Droughts and flooding rains | Art Gallery of NSW

In 1908, a 19-year-old Dorothea Mackellar wrote an ode to Australia, her much-loved poem My country. The second verse, a familiar refrain, spoke of her love for ‘a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains’. A century later, the weather events Mackellar poeticised have been exacerbated by our planet’s changing climate, resulting in devastating bushfires and catastrophic floods. Climate-related disasters are increasing in frequency and severity worldwide and climate change has become a major concern for young people around the world today.

A collection display in the 20th-century galleries in the Art Gallery’s South Building includes artworks by Australian and international artists concerned with the impacts of climate change and the often disastrous effects that human activity can have on the environment. Spanning half a century, they reveal some of the ways artists have been advocating for environmental awareness and action.

Several of the works relate to activism and protest. In Joseph Beuys’ Save the woods 1972, the artist (who was a founding member of the German Green Party) and a group of students are seen sweeping the Grafenberg Forest in Dusseldorf with brooms to protest the cutting down of trees to make way for tennis courts. While in Kay Rosen’s IOU 2017, the artist makes a statement in solidarity with the Sioux community and the Standing Rock protests which fought against the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline in America’s midwest. The pipeline project had been approved despite concerns about the risks posed to cultural resources and water access.

Alain Jacquet *Survival of the planet* 1974, Art Gallery of New South Wales © Alain Jacquet/ADAGP. Copyright Agency

Other works engage with the environment in a more speculative manner. Alain Jacquet’s lithograph Survival of the planet 1974 depicts the Earth floating jewel-like in the blackness of space, as photographed by astronauts during an Apollo space mission in the 1960s. From afar, the world appears peaceful, but even then, environmental concerns were becoming increasingly prevalent. Caroline Rothwell’s Cloud buster for cosmic orgone engineering 2014 presents a curious machine designed in the 1950s which aimed to manipulate the weather and control precipitation. Rothwell’s delicate drawings are rendered in copper leaf and ‘inks’ that the artist made from residue scraped from car exhaust pipes.

In Australia, the driest inhabited continent on the planet, water is a valuable commodity. In view of this, one might assume that the health of river systems would be of utmost importance. Sadly, many waterways across Australia exist in a constant state of stress due to pollution, land clearing and overzealous water extraction.

Caroline Rothwell *Cloud buster for cosmic orgone engineering* 2014, Art Gallery of New South Wales © Caroline Rothwell

The environment and the health of river systems has been a recurring subject throughout Bonita Ely’s artistic practice. In 1977 she began a project where she explored the length of the Tongala/Murray River, from its beginnings as a freshwater soak in the Snowy Mountains to the salty waters of the Coorong in South Australia. Along the 2508-kilometre journey of the river, Ely observed areas of stagnation and higher-than-normal levels of salinity resulting from land clearing and poor water management. A series of works on paper, including Life is full of situations 1978 and The river’s edge 1979, developed from her investigations and highlight her concerns about the health of the river.

Thirty years later Ely retraced her steps, documenting her findings in a series of photographs titled The Murray’s edge 2007–08. After years of drought, Ely found the river in a state of distress, its hypoxic, muddy waters plagued by blooms of blue-green algae and acid sulphate contamination. In South Australia the river was barely flowing. Its lakes were dry and the elevated salinity had turned many of the once magnificent river red gums into sun-bleached skeletons.

Bonita Ely *Life is full of situations* 1978, Art Gallery of New South Wales © Bonita Ely/Copyright Agency

John Davis shared Ely’s concerns about the effect of land clearing and irrigation on Australia’s rivers and waterways. His process-based artistic practice was informed by nature and the devastating impact non-Indigenous people were having on the environment. His installation Nomad 1998 comprises a large school of fantastical fish, each one constructed by hand from twigs, calico and bituminous paint. Nomad might be seen as a celebration of the diversity and ecology of our river systems but could also be read as a grim portent of the mass fish deaths that occurred in the Paawan/Baaka/Darling River in recent years.

Gabriella Hirst’s two-screen video work Darling Darling 2021 also shows views of a waterway, both current and historical. On one screen we encounter places on Barkindji Country, near what is now known as Bourke, that are critically affected by years of crippling drought. The Baaka/Darling River has run dry, and in one scene, a mechanical pump attempts to oxygenate the stagnating water that remains. On the other screen, we see WC Piguenit’s 1895 painting The flood in the Darling 1890, undergoing conservation treatment at the Art Gallery. Viewed side-by-side, the care and attention devoted to the painting stands in stark contrast to the neglect and exploitation of the river.

Created over the past 50 years, these works by Australian and international artists highlight the increasing need to address the negative effects of human activity on the environment at a local and a global scale. As the caption accompanying Alain Jacquet’s 1974 lithograph explains, ‘Survival of the planet depends on humanity evolving to a new level of consciousness.’

These works will be on display until March 2024.

A version of this article first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine