This image depicts an elaborate and clearly heartfelt roadside memorial to “Emily”, which is an extraverted display of sadness and loss that is an increasingly familiar contemporary lament. We know not who Emily was, nor what happened to her. The story is unclear if the tragedy unfolded on the road outside the house, or inside the house itself, thus the house could have been either witness or host to her demise. The composition directs, but most certainly does not invite us via the gate to the front door, on which the cross is strangely, but unintentionally replicated. Were we to have known Emily, we could be profoundly moved by this image, reminded of a very personal loss, and the catastrophe that may surround it.

My own motivation here is one of compassion and regret for the loss of community that generates such an isolated and lonely tribute. The scene arrested me because of its overt anonymity, which seemed frozen between catharsis and repression. It weeps publicly before a locked-down house, a sign that perhaps someone wants to talk about it, but is unable.

This urban landscape, Mandurama Storm, highlights our resistance to the forces of nature. The photograph is underpinned by a similar sentiment to artist Laura Glusman, who writes, “the concept of landscape is not an isolated portion of land that exists only to be contemplated, but [is] a being imprinted with the traces of culture, storms, commerce and climate change”.

The image depicts an anonymous building behind a nondescript façade in the main street of a small town. It is of unknown purpose, but appears to be a former business. There are signs that it may now be inhabited as a residence, such as a garden-style gate over the original front door, and a television antenna protruding from atop the fibro structure behind. A single line still connects the building to the grid via the adjacent power pole, which frames the space above with its web of electrical cables. As a fierce storm approaches, a last shaft of sunlight casts an ominous shadow of a cross, which is mimicked by designs in the façade itself. But it is not of any ethereal origin, and is instead caused by another man-made power pole. This building, which suggests a battening down of the hatches, preparing for the inevitable storm, could be anywhere, and is everywhere in regional Australia.

This interior landscape finds its only cheer in the idyllic brackish waters depicted in a picturesque painting reproduction. The ideal coastal estuary adorning this space serves to highlight that our interior-orientated habitats often rest uncomfortably at odds with the natural landscape. There was a time when people who lived by the sea measured their lives by the tides, not clocks. Now ruled by the clock however, our working lives are often tied to a different tide, occasionally only punctuated by melancholic reminders, in this case provided by a painting on the gritty wall of a cheap motel room that is home to a mine shift worker in central Western Australia.

The occasion for the writing of these poems was activism surrounding the controversial highway known as the Roe 8 extension in the areas of Cockburn and Fremantle in Western Australia. Planned in the 1950s, Roe 8 is contentious for a number of reasons, including extraordinary political deals over funding, undue process regarding environmental reporting, lack of a business case, inadequate noise and traffic modelling, erasure of Indigenous heritage sites, and clearing of the sensitive Beeliar wetlands and Coolbellup banksia woodlands which were designated a Threatened Ecological Community in 2016. During the summer of 2016/2017 contractors started to fence off and then bulldoze a footprint for the highway extension, resulting in in one of the largest protests ever seen in the state. Over the next 3 months alongside constant protest 40 hectares of bush was cleared and deposited back on the site in 3 metre-high piles which were left to rot as the windy summer topsoil blew across the suburb and into our houses. The project stopped the night before the Western Australian state election of March 11, 2017. One of the promises of the Opposition was to stop Roe 8, and their election was partly attributed to the high degree of animosity and grief engendered by Roe 8.

This landscape, photographed at Coffin Bay, contributes towards a solution to Glenn Albrecht’s solastalgia, which he terms soliphilia. It expresses my concern that we live too much in the shadow of fear and helplessness, needing to reclaim our relinquished responsibility for our own condition. To do this, we must first realise that we are heading towards a demise of our own making. This image metaphorically depicts exactly that, by suggesting that the highway of denial of our ancient rhythms, which carves its way through nature’s own warnings, careers relentlessly towards the inevitable edge.

In the end, Albrecht’s neologisms are only words, but they are intended to inspire action, appealing us to work together to protect and maintain our home environments, providing “a universal motivation to achieve sustainability”. Sometimes it takes a moment of melancholy to bring this to the fore, which my photograph endeavours to elicit. If this image inspires reflection on the benefits of a human societal way of life in harmony with a sustainable environment, then ultimately that melancholy is a positive experience, which can help bring balance to a disharmonious world.