Outback: Andrew Babington's photographic series on serial killers and missing persons
December 2 - December 15
There is often a gruesome aspect in the depiction of the Australian landscape in films, books and indeed in many of the common perceptions outsiders hold of the country.
Lauded films like Picnic at Hanging Rock, Lantana, Walkabout, Wolf Creek and the currently screening Snowtown, ascribe to it both a brutality and an oft present malevolence.
Kenneth Cook's classic novella Wake in Fright or Barbara Baynton's Bush Studies paint unsympathetic pictures of many of its denizens, reinforced by the hostile environment.
And ask a stranger their view of the country and you're met with tales of deadly spiders, jellyfish, sharks and serial killers.
The Backpacker Murders and the disappearance of Peter Falconio have added to the sense that the wide open spaces and the long gaps between relatively isolated communities hold perils that are sometimes never explained or revealed.
Andrew Babington's photographs at the Australian National University address these fixations, some myth, some real in a series to be shown next month alongside other students.
Shot in high resolution his careful set pieces, using models and props, are disturbing and bleak.
But, in a strange way with their soft, almost autumnal tones (the strategic placement of a wattle), they also reference the traditional bush landscapes of Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts and other artists of the Heidelberg School of painters that flourished in 19th century Victoria.
Art student Babbington, 20, spent 18 months photographing 16 landscapes and illustrating both fictional and real stories of axe wielding serial killers and children lost in the interminable bush.
He said: "I am interested in the relationship between the human characters in the space and the other character that takes the form of the landscape itself.
"It is a constructed and completely set-up series of narratives, that in many ways question what an actually photograph is and whether a photograph can ever be trusted these days as a 'documentary' or 'truthful account'.
"The first settlers were confronted with an alien landscape, totally isolated and unlike anything they had encountered in Europe.
"For the following centuries writers, artists and filmmakers used the Australian outback as a stage for horrific and lucrative plots as the national identity became engulfed with the idea that Australian's only ever colonised the coastlines, fearful of what lies in the outback."
Citing McCubbin, Arthur Boyd and Bill Henson as influences Babington added that the bush had always been a place of great exploitation, with the isolation and aridity of the environment used to intensify the drama of events.
The photographs tell their own story but engage the idea of the Australian outback's melancholic disposition.
The ANU School of Art
Australian Capital Territory