Riverine

Over the last four years, long-time friends Raymond Arnold, Ian Westacott and John Wolseley have camped each autumn by the Banyena/Richardson River on the Bonnie Brae property situated in western Victoria’s Wimmera region. They have been making paintings and etchings of the ephemeral river systems and the trees that border them. As the project evolved they found that their works were becoming something of a multi-faceted survey of this Wimmera landscape, a complex environment that has changed conspicuously over the years. Much time was spent discussing the forces and factors involved in its history, particularly the radical clearance of trees. Rains and floods which once had been filtered and spread over the wooded terrain moved swiftly over the cleared land and surged into the river channels, deepening them and causing the water to hurtle down toward Lake Buloke. More recently, it was noted, there had been consequential changes to the water flow allocated to this and other river systems by water policy managers. All this was reflected in the growth and curious behaviour of the trees, which had grown up during this time. Some of the huge and dead river red gums at Bonnie Brae bore witness to these significant human-induced changes.

The artists made camp in a patch of original forest almost surrounded by a curl of the river. This was a wonderful base from which to investigate the riverine ecosystems. Property hosts, the McAllister family, shared all of the historical, agricultural and ecological aspects of the farm. Moving to farm in more regenerative ways, it is clear just how much they have been able to adapt and restore this previously damaged landscape, bringing it back to a more ecologically balanced and fecund state.

Raymond and Ian live in very different landscapes. Raymond based in Queenstown, Tasmania, is famous for his paintings and huge multiple-plate etchings of rocks and mountains. Parallel to his work in the landscape he has made work that explores the history of intaglio printing and its origins in the decorations of medieval armour. His interest in military fashions and equipage as they relate to the soldier’s body is somehow echoed in the ways he has imagined the torsos, trunks and bark of the river red gums in this exhibition.

Ian grew up in Myrtleford in the high country of Victoria and moved to Scotland in the 1990s. His long-time obsession with drawing and etching the native trees of Great Britain has given him insights into the way trees grow in different environments. When doing his degree at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1987 he worked on a series of monumental etchings of engineering workshops and the plant and machinery in them. Years later he seems to bring the same analytic enquiry into the complex machinery of these extraordinary trees.

John, though known for his paintings of desert country and the tropical north, began painting Mallee country and the box ironbark forests when he moved to live in the Whipstick forest near Bendigo in the 1980s. Since 2018 he has had a number of shows devoted to patterns of land use and regenerative farming in New South Wales and western Victoria. It was while researching for the exhibition Earth Canvas (2020-22) that environmentalist and Landcare advocate Rob Youl introduced him to the McAllister family and their farm near St Arnaud. Since then he has spent a lot of time exploring and painting the Banyena/Richardson River, and the birds and insects which dwell in the ancient trees.