writer HILARY BURDEN photographer PETER MARMION
“To an extraordinary extent, photography has defined the way Tasmanians think about themselves and their environment.” ~ Nic Haygarth, The Wild Ride – Revolutions that shaped Tasmanian black and white wilderness photography, 2008
Part 3: Landscape
The battle lines once drawn against Tasmania’s first peoples are frequently repeated: epic stories of resistance, suffering and survival quench white man’s thirst for the heroic. Less known, though, are far gentler stories of beauty and spirit, or the folklore and mythology of place. The old ways of telling stories as a means of survival are scarcely remembered in Tasmania. The sharing of yarns, legends or myths that survived invasion – The Dreamtime – is still fraught and complicated territory here. Whose stories are they to tell, whose role to write them down? In an afront to imagination, some wonder if the stories are even true, and create angst over how words are spelt.
Could the gap left by the attempted genocide of a 10,000-year-old culture also be an annihilation of a deeper sense of place? One that is felt rather than fought over?
In the remote World Heritage wild lands of Port Davey, the role of storytelling is the realm of an ancient landscape itself, one unique in Australia, where floating rock islands and ranges as grand as the Western Arthurs are remnants of an ancient plain; a landscape once 120 metres lower, drowned too many hundreds of millions of years ago to mean much to anyone other than the geologist.
It is no wonder, looking at the Port Davey landscape today, where the Toogee Low people once dwelt, that stories told here were mythical, of the birth of man, of the spirit Moinee, hurled from heaven after a fight with Dromerdeem, residing at Louisa Bay. How his wife followed him and lived in the sea. How their children came down in the rain. How Moinee then cut the ground and made the rivers, cut the land and made the islands. And on his death, turned into a stone that now stands at Cox Bight “in his own country”.
“I am struck dumb, but oh, my soul sings!” ~ JW Beattie, a mountain summit epiphany quoted in Death of Mr JW Beattie, The Mercury, June 25, 1930.
Visitors to the deep south-west are silenced by landscape. Like JW Beattie, the call to speak its story has long been answered by the professional photographer, entranced by the magical, ethereal, and otherworldliness of light falling on wildscapes at 43 degrees south.
Photographers being drawn by Tasmania’s wild places and picturesque landscapes goes back almost as far as the rise of photography itself.
But there’s something you can’t quite capture. For south-west guide and photographer Peter Marmion, it is “a sense of old time”. “You feel the land is speaking to you, sharing its stories,” he says, “but as a white fella it’s not your place to say that.”
. . .
Peter Marmion doesn’t aspire to be a professional photographer. He says his photography is more about right place, right time. Huddled over a laptop at the dining room table, scrolling through more than 2,000 images taken over decades of trips into the south-west – a place he considers home – the former school principal says if he was a photographer, he wouldn’t see the moments that he does.
“It’s about spontaneity sometimes, isn’t it? I always thought when I was teaching the best moments were spontaneous. It’s the same with guiding. You’ve just got to make the most of the chance. For some people it’s all about the tripod, but there’s also the other side of it. Just being spontaneous because it actually captures what it was like to be there.”
As a wilderness guide, flying from Cambridge Airport to the tiny Melaleuca airstrip, Peter Marmion often gets to sit in the Islander’s middle seat with no view. Which means he does a lot of sitting with his camera, poking up and under, through people’s arms. He says that’s how he took the photo of the Norold Range, a summit he’s also walked, “A really truly lonely place where hardly anyone ever goes.”
Marmion explains his primary role as a guide is to look after people, which is why he uses an old wide-angle lens to set up quickly, rather than multiple lenses.
Always a guide first; a lover of light before rain and early morning ridges; of rain coming in rather than down; of sea mist that can make the South West Cape monolith look coy. He loves the energy of bad weather as much as the endless reflections in Bathurst Harbour.
“What’s that saying about let the storms blow their energy into you? I often think about that.”
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.” ~ John Muir, The Mountains of California
Even in lockdown Tasmania, the south-west mountain ranges were in Peter Marmion’s purview, seen daily from the front door of the family home on a hilltop in the Glen Huon, stubby in hand, camera at the ready. He’s carried a camera with him – sailing and bushwalking – since the age of 12.
As a boy, he took a lot of black and white photographs; his father built his own enlarger and father and son developed their film together in the family bathroom. Throughout his education, Marmion spent time drawing maps or profiles of many of the mountains he’s since climbed. Later, while studying for a BA Dip Ed at the University of Tasmania, Peter was secretary of the Photographic Society. “We had a dark room at the university underneath the stairs in the Ref.”
One of his first landscapes was of Lake Pedder, taken during a walk in for his Bush Walker Badge in 1971. He knew it was his last chance to see the iconic alpine beach before it was drowned by the Hydro. During the overnight camp, Marmion recalls his 14-year-old self, “realising how his place in the world really wasn’t that important”.
Since then, he’s circumnavigated the coast of Tasmania on foot, and climbed more than 330 of its mountains. One of his favourite views in the south-west is from the top of Mt Rugby looking along the range into the heart of the wild country he’s spent most of his life exploring, “like looking down on a map”. A master of showing up to landscape, it is a rare gift to be able to see the grandeur of a landscape while at the same time know it intimately.
With the rare experience of regularly seeing these landscapes from air, sea and land, he feels totally at home in any conditions, and describes having “a sixth sense of where the best scenes might be unfolding”. “I go to the same places all the time – they’re always changing. Being a local allows me to visit the area in all seasons, especially in winter when the light has a special quality. I am fortunate to have grown up in a place where such extraordinary landscapes exist.”
Peter Marmion can’t get enough of his favourite place to photograph: the ancient tea trees on the Celery Top Islands in Bathurst Harbour that speak to him of resilience. “It’s something I admire in humans and it’s something I admire in the landscape as well. Everyone has a tough life at some stage or another. No one gets out of it scot free. Those trees seem to say it. I reckon they’re at least 200 years old. How many hundreds of storms they would have seen.”
His particular skill is in seeing grandeur and intimacy at the same time. “Some landscapes are a really personal thing because I know these places, I’ve walked all over these mountains, I just feel this closeness to the landscape. I’m comfortable because it’s so familiar.”
It’s been a mammoth task – sorting, choosing and editing photographs for his soon-to-be published book. Some landscapes he’d really like to use won’t be seen, of petroglyphs and rock paintings, Aboriginal cultural living sites. “It’s almost impossible not to photograph them – what we used to call ‘middens’. I’ve taken photos that I would never publish of a cave on the west coast, the whole cave is covered with petroglyphs. It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.”
“You feel the land is speaking to you, sharing its stories … ”
Hilary Burden was a guest of Par Avion.
Peter Marmion’s book on 50 years of Port Davey will be published in 2023.
Hilary Burden is a British/Australian author, journalist and photographer. She lives and writes from a shack on an acre in the low hills of Swansea. Her memoir, A Story of Seven Summers – Life in The Nuns’ House, was published in 2012 by Allen & Unwin. More of her photography can be seen on Instagram, @hilaryburden.
Peter Marmion lives in the Huon Valley where the scent of the south-west sweeps through his garden on the frequent gales, and wedge-tailed eagles can be observed from his living room windows. When not working as a wilderness guide, he volunteers on a range of nature conservation projects, including feral animