Walking/photographing Adelaide

photo-wooze

2024-06-06T10:50:03Z

I recently wandered into Adelaide's CBD on an early morning walk to photograph the morning light on the eastern face of the sandy colours of the late modernist buildings. Light animates an object and the approach is one of studied snapshots.

The buildings that I photographed were those built around Victoria Square (Tarndayangga) precinct in the 1970s. This kind of focused walk is the opposite of just going out into the CBD one fine autumn morning, shooting on some random theme and then hoping that something emerges. If you are not careful that is the pathway to photo-wooze ---ie., lots of boring images of nothing much at all.

I was looking for a low key emphasis on colour in the walking Adelaide project, though not in the formalist sense. These skyline snapshots are designed to say something about the city's history --- content or meaning --- as opposed to concentrating on technique -- eg., a concern with correct exposure, being in focus, the right way to light a building, or the right kind of light.

Keswick Creek

2024-05-23T06:23:20Z

This particular supplement to the Walking Adelaide website broadens this recent post on Keswick Creek.

The supplement takes the form of some additional photos of Keswick Creek in a different locations in the old industrial area of Mile End. These additional photos came from walking around the area tracing the creek whilst looking for suitable locations to scope for a large format photo session at a latter date. These locations below are ones that are prone to flooding.

The picture below photo of the creek, or rather a culvert, is on the western side of the Flinders and Seaford railway line, and it is looking towards the Adelaide Showgrounds. I came across it whilst looking for where the underground culvert in the showgrounds surfaced as it went through the Keswick Army Barracks to Anzac Highway.

I was lucky that day. There is very limited access to the location as the gate for the Keswick Army Barracks is usually closed as I discovered on subsequent visits. Access to the barracks would be restricted. Moreover, the protective wire netting fence across the culvert means that a large format monorail cannot be used. Only 35mm as you need to be able to poke the lens through the smallish holes in the wire netting.

the blog as supplement

2024-03-28T07:28:03Z

As there is now a walking Adelaide website with its own blog this old, low-key blog became superfluous. It served its purpose in kickstarting the website into existence, and as a result, it hasn't been updated in 2 years. Originally this low-fi blog was envisioned as a way to start making a photobook of urban photography of Adelaide. I had in mind that the images and text would be the raw material for the photo book. However, as I left living in Adelaide for the coast and the money ran out for a book, I decided to build the website. The next step in the project is a photobook.

My reason for reviving the old blog is that I've returned to the city in the sense of I've started regularly walking the city again. I have also linked up to, and joined, the Australian Walking Artists group, since urban photography has been historically based on the medium of walking the city. Adelaide 's CBD has changed a lot in the last 8 years.

This revived blog will include the odd photo that doesn't make it to the official website. Toss away photos, odd balls, rejects, poor mages. fragments or scraps, if you like. Ones that stand outside the website and are an accessory (the parergon) to the main work (the ergon). This blog would then exist on the margins of the website.

The photos and text, which are degraded supplements to the original image that lies buried in the darkness of the archive on a computer's hard drive, are deemed to have little value in the neo-liberal image economy. They are toss-a-ways, as is this blog, since blogs have been shunted aside in the culture of social media.

urbanscapes

2022-06-25T08:25:06Z

I took advantage of a recent dental appointment in Adelaide's CBD to walk the city and to try and make some photographic urbanscapes. I started out from my base in the Adelaide Central Market where I'd had my morning coffee and went nto the Pitt Street carpark to check out Franklin St:

I thought that I'd return to some of my old locations in the various car parks that I'd visited and explored when I lived in the city prior to 2015 and this was a good a way as any to gain a quick perspective on how the CBD had changed, if at all, between 2015 and 2022.

Thresholds: Gawler Place

2022-05-19T05:23:17Z

I briefly explored in and around Gawler Place in the hour or so that I had between meetings in Adelaide's CBD on Wednesday (18th May). This exploration focused less on the empty shops or offices themselves, and more on the urban space of the street that included the empty offices.

