Artists chart rivers’ neglect

Works by Australian artists who have turned their gaze to the Murray-Darling crisis ask us to broaden our ecological awareness.

Amanda Penrose Hart’s Darling River Bend, 2019.

We probably all learned in primary school about life cycles in enclosed environments, such as ponds. A species will grow, reproduce and proliferate until its numbers become ­unsustainable: it has exhausted its food supplies and poisoned its environment with waste. Then its population collapses and only a few hardy individuals cling to life. Eventually the environment recovers and they begin to reproduce again.

The cycle will repeat itself forever, except that in the course of evolution the better-adapted will prosper while the weaker will be eliminated. These creatures cannot learn from experience or change their behaviour. They are driven by blind ­instincts, by genetic imperatives that override even the wellbeing of individuals in the race for species survival.

Humans are meant to be different. We are able to understand our situation in the world, to recall the past, to estimate the probable course of the future, to learn from our mistakes and to adapt our behaviour to avoid catastrophic and self-­destructive consequences. We demonstrate such abilities ­whenever we study for an exam rather than idling on social media, attend to a task rather than procrastinating, save and ­invest rather than squandering money, or replace a faulty piece of equipment before it breaks down completely or ­becomes dangerous.

Why then do we fail to apply this remarkable and, in fact, unique set of survival skills to the most important thing of all — that is, the pond in which we are proliferating and which we are exhausting and poisoning with our own waste? Instead, our numbers continue to grow and, worse still, an ever-greater ­proportion of our kind is increasing its level of consumption and waste production.

Luke Sciberras’s When the river runs dry, 2018.

To a visitor from another planet, this inability to use our cognitive faculties more effectively for our own survival would seem paradoxical. But it is not new: from farmers who, since ­antiquity, have overcleared land, causing erosion, desertification and the silting-up of rivers, to hunters like the Maori who caused mass extinctions after their arrival in New Zealand, human beings have time and again demonstrated intermittent cleverness compromised by short-sightedness.

In the past, the destructiveness of humans has been limited by relatively small populations, and even though they have caused localised damage to the natural world — though sometimes enduring, especially in the case of deforestation — it is they themselves who have generally paid the price for despoiling the environment that was vital to their survival.

Today, however, human population has long passed the point of sustainability, although it was reported recently that Elon Musk and Jack Ma, in a debate about the future of tech­nology, agreed that our numbers would start to fall quite ­dramatically within a couple of decades; others’ estimates are more measured.

The Pew Research Centre predicts that world population will continue to grow until the end of this century, but the picture will not be the same in all countries. Some of the most ­developed will experience declines, while alarming growth is predicted in African countries, already poor and suffering from environmental stress, endemic violence, corruption and social breakdown.

Guy Maestri’s The Broken River, 2019.

The environment in Africa will inevitably continue to ­deteriorate, especially under further demographic pressure, so the crisis of Africans seeking to leave is only going to get worse. Europe, already overwhelmed by illegal migration, will have to find some way to respond to this problem before it leads to ­social revolt and the triumph of the far-right parties already on the rise in reaction to the present situation.

Why then have humans been so improvident when the ­ability to envisage the future is one of our defining gifts as a species? We can see a parallel in the management of what we might consider our micro-environment — that is, our own bodies. The body is indispensable to life, and yet the majority of people in our country, as in other developed parts of the world, are in a visibly bad physical state. Even the effects of age are aggravated by poor diet, obesity and lack of exercise.

In most cases, we could do much better than this. So why don’t we? It can’t be just a matter of willpower because people who can’t manage their bodies can still get up in the morning and get to work on time. It seems to be more a matter of awareness: what stops us eating junk food is not mere strength of character but an expanded awareness of what such products contain, what they will do to our bodies and how they will make us feel later as distinct from in the moment of consuming them.

Similarly, the environmental crisis has its roots in a restricted field of awareness. We all know, for example, that a regular ­objection to ecological measures of almost any kind is that they were not economical; but the answer to this is usually to expand the economic perspective. If we take into account the cost of cleaning up the waste and making good the damage produced by what appears at first sight a more economical technology, it may turn out to be actually more expensive.

Several factors inhibit a broader awareness of our ecological environment, including selfishness and stupidity, lack of ­imagination and ultimately fear of the frightening reality we might have to confront. And these are not merely the failings of individuals, they are founded in a commercially generated culture that encourages personal consumption and legitimises selfishness, while discouraging attention to the past or future, since this broader perspective would reveal the futility of the life we are leading.

