The landscape has played a central role in forming how colonial Australia sees the country and their place within it. Romantic notions of sweeping plains and a sunburnt country have evolved into contemporary panoramic images of a wide, empty land of red dirt and blue coastlines that fill our airports and tourism ads. These ideas of a vacant and untouched landscape have been perpetuated by photographers in Australia since the mid-nineteenth century, employing European conventions of the picturesque and the sublime to portray a vision of the uninhabited landscape as ripe for settlement. Impressionist painters later added a layer of hostility to the land, populating the bush with swagmen and pastoralists, battling forces of drought, fire and flooding rains in the name of farming and development.
Yanyuwa Garrwa photographer Miriam Charlie of Borroloola in the Gulf of Carpentaria explores displacement from country. For You Are Here, Charlie was commissioned to create a new series of photographs capturing her own fractured sense of place. The series narrates her current circumstances, removed from her home, while living in Darwin at the Daisy Yarmirr Hostel for dialysis treatment. Using a polaroid camera she captures an honest and unfiltered account of her three-times a week journey with other community members, to the Royal Darwin Hospital for treatment. Charlie describes her situation away from her beloved homeland as 'a life sentence'.
