Shooting the Sunburnt Country, the Land of Sweeping Plains, the Rugged Mountain Ranges: Australian Landscape and Wilderness Photography

Landscape photography of Australia, and by Australians of other places, has played an important role in the formation and maintenance of Australian national and cultural identity. Whether it is Steve Parish’s multitudinous and ubiquitous touristic landscape pornography or Frank Hurley’s melodramatic montages of the landscape of trench warfare, Australian landscape photography has been, and still is, central to how Australia and many Australians see and define it, and themselves. Yet the place and role of landscape photography in Australian life has not been well researched or documented. Of course, there was a flurry of interest in, and books about, Australian photography during the bicentenary of white settlement which discuss landscape photography, but only intermittently and spasmodically (Newton, 1988; Willis, 1988; see Batchen, 2001, for a review of both). This situation compares unfavourably with the American one where there is a wealth of research about its landscape photography (e.g. Jussim & Lindquist-Cock, 1985; Weber, 2002). Some of its leading landscape photographers, such as Ansel Adams, are national heroes (Adams, 1985, 1990; Alinder, 1985). The closest Australian