Kaye Manners

Graduate Certificate of Visual Art

The vastness of this country makes it available to experience but also to plunder. Small settlements bear the scars of historical colonialism that is still active today.

For a brief time, I took photographs in a central desert township. I felt those who had always lived there and those who came and claimed. A sign on the hill, Hollywood-like, announced the township. Houses were burrowed into hillsides, yet still the colours of the earth and the sky were breathtaking.

The actions of those from my ancestral country have impacted the landscape. Notions of wealth, through the mining of translucent stones, continue to tantalise. Colonial capitalism is alive and present today in the ancient hinterlands of this country.