Brad Rimmer Loom of the Land
Summer
You cannot be untouched by a landscape of absence – an unforgiving land of mallee and eucalyptus woodlands and red earth on the edge of the grain belt, where decades of over-cropping and drought create continual struggle. I was working on the wheat bins in Western Australia’s eastern Wheatbelt region, where I grew up, between finishing high school and the timeless question of ‘Should I stay or should I leave?’. The question was ever-present – part of finding your place in a small, rural fringe community. It is our history, all of it, including the long-term effects of a single action on subsequent generations. How does our history, our experiences and our emotions, shape us? How do we arrive at a time in our lives when we can find a comfortable balance between looking back and looking ahead? How does our sensory archive collect sounds, music, smells, colours, shapes and the tiniest details to trigger memories, almost cinematically?
This forms the basis of a personal visual and written narrative drawn from the cultural idiosyncrasies of place, identity, belonging and memory, as I return to the Western Australian Wheatbelt where I grew up. Loom of the Land engages a quiet, contemplative tone, examining the tensions within remote communities – their resilience, solitude and accumulated histories. Over 20 years, the work has evolved into a personal reflection on the Wheatbelt that formed me, rooted in an insistence on the integrity and truth of place. In photographing this region, I offer a return of sorts, acknowledging how deeply we remain bound to our origins through memory, shared experience and the persistent pull of place.
He spent most of the day perched high up on the elevator platform. Out of reach from the flies and the intense heat coming off the tarmac that surrounded the remote wheat bin, a white concrete cocoon in the sea of red dirt. He made a comfortable seat cut out of an old foam mattress left in the donga. He joined lengths of bail twine to hoist supplies up and down in a bucket. He was afraid of heights and the narrow ladders made him nervous. From his perch he could see the scale of the vast, flat, wheatbelt landscape, bound within its sharp horizon. In the distance, large granite outcrops protrude like blisters. Abstractions of pure white saltpans creep like a cancer slowly across the land, cleared by men with broken bodies and souls attempting to domesticate the wilderness.
After harvest the stubble turns from nutritious gold to dull yellow. Then eventually fading to lifeless grey, it is burned, then ploughed back into the red earth for the cycle to begin again. From above, the bush looks exhausted under the monotonous bleached sky. Late in the hot summer afternoon a few puffy clouds appear, as if to tease the thirsty landscape, their shadows swooning over the earth. He craved for the relief of a thunderstorm. In the scrub next to the silo lies the proposed Bonnie Rock town site. Gazetted in 1932, the remains of four cleared blocks and surrounding streets, now only faintly recognisable from above. A new town, plans of promise; a school, general store and train station. It never happened. And decades later, nature has slowly resurrected, growing over ambitions and memories. Only the one building completed, a sad wooden hall, once used for dances and celebrations, stands quiet and alone.
The landscape never forgets.
Brad Rimmer Excerpts taken from Nature Boy
14
15
Presented with Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre
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