More specifically, it was the interface space between the inside of the building and the street outside the building along with its various reflections in the glass windows of the buildings. What could be called thresholds.

Edgelands, Port Adelaide

2022-05-11T02:31:55Z

I've realized whilst constructing the Walking Adelaide demo website on the Square Space publishing platform that this is going to take me quite some time. Realistically, I will need all of the six months allowed by the demo to construct a skeleton of the project that would be ready to go public.

Whilst working on building the demo website I remembered that I'd walked around more than Adelaide's car-centric CBD. I had spent a lot of time walking the edgelands in, and around, the Port Adelaide precinct in the 1980s. This example is from the archives:

The picture was made on the Grand Trunkway near the Torrens Island power station. We are looking north east towards the Adelaide hills. What appeared to be wetlands was being used as, or had become, an industrial wasteland. It is a good example of edgelands in 1980s industrial Adelaide.

post-Covid Adelaide

2022-04-30T23:36:02Z

The recent brute force attacks and hacks to two of my Wordpress blogs --Thoughtfactory and Mallee Routes --- have caused me to start to look at Square Space for re-building the Walking Adelaide project. Rebuilding because this project has basically outgrown Posthaven's simple blog format. It needs galleries, blog and text and so rather than building another Wordpress site I am considering Square Space. There is more on this at the Thoughtfactory blog.

The galleries, blog and text would be designed to give the project more depth.

Post-Covid Adelaide is different to the one that I lived and photographed in during the second decade of the 21st century. As noted in earlier posts there are fewer people on the streets of the CBD. Whilst walking around the northern part of the CBD last Tuesday (26th April) I noticed that the only section of the city that had lots of people moving around was the north-west end of the CBD, and these were students at the Uni of SA

lunchtime in Adelaide

2022-04-14T03:00:22Z

I still find it a depressing experience walking Adelaide's CBD post-Covid. Many of the lunch time cafe's and coffee shops continue to remain closed. Will they ever open again? Will the pandemic shape Adelaide's future? What might urban life look like on the other side of the Covid-19 pandemic? How long before the CBD starts to be full of people?

Judging from the lack of people in the city it appears that many of the office workers are still working from home. The density of the people in the city is certainly much less than in pre-Covid times and about half those walking the streets are wearing masks. It was such a marked difference to Melbourne where hardly anyone wore face masks on the street.

Covid-19: a public mood

2021-12-25T04:33:44Z

I spent Wednesday in the week before Xmas walking the city and taking photo for several hours. I had parked the car near the Adelaide parklands and walked to the Adelaide Central Market. After a coffee in the Central Market I spent the next 4-5 hours walking around the north western side of the CBD, starting at the nearby Post Office Lane.

Then I wandered and photographed along "Westpac Lane", which runs off Topham Mall, returning to old haunts to get my bearings. Some people were wearing masks on the street, most were using the QR codes on their phones and many were keeping a safe distance. Though South Australia's closed borders had meant that it was a zero Covid state, people were going about their business without the twinkle, shimmer and buzz of the approaching festive season.

South Australia had just opened its state borders, the Omicron variant was starting to circulate through Adelaide, and the number of daily infections were starting to rapidly rise. The public mood was sombre and wary. Grim even. This is such a contrast to this time in 2020, when looked as if the near future would be one of hope: we had survived 2020, vaccinations were just around the corner and with that, the promise of no more lockdowns and a return to open borders. Fortress Australia would be history. In late December 2021 the Omicron variant of the virus is everywhere, the federal government continues to be missing in action, and the capacity of the health system is being eroded with staff stand downs and resignations, ambulance ramping and a blowout in waiting lists.

photography + the modernist city

2021-11-24T04:52:01Z

I have been going through my digital archives circa 2013 /2014 in order to start to look for, and select, material for the proposed Adelaide book. This builds on The Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity book which I am currently completing. Sadly, there was less visual material in the 2013 photographic archive than I remembered or hoped for. I was disappointed, but I did come across this mugshot poster by Peter Drews.