One of the uses and pleasures of art is to open our minds and hearts to a world beyond our own egoism and beyond the narrow space in which our daily reality is confined. And this is ultimately the rationale for assembling an exhibition of artists pondering the disastrous state of the vast Murray-Darling river system that is vital to agriculture and to natural life in the southeast of the Australian continent.

Whether art is actually a good vehicle for political messages is another matter, and the more overtly political works in this rather uneven exhibition are among the least successful. One bad idea is painting a corner of a series of photos in gold to refer to the thoughtless pursuit of profit. Apart from being crudely obvious, the gold triangle has no formal connection to the underlying image.

Speaking of crude, the worst piece in the exhibition is an enormous picture by Ben Quilty, employing his familiar pull-apart gimmick and with a figure of a white settler in the centre; this figure is meant to represent a grotesque personage, but ­actually only represents grotesquely inept painting. In the ­accompanying label, Quilty takes the blame for the Murray-Darling catastrophe on our behalf; it must be hard to bear the burden of so much compassion but one has to make sacrifices to get ahead in the art world.

In contrast, the quite diverse works of Ian Marr are simple and honest. Marr was also the host of many of the artists in this exhibition on painting expeditions at the family property, Mount Murchison in Wilcannia. The exhibition includes several documents relating to Mount Murchison, including a photograph from 1865 that includes the white members of the original owners with their Aboriginal station hands, signed “Pickering, travelling photographer”.

I should say that I have known Marr and his family — and especially his late brother, Ted — since school. I enjoyed a ­memorable stay at the Mount Murchison homestead many years ago, helping to castrate the new lambs, and swam in the Darling, which meandered for countless miles through the vast property.

The environment was always arid but it has clearly deteriorated in the years since that visit. One of Marr’s drawings is of the dry river bed, exposing bottles and other detritus from the 19th century and from the time when the river was navigable and Wilcannia was a river port. Another work is an inscription on slate — the medium for which Marr is best known — with a text from the diary of the great surveyor Thomas Mitchell (who incidentally named Mount Murchison), recounting a meeting with local Aboriginal elders.

The form of the stele reminds us, however, that although Mitchell was generally sympathetic to the indigenous people, relations were not always friendly and there was some loss of life on both sides. An adjacent map from the published version of the diaries records Mitchell’s journeys exploring the rivers and tributaries that make up the system.

There are several works by Aboriginal artists or artists with Aboriginal background, notably Nici Cumpston and Badger Bates, both related to the local Barkindji people, the former with hand-coloured photographs of dead trees and their stumps with strangely elongated root formations that must be the result of floods long ago, and the latter for black-and-white linocuts that evoked the natural and legendary life of the river and its waterholes.

Another effective work is the stop-motion animation in charcoal drawings by Martin King of a black cormorant in flight; the slightly slowed-down beating of its wings as it flies just above the surface of the water reminds us how simplified and even rudimentary forms become vivid by eliciting the imaginative participation of the viewer.

Euan Macleod evokes the pathos of the dry river bed, characteristically, through the use of metaphor: several pictures are variations on the theme of anonymous figures carrying a small boat, as though from one surviving part of the stream to another. ­Macleod, like most of the painters in the exhibition — including Luke Sciberras, Amanda Penrose Hart and Idris Murphy — are also represented in the travelling exhibition, Salient, based on work done at the Western Front battlefields, whose final stop will be at the Tweed Regional Art Gallery from November 22 to ­February 16.

But all of these painters, and others like Guy Maestri or Elisabeth Cummings, have responded to the river and to the pathos of its dry state, which touches us much more authentically than political or moral posturing. For rivers appeal deeply to the human psyche, and their life-giving flow has since the beginning of human thought been associated with the very concept of time as well as the cycles of natural existence and even spiritual nourishment.

These painters are plein-air artists, so they are used to dwelling with the landscape and listening to the life of nature. But here, in the face of a river that is dying of human greed and mismanagement, we can feel that each artist is drawn viscerally — their style stretched in the effort of expression — towards the moral as well as the visual spectacle of the dry river bed, which ­reproaches our lack of foresight and demands a broader and more intelligent awareness of the natural world on which our existence depends.

River on the Brink: Inside the Murray-Darling Basin

SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney. Until November 3