautiful subtle composition
of this photo, with its warm, haphazard cut-out windows of light, is what
provides the jolt of connection.
Just as satisfying is the colour field of The yellow kitchen, where a
geometric arrangement of yellow, white, cream and metallic grey is
perfectly offset by a small potplant placed almost, but not quite, at its
centre.
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Subdued light and a sense of quiet suffuse the image, as in so many of
Helga’s photographs. Whether taken inside or outside, they sing of home
and solace, or nurture and care.
Rescued joey, depicting a baby kangaroo wrapped in a woollen blanket of
a checked design found in a thousand country linen presses, highlights
its atmosphere of shelter, comfort and warmth through the kettle and
toaster visible in the background. Owen’s billy cart, made with old pram
wheels and an eye for dragster cool, stands ready on the track for further
punishment. A log in a red gum forest, fashioned into a horse, waits for a
child in need of a fantasy steed.
In a world so saturated with the recording of every experience, where
emotion itself often feels faked for the camera, what allows us to see
these photographs as art, and trust that the moments revealed to us are
authentic and unforced? I’m with nature writer Barry Lopez on this
one, when he talks in Crossing Open Ground about the way, as audience,
we trust the intentions of true storytellers. ‘The power of narrative to
nurture and heal,’ he comments, ‘to repair a spirit in disarray, rests on two
things: the skillful invocation of unimpeachable sources and a listener’s
knowledge that no subterfuge or hypocrisy is involved.’
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A small bird resting on a powerline, while a weather vane in an empty sky
points the windy way to migration and flight. The random, serendipitous
symmetry of a cloud in relation to two tranquil cows on a hillside. How
uncluttered these images are, leaving so much generous room for the
imagined and subjective narrative we step forward to supply, as viewers.
No subterfuge or hypocrisy, just the light that pours, blood-red,
electric with life, through the scarlet comb of a watchful prizewinning
rooster, the blue-painted timber behind the bird providing a perfectly
contrasting colour and making his feathers even snowier. The momentary
uncertainty of a small boy, a still point in a whirlpool of adults dancing
around him. A cat and dog sprawled in utter contentment on the floor
beneath a table. All small, random moments in a world caught in a frenzy
of self-documentation, all ephemeral, prosaic and easily missed, until
someone, rambling home from a solitary walk and with an eye for the
moment, raises a camera and focuses with a steady and careful hand;
seeing the frame, seeing the gift.
Cate Kennedy
Perfect spring day
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