The photos in the Adelaide photo book are all post 2000 and they include a mix of film and digital as I started using a digital camera early in 2007. It's early days as I haven't gone through the 2007-2012 archives, the book has no name, and I haven't decided how it will be published. I have started writing an introduction based on reworking some text left over from the Bowden book.

The argument in the introduction is that photography was substantively associated with the modernist city in the 20th century. There was a historical relationship between urban spaces, urban representations and the photographic/cinematic form. Photography was part of the experience of modernity, especially that on the flâneur, or citystroller, a figure of modernity characterised by their detached observations of urban life, being simultaneously of the city, and yet distanced from it by their spectatorial gaze.

Film -- ie., photography and cinema --- were more than being new mediums. They are central to how modernity was experienced and understood by a broad public. Photography and cinema enabled the relationship between modernity's shocks, surprises, distractions and overwhelming stimuli and its corollary, drift, the experience of vacancy, the sensation of empty moments, to be understood and negotiated. They helped to shape modernity's urban visual culture.

Covid's empty shops

2021-10-09T05:37:08Z

I have tentatively made a return to the project of walking the city of Adelaide with a hand held camera. This project has been tentatively put on the backburner for some time. Walking the city with a large format camera and a heavy tripod has definitely been placed on the back burner.

This recent experience persuaded me to think about picking it up. I briefly looked at the archives. I decided that it would make a good break from sitting in front of the computer working on the text for The Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity book. Then I realized that the Walking Adelaide project, which is about urban psychogeography, could be interpreted as building upon this body of photographs from the 1980s, which form the third section of The Bowden Archives. There are a lot of photos from the time when we lived in the CBD, but I am unsure how to conceptually organise them into a book project. That is why this project has been on the back burner with only a blog as its public face.

So off I went on a tentative foray to Adelaide's CBD last Thursday (7th October). Below is a cafe in Hindmarsh Square next to the old central office of SA Health. This cafe used to be quite buzzy:

There were a lot of people sitting around in the square as it was a warm sunny spring day. I would have thought this mass would have kept the cafe open, given that there is currently no Covid-19 community transmission in South Australia.

I spend a couple of hours walking the CBD -- just a playful, drifting aimlessly around (dérive ) in good Situationist fashion. The city was very quiet even though I was walking between 11am and 1 pm -- ie., around lunch time. Many of the cafes had gone, most of the restaurants in the Rundle St East strip were closed, and there were many empty spaces for rent in the CBD. Some of the fashion shops had gone and there was only the odd customer in the ones that were open. These are strange times compared to even this time.

Post Office Lane

2021-09-17T23:39:13Z

Recently I wandered through some of my film archives for the Adelaide part of the Bowden Archives and Other Marginalia project. I was using it as a way to take a break from the grind of substantially reworking the text for this Adelaide/Port Adelaide part of the book. I am finding the reworking of the text for each section hard going, as the early drafts of the texts have little coherence by way of an argument. It is a humbling experience.

Whilst exploring the archives I came across some b+w photos that I made for the Walking Adelaide project. I had completely forgotten about these photos. These street views were usually photographed in colour and I'd forgotten that on occasions I was also photographing them in b + w at the same time.

An example is this picture of Post Office Lane, which runs between Franklin and Waymouth Streets. I was standing in Post Office Lane and the photo would have been made early in the morning.

At the time the photo was made I was photographing the empty streets in the CBD. My conception of Adelaide then was that its street life was pretty minimal. The time period is roughly a decade ago when I was living in the CBD.

old and new

2021-07-11T01:51:14Z

I finally had some time to spend a few hours wandering around, and photographing in, the CBD last week. The CBD is rapidly changing from when I used to live there.

