Capturing contrasts

By Casey Neill
HILLS photographer John Crook contrasts the Australian landscape’s beauty and severity in a series of new works on display at Burrinja.
Mr Crook’s ambition to record this disparity and Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country inspired The Wide Brown Land.
“I have used Mackellar’s poem to gather my love of this land and help make it translatable to others,” Mr Crook, who is now in his eighties, he said.
Mr Crook began taking photos in the 1950s.
“But I am old enough to remember the poor farmers of the 1930s,” he said.
“This, and the rapid expansion of Melbourne in the 1960s, led me into documentary photography – as a means of recording my time.”
An encounter with an elderly farmer in the early 1990s highlighted to Mr Crook the isolation and poverty many suffered on the land.
The man lived alone in an old timber house filled with small framed photographs featuring half a dozen children.
He told Mr Crook his children had left home as soon as they were old enough and had never returned.
“It was just too hard a life for all of us,” the man had said.
“I should never have tried to raise a family on 20 acres.”
Mr Crook moved to Belgrave South in 1969, served five years as a Shire of Sherbrooke councillor in the 1970s and ’80s and fled for his life when 1983’s Ash Wednesday bushfires claimed his home.
The Wide Brown Land will be on display in Burrinja’s Jarmbi Gallery, 351 Glenfern Road, Upwey, from 30 September to 13 October.