Speculative Landscapes: Regionalism and Rurality

This work investigates the continued speculative practice of rural localities in regional New South Wales. It is a document of nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. As the ubiquitous grain tower rises as if to signal life within the community remains healthy. It is both a landmark to speculative living and monument to severe cultural depression. This is a contribution to the Australian Vernacular, a landscape about the any-man, from any-where. It is as much about a collected Australian culture as it is about white familiarity and home-life, particularly frontiersmanship. Speculative Landscapes draws from the original writings of John Brinkerhoff Jackson on American colonialism and civics transplanting these motifs in their Australian regional settings. The photograph works to underscore the contribution of agricultural expansion, principally railways and grain silos to the Australian agricultural frontier. It uses these images to de-familiarize the common. The photograph forms part of a broader academic field of inquiry re-investigating and re-situating Australian vernacular building and agriculture with its sustained relationship to colonisation.