Wanderers in the Desert of the Real, Part II, Latrobe Valley
William L. Fox
The Australian painter Mandy Martin and I ended our July trip through the industrial sites she’s painted in New South Wales and Victoria with a swing through the Latrobe Valley, which hosts some of the larger deposits of brown coal in the world, as well as several huge power plants. It amazed me how different the architecture of each of the plants was, and how beautiful the arrays of cooling towers were from a distance. It’s easy to see why she would have photographed and then painted the structures with their seductive aura of the industrial sublime (which is to say, they’re both beautiful and terrible at the same time).
Late in the day we followed Melbourne architect David Leece up into the foothills northwest of the valley where he’s building a house--and where the gum forests had been scorched by fires early in the year. The potential for bushfires is measured in Australia by the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index, which runs from 1-100. On February 7 2009, the temperature in Melbourne was a shattering 115.5ºF, the humidity almost nil at 6%, and the winds roaring at more than 60 mph. The fire danger was estimated at more than 180, beyond the definition of catastrophic.
On that day, known afterwards as “Black Saturday,” 400 separate fires consumed 1.1 million acres, burned down 3500 structures, and killed at least 173 people, although there were still people missing on the day we visited Leece’s charred hilltop. The 2100ºF fires were so hot that the ash of human victims was indistinguishable from that of trees. Despite the ferocity of that fire front only six months earlier, green shoots were sprouting from the trunks of the eucalypt trees, and the tops of tree ferns had regenerated, a surreal green froth atop the charbroiled forest floor.
Through the trees the sun was setting in the valley, low rays washing the giant walls of a power plant, a facility helping create the climate in which such ferocious fires, unheard of in previous times, could burn. Coal in the valley, charcoal underfoot. Mandy took pictures for future reference while painting. Her work with industrial structures has moved from depicting facilities to selecting icons of our place in the world--be they cooling towers or the “epicormic” regrowth of gum trees--as she seeks artistic metaphors for the complex environmental systems we both live in and create.
Next: Land/Art New Mexico
The Australian painter Mandy Martin and I ended our July trip through the industrial sites she’s painted in New South Wales and Victoria with a swing through the Latrobe Valley, which hosts some of the larger deposits of brown coal in the world, as well as several huge power plants. It amazed me how different the architecture of each of the plants was, and how beautiful the arrays of cooling towers were from a distance. It’s easy to see why she would have photographed and then painted the structures with their seductive aura of the industrial sublime (which is to say, they’re both beautiful and terrible at the same time).
Late in the day we followed Melbourne architect David Leece up into the foothills northwest of the valley where he’s building a house--and where the gum forests had been scorched by fires early in the year. The potential for bushfires is measured in Australia by the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index, which runs from 1-100. On February 7 2009, the temperature in Melbourne was a shattering 115.5ºF, the humidity almost nil at 6%, and the winds roaring at more than 60 mph. The fire danger was estimated at more than 180, beyond the definition of catastrophic.
On that day, known afterwards as “Black Saturday,” 400 separate fires consumed 1.1 million acres, burned down 3500 structures, and killed at least 173 people, although there were still people missing on the day we visited Leece’s charred hilltop. The 2100ºF fires were so hot that the ash of human victims was indistinguishable from that of trees. Despite the ferocity of that fire front only six months earlier, green shoots were sprouting from the trunks of the eucalypt trees, and the tops of tree ferns had regenerated, a surreal green froth atop the charbroiled forest floor.
Through the trees the sun was setting in the valley, low rays washing the giant walls of a power plant, a facility helping create the climate in which such ferocious fires, unheard of in previous times, could burn. Coal in the valley, charcoal underfoot. Mandy took pictures for future reference while painting. Her work with industrial structures has moved from depicting facilities to selecting icons of our place in the world--be they cooling towers or the “epicormic” regrowth of gum trees--as she seeks artistic metaphors for the complex environmental systems we both live in and create.
Next: Land/Art New Mexico
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