After accidentally erasing my first attempt of processing black & white film, I loaded the same type back into the camera and went photographing immediately after work the following day.
With the shots lost, there was one that could be replicated easily; an outlying column of sandstone rock at Reddells beach that has been engraved with names and initials over time. I've seen similar engraving on the walls of remote caves in Cambodia, the insides of which were emblazoned with the names of hundreds of tourists. Cedar Falls outside of Brisbane is a small waterfall and bush walking area where people have sprayed tags over the rock-face. I've even seen a small fishing boat that had sunk in the shallow, clear waters off the dive island of Ko Tao in Thailand, that was totally covered and tagged by people that had dived there.
I'm pretty unforgiving and puzzled as to why people feel the need to do this. To me, it's about as imaginative and seems as compulsive as a dog pissing on a lamppost. I was speaking to a friend about this recently and she was less scathing. She said if she saw the initials of a couple in a tree, than that added a story. A mystery. It conjured up a narrative about who they were, when they met, did they eventually get married etc? And in cases like that I get it. The photos and examples above feel different though,
Bundy, The Ord River, The KImberley, Western Australia, 2018
And look I used to do it. When I was about five or six I wrote '"Steven's Garage" (minus the apostrophe presumably) in green marker pen on the garage wall of my parent's home in big, scrawling writing. Dad had been out and I wanted to surprise him on his return. He pulled up in the drive way and as he stepped out the car I proudly showed him my addition to the pebble dashed wall. He was surprised alright and instead of the kindly praise that I was expecting, I got an absolute bollocking for it.
And at secondary school, I would occasionally engrave the names of my favorite bands into the wooden desk tops during class which were already covered. However one day I tagged the wrong desk. Mrs W, who had thick glasses, a soft voice and a keen temper, kept me after class one day, where she had found one of my latest additions. Strategically it was a flawed decision on my part because these were new tables, plastic coated with a mock wood grain underneath and pristine. She worked out it was my work because a) we all had designated seats for the whole year and b) there had been no other lesson in that room since our last class , so she didn't exactly need a qualification in criminology to deduce, correctly, that I was the culprit. At the time I couldn't' believe she traced it back so quickly but before my lame attempts at denial were over, I had a cloth and spray firmly placed in my hands.
So I put my hands up, but in this context we're talking about the natural environment where people, adults apparantly, have engraved their names into delicate sandstone rocks that can't be wiped away. I get we all want to leave our mark etc but really?
Here’s a few shots from that afternoon, the last being a dinosaur print from about 135million years ago.
