Waterways as metaphors: an interview with Peta Clancy

Peta Clancy, Confluence 4, Pigment Inkjet Print, 100 x 150cm. 2022. Courtesy Peta Clancy and Dominik Mersch Gallery

A beautiful photograph of the confluence of the Merri Merri (Merri Creek) with the Birrarung (The Yarra) is currently on exhibition at The Ian Potter Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria Australia.

The image has an ethereal glow, with colours of rusted orange and faded green. The ghostly tree trunks are slightly blurry and the areas in shade, mysterious and impenetrable. The time that the photo was taken is unclear; morning or evening, this century or last? The photos have a jarringly empty feel, leading the viewer to ask themselves: “What has happened? What has been left out?”

The photograph is by Peta Clancy, a descendant of the Yorta Yorta people. The consistent theme of her work is the hidden history of waterways and the need to draw attention to their cultural significance, pre and post-colonisation. Peta’s work focusses on many creeks and rivers across South Eastern Australia, from the Dungala (Murray river) on Yorta Yorta country, the Bulutjal Yaluk (Loddon River) on Djaara (Dja Dja Wurrung Country), to the Broong-ku-galk (Watts river), the Merri Merri & the Birrarung on Wurundjeri Woi-Wurrung country.

Her work, in part, arises from studying early colonial photographs featuring waterways. She talks about one particular photograph by Nicholas Caire that had been turned into a postcard promoting the early settlement.
“In the photograph you can see the Dungala (Murry River) running past. You can see 4 men in traditional bark canoes and there’s a number of Aboriginal women on the side on the bank…I’d been looking at this photograph for a while. And then I came across this postcard (the circulated image), I noticed the women had been cropped out of the photograph and the image made more blurred, blending Aboriginal people into the background. So there’s this erasure that’s happening.”

In response to this erasure and the covering up of Indigenous history, Peta makes multilayered photographs.
“I go there (for example, the confluence of the Merri Merri and the Birrarung) with my large format camera, (and I) process the negatives, scan them and then print the photographs out and take them back to exactly the same location and put them on to a frame and cut into them and re photograph, so you have these multiple layers in the final image. Thinking about what’s covered in terms of history and peeling back layers as well.”
“Using Large format onto film: the process really slows you down, using the same materials that colonials used…. (You)…Really think about the composition and spend a lot more time. I’m interested in collaborating with Country to make photographs…. (when prints are taken back to the site)… The wind moves them, it becomes like a sail and the light reflects, and thinking about the agency of Country and what that means and how we relate to Country, not as land, but as a living entity, with agency.”

In consultation with the Wurrundjeri Woi-Wurrung, Peta’s work has explored Merri Merri. She has walked beside the Merri Merri and understood the need for continuous access to the creek banks, a place of immense cultural import. Peta highlights the sad fact that the confluence of the Merri Merri and the Birrarung has been irrevocably altered since it was dynamited to allow the construction of the Eastern Freeway. The confluence is no longer where it was. As she puts it: “It’s a metaphor for all these significant places for traditional custodians. They are just changed and covered over.”

Peta has also made art about the Coburg lake, looking at its different uses through history and the colonial obsession with control of waterways. Amongst other things, she focussed on how the lake was created and how the rocks were taken out of the Merri Merri (the rocky rocky creek) and used to dam it, highlighting the poignancy of the creek’s rocks being used “to destroy itself.” Peta wants to encourage the viewer to “think about the damming, what is under the water and to think about the history and memory of culture that has been drowned when we create these lakes and weirs.”

Peta Clancy, Deep time and now 3 from the Confluence series, Pigment Inkjet Print, 40.6 x 52.6cm. 2022. Courtesy Peta Clancy and Dominik Mersch Gallery

Peta Clancy’s work can be seen in many Australian Galleries and on her website www.petaclancy.net
She is represented by Dominik Mersch Gallery on Gadigal Country.