The few hours of photographic drifting was between seeing the Marek brothers exhibition --- Dušan and Voitre Marek: Surrealists at sea -- at the South Australian Art Gallery and receiving the 1st AstraZeneca vaccination at my GP clinic. The Morrison Federal Govt has been very slack in acquiring and rolling out the vaccine, and my GP clinic has only been receiving very limited doses per week. Sadly, exaggerated claims, spin and outright lies have covered over the stuff up re the vaccine supply and roll out.

Back to the exhibition. There was a deep resistance to the foreign, the European, and modernism in postwar Adelaide and the migrant artists in the European diaspora were consigned to obscurity. They represent by-ways, irrelevancies, alternative pathways – all leading to dead ends in the central narrative of Australian art history. For instance, Sasha Grishin's recent Australian Art: A History does not mention the Marek brothers, despite their influence on the early paintings of Jeffrey Smart.

The Surrealist at Sea exhibition finally recovers, and recognizes, some of the forgotten modernism in Adelaide after the 1945. An example of this forgetting is Patrick McCaughey's recent Strange Country: Why Australia Painting Matters, which ignores Surrealism in Australia, and doesn't mention the Marek brothers. McCaughey's text is both Melbourne-centric and ignores how some modernists, such as the Marek brothers worked across several artistic mediums and not just in the medium of painting. In the Marek brothers case it was painting, sculpture, prints, film, photography and jewellery.

archive: urban textures

2021-06-19T10:51:09Z

I have started to walk around photographing Adelaide's CBD after an absence of six years or so.The city has become a very different one during the negative consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. I realized that, in contrast, the pandemic has not substantially altered the way the retirees living on the coast in Victor Harbor and other coastal towns. The retirees go about their lives in a similar way to what they were doing in pre-pandemic days. They can't travel overseas like they used to, or visit family interstate as easily as they once could.

I also decided to revisit my photographic archives as I am now quite distant from the photographs I made when I was living in the CBD. I can look at them as photos in themselves, as I cannot longer remember the experiences of that photographic moment. I came across this abstract image of peeling bark in the Adelaide Parklands. It was made whilst I was on a poodlewalk in Veal Gardens:

Walking through Veal Gardens was an integral part of one kind of poodlewalk in the southern parklands. For the poodles it was all about the possums in the trees.

South Road: An experiment 1

2021-06-14T09:08:41Z

I have often thought about walking along Adelaide's South Rd in the late afternoon taking photos of this urban stretch. I drive along this road every time I go to and from Adelaide to Encounter Bay. It looks interesting with all the different signs, architecture and colours. It's all mixed up, chaotic jumble.

However, South Rd is Adelaide's main north south corridor and at peak hour it is jammed with cars in the late afternoon. It is noisey and full of fumes, and so I have backed off walking along it. Breathing all those fumes would not be good for one's health. Still, I find photographing South Rd in the late afternoon winter light intriguing.

I tried an experiment recently: --taking photos through a car window. The opportunity arose when we were returning from Blinman after being on a camel trek from Blinman to Lake Frome, as I was sitting in the back seat and Suzanne was driving towards the Southern Expressway.

I wound the back window on the left side of the car down. The basic concept was simple: to take a photo when the car stopped in traffic. It is unlike the Conceptual artists of the 1960s. They preconceived a conceptual project that they then carries out with photographs. However, photography was only useful or interesting to them insofar as it was instrumental in conveying or recording their ideas. These artists describe the photographs themselves as either brute information or uninflected documentation. The 1960s conceptual tradition held photography as a specific medium with its rich history and formal conventions at arm’s length.

windows onto

2021-05-11T08:56:25Z

This photo comes from when wandered in Rundle Mall in September, 2011.This was a time when I was still living in the CBD and so it easy for me to walk the city in Adelaide learning how we perceive the city, how we imagine it, how we experience it. The photos of shop windows below are very different to the drone's aerial view of Rundle Mall; an aerial view which has become pervasive in documentaries filmed outdoors.

I was being a flaneur wandering from shop window to shop window, drifting amongst the shoppers and office workers who were going about their business in a very determined and focused manner. I was just drifting through the shopping precinct looking for something to photograph; drifting not hunting. The photo is different from Google's Street view which unfolds on the screen under our fingers.

walking Bowden

2020-10-06T03:28:19Z

I was able to walk around Bowden making some photos when I was in Adelaide last week. I had several hours whilst I was waiting for Kayla to be clipped. I quickly realised that the Bowden/Brompton that I lived in during the 1980s has well and truely gone.

This old industrial /working class suburb is undergoing extensive urban renewal and redevelopment. The factories and cottages have all gone--replaced by apartments in Bowden and townhouses in Brompton.

I spend some time walking around the new redevelopment in Bowden--it is high density urban infill with a heritage precinct on the land of the old Brompton Gasworks. Bowden is envisioned as a vibrant, inner city destination.

The empty land opposite where I used to live in Gibson Street is now Emu Park whilst the Stobie poles have mosaics. The boundary in Gibson St has gone, as has the house where I had a studio. Conroys Small Goods is still there.

Re-development of the Central Market precinct

2020-07-21T01:28:19Z

The response to the decline of automotive and manufacturing activity and employment in Adelaide has been redevelopment to ensure a transition to an information and knowledge based economy. Adelaide, as a middle ranking city in Australia, is lagging behind Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Perth in becoming a knowledge city. Adelaide struggles to develop the human capital (knowledge workers) to underpin the knowledge economy and the infrastructure to utilise that human capital to create economic value. Melbourne is probably the key city here.

One sign of the process of change in Adelaide to becoming a post-industrial city can be seen in the number of boutique hotels being built in the city.This is considered to be part of the 'revitalisation' index.

The large background building under construction is the Indigo Hotel in Market Street looking across Gouger St. The Indigo brand is owned by IHG hotelier, which is set to open in 2020. It is marketed as adding to, and participating in the vibrant atmosphere of the Central Market precinct.

Adelaide Central Market precinct (walkable urbanism)

2020-07-15T00:46:19Z

Up until 2014-15 Suzanne and I lived in Sturt St a couple of blocks from the Adelaide Central Market in Adelaide's CBD. The Central Market was our shopping centre and we would do the weekly shop early on a Saturday morning around 7am after we had walked with the poodles (seen as significant others). We would walk down to the market precinct with a shopping trolley, have a coffee at Cibo's in Gouger St, do the shopping, then walk back to the town house, unpack the shopping, then have breakfast. We would be back home around 8.30-9 am.

We walked to most places in the CBD (GP's, gym, hairdresser, gallery openings, etc ). This convenience was one of the attractions of inner city living. I understood walking to be a counter to the car's domination of the city with its traffic noise and fumes, congestion, the urban grime and the heat during the summer. Our car would sit in the garage during the week, as it was mostly used for travelling to places outside the inner city, or to go to Victor Harbor on the weekends. Now, at Victor Harbor, we have 2 cars and we have to travel in the car to several shops to do the weekly shopping.

street art

2020-07-07T13:10:14Z

During the last few days I have been going through the archives looking for material for the forthcoming online Walking/Photography exhibition at Encounters Gallery. Whilst doing so I came across some photos of street art in Adelaide, South Australia that I had made around 2011 whilst I was walking the city.

I was living in the city at the time and my daily walks with the poodles would be around the CBD and the parklands. These walks would be meanderings--to do with exploration, a way of accommodating myself, of feeling at home. It was a way I got to know the city. Walking into dead ends, or reluctantly retracing my steps, didn't matter to me because this was part of the process of exploration.

Adelaide: an urban heat island

2019-11-25T06:53:01Z

The skyline of 1970s modernist Adelaide from the top floor of the Wakefield St car park. We are looking west towards Victoria Square.

Little has changed in this part of Adelaide since I left living in Sturt St in 2014 to move to Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. The only change is the hotel on Whitmore Square-- the dark building in the left background.

