Desolation as made by men and women

THE Museum of Sydney is at present holding two notable but extremely different exhibitions. Not far from the Martin Sharp survey is the much quieter, even laconic Smalltown.

EXHIBITIONS: Smalltown: Photographs by Martin Mischkulnig. Museum of Sydney. Corner Phillip and Bridge Streets, Sydney. Open daily 9.30am-5pm. Tickets: $10. Inquiries: [phone]. Until February 14.

THE Museum of Sydney is at present holding two notable but extremely different exhibitions. Not far from the Martin Sharp survey is the much quieter, even laconic Smalltown.

You need a moment, in fact, to adjust your eyes and your sensibility after spending a little time in Sharp's psychedelic world; but close attention to Martin Mischkulnig's photographs of the outback and its human settlements reveals that the two exhibitions have some deeper concerns in common, particularly related to the spiritual barrenness of a materialistic culture.

Mischkulnig's photographs are accompanied by passages from Tim Winton, and there is a related book, also titled Smalltown. It is not the book of the exhibition, however; it is the other way around: the works displayed at the museum are the exhibition of the book, which contains an excellent series of short essays by Winton, and more photographs than can be included in the hanging.

Photographs tend to look better in books, and this is no exception. Impressive as Mischkulnig's pictures are in the exhibition, they acquire a different density in the publication. The works are more compact and richer. Holding the open volume, our relation to them is more intimate; turning the pages, we have the tantalising sense of a story unfolding, even though there is no discernible sequence and all we really encounter is the husks of human experience, like the discarded shells of cicadas in summer time.

Winton writes: "There is nothing so bleak and forbidding in country Australia as the places humans have built there", and that view is confirmed by some of the dismal structures from which Mischkulnig can make surprisingly beautiful photographs. One of a run-down house with the wreck of a car in the foreground is of a place called Wolfe Creek, also the title of a particularly disturbing Australian film.

One of the most depressing things in rural and coastal Australia is that the mean and ugly buildings that so often dominate the streetscapes -- shops, service stations, milkbars, motels -- are in most cases the first permanent structures ever erected on this land. Why do we seem to accept this as inevitable? In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, we built well-proportioned private houses and handsome public buildings. Even smaller municipalities took pride in the quality of their civic and domestic architecture.

But in so many towns -- Kiama, south of Sydney, is just one example -- everything built since the war has been ugly and insensitive both to the natural surroundings and to the architectural character of the town. How did so many communities like this come to lose their self-respect?

Most of Mischkulnig's subjects, however, are much worse: not merely demoralised regional townships, but places that are derelict, if not actually moribund. There is a terrible photograph of the former swimming baths in a locality called Iron Knob, now filled in with dirt and apparently turned into a track for cross-country motorbikes. Could anything encapsulate the cultural vacuum of such places more eloquently?

There are broad views evoking the vast, stifling aridity of the environment in which once again, and as Winton says, we seem content to build cheap and impermanent dwellings, as though lacking the courage to be more ambitious and decisive.

And there are pictures of interiors that are still more desolate, with their plastic chairs and kitsch alternating with graffiti. In one dining room, presumably in a motel, there are tablecloths and three Tom Roberts prints on the wall, but too small and hung too high, somehow reminding you of a rustic who has dressed up and put on a tie for a funeral.

What holds all these pictures together aesthetically is a strong feel for classical composition: an invisible armature of horizontals and verticals imparts order and serenity to material that in itself tends to be shapeless, random and in a state of collapse.

There is an extraordinary photograph of a set of giant dice piled up in the bush, in the tradition of big bananas and other roadside monstrosities. But they too are faded and wearing away: the presiding agency here is not fortune, but entropy.