Summer in the CBD is very hot due to the way surfaces like asphalt trap heat even as cars and buildings exude it. When a city is markedly warmer than its surrounding rural areas, it is called an urban heat island. Adelaide is one of the worst in Australia and it can be stressful, if not dangerous, to be outside during a heatwave with 40+ degrees temperatures. With climate heating, the impact of higher temperatures will become more evident in the CBD.

old signs + the new urbanism

2019-07-21T01:18:26Z

One result from walking with the poodles around Adelaide's CBD is that my 'walking Adelaide' usually involves wandering down the various laneways and the back alleys as well as into the various carparks. In doing so I occasionally stumble across an interesting image, or even two, in a few of these back alleys.

An example from January 2019:

Usually these signs/images are on the walls of an alt-Adelaide (the seedy underside of Adelaide), and they have been there for many a year. They are off the main pedestrian thoroughfares, and so they are been forgotten and unseen. So they slowly decay over time until there is a major urban development, which its usually a hotel, a block of student apartments or an office block.

Adelaide modern

2019-06-26T00:52:09Z

Prior to mid twenthieth century modernism Adelaide was a planned city of red brick and sandstone within a self-contained rectilinear grid encircled by parks and green space, never to be built upon, with its discrete zoning of dwelling, work, transportation and recreation. It was Colin Hassell and John Morphett who rejected the established classical/gothic revival architectural order in early 20th century Adelaide.

The modernist ethos was to make a modern world, to sweep away the old and, out of chaos, build stability. Concrete was the stuff of dreams of a progressive, dynamic cosmopolitanism. Adelaide did not experience the modernist Brutalist style of building deployed to satisfy the urgent demand for cost-effective post-war housing on a mass scale that was frequently associated with socialist utopian ideals, and dreams of collective living.

One of the themes that I explored off and on when I was living in Adelaide's CBD was the modernist architecture from the 1960s and 1970s. These pictures are of the backs of those overlooked "form follows function" buildings along Pirie St which survived the mindless razing of so much of Adelaide's built heritage from the 1960s to 1980s:

Many of the modernist buildings that are gathered together in the Victoria Square precinct are of the 1970s butalist genre, such as the Department for Education's headquarters on Flinders Street and Wakefield House opposite St Francis Xavier's Cathedral. Whilst photographing these kind of buildings I realised the importance of light to architecture and how it can transform a building completely, both inside and out. This is especially the case with the roughly textured béton brut buildings.

West Terrace Cemetery

2019-06-24T05:44:24Z

When we lived in Adelaide's CBD in the first decade and half of the 21st century one of my favourite afternoon poodlewalks was in Adelaide's west parklands, especially Park 23 (G.S. Kingston Park or Wirrarninthi) with its sculpture trail plus the heritage listed West Terrace Cemetery. Wirraninthi used to be called Wirranendi, and over the years that I was living in the CBD I witnessed its extensive replanting with trees, shrubs, grasses and the ecological rehabilitation of the stormwater wetlands.

We--the two poodles and me-- would spend many an hour wandering around and exploring the cemetery in the late afternoon. It was safe territory. The poodles could explore the fenced grounds whilst I could take photos. I just had to keep an eye out for the cyclists riding through the grounds and for the occasional graveyard visitor. I usually went to the forgotten, rundown areas, which I found more to be more interesting than the newer, and more flashy Italian/Greek grave stones. I thought that the latter were excessive--over way the top.

Adelaide's empty shops

2019-06-11T01:18:04Z

It could well be the case that with the disappearance of the Holden car plant at Elizabeth, Adelaide is in danger of being a distressed city with its unemployment, run-down buildings, an inequality with its impoverishment part of the population, an underperforming public school system, declining living standards, and a limited skill base due to young people leaving to find work in Sydney or Melbourne.

This long and uneven process of de-industrialization has resulted in crisis management by the South Australian state government; one that aims to prevent further urban decline in the context of post-Fordist capitalism. However, Adelaide struggles compared to Melbourne or Sydney, as the latter have weathered industrial decline far better than Adelaide, due to these two larger cities having benefited more from globalisation.

It is true that a faltering Adelaide has begun the process of adapt and respond to economic change.in the form of re-invention--of slowly transforming into becoming a post-industrial city. This is a transition from producing and providing goods to one that mainly provides services. In a post-industrial society, technology, information, and services are more important than manufacturing actual goods. This, it is argued, is the path to recovery.

The subsidised casino, convention centre and sports stadium are designed to encourage urban development, give Adelaide a competitive edge in the competition between Australia's cities, and a new image as an attractive city in contrast to the rusting industrial image. Adelaide brands itself as a destination that seeks to attract visitors and a creative class of new residents in the CBD.

What I do find disturbing is that there are still a large number of empty shops in the CBD. The above picture is of an empty shop is in the western part of Hindley St, which is in the northwestern area of Adelaide's CBD.

Austral Stores building

2019-05-25T13:11:59Z

Slowly, ever so slowly, I am returning to working on the Adelaide book project after couple of years. We left living in Adelaide's CBD about 3 years or so ago, and shifted to living on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast. Most of my daily photography on the poodlewalks now happens along the coast, whereas when we lived in Adelaide, the daily photography emerged from walking the CBD with the poodles.

Adelaide's CBD has changed since 2016. What is noticeable to me as a visitor about the new development in the CBD is the increase in both the high rise apartments and the coffee shops/cafes. Adelaide is becoming post-industrial.

Occasional day trips to Adelaide are all that I can do these days, and this particular trip was designed to pick up the photography from where I had left off 3 years ago. This photo was made on a day trip to Adelaide when I was able to spend some time wandering around the CBD as a flaneur. The above picture was taken from a car park behind the back of The Austral Stores building in Hindley St.

Port River Estuary

2018-09-29T00:21:58Z

I have come across more pictures in the archives from my photographic sessions in and around Port Adelaide in 2011:

I made this picture whilst I was wandering around some edge lands along side the Port River estuary.

Port Adelaide

2018-08-31T01:33:41Z

I have been going through my archives and realized that the images that I made in and round Port Adelaide do form part of the Adelaide book. The book is more than the images of the CBD of Adelaide. For some reason I had kept these two areas of Adelaide separate when I was photographing.

The Port is intrinsically connected to the CBD as it was, and still is, the terminal or exit point for South Australia's exports. Historically the exports were loaded onto ships at Port Adelaide. Today, the goods continue to be railed to the Port but they but they are now exported in containers through the container terminal in Outer Harbor.

Elizabeth after Holden

2018-08-14T02:19:05Z

This picture was made whilst I was on a recent visit to Elizabeth for the opening of Eric Algra's photographic exhibition This is Our Town. Elizabeth is a town that is struggling to come to grips with the closure of General Motors Holden car plant in October 2017; an event that ended more than a century of car manufacturing in Australia.

The recent Holden commemorative mural on the wall of the shopping centre ---Elizabeth City Centre--remembers the past as the town confronts the fallout from the 12,000 job losses in the northern suburbs from the ripple effect in the supply chain of the component suppliers, and the range of logistics companies as they close down.

The Holden plant closure represents the end of the old style nation building centred around industrialisation and manufacturing. Elizabeth was a planned community with a utopian vision for how modern life based around steady job and money, happy workers, orderly streets, stable families and a pleasant place to live. It was a car city that championed the car. It was a city going places.

people in the city

2018-08-09T00:08:35Z

When I used to poodlewalk around Adelaide's CBD when I lived in Sturt St (2005-2015) the people in the city outside of the office hours. were few and far between. The CBD was noticeable for the empty streets on the weekends -the doughnut city I called it. An alternative name could have been zombie town as the past cast a very long shadow over the city.

This started to change just before we left in 2015 to live on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula. Small bars were opening, more people were living in apartments, people were on the street outside of business hours and the laneways from the central market to the railway station were being developed

This is a significant change: a transformation from Adelaide being like a country town to Adelaide having an urban life. I notice the difference when I walk around the city with a camera 3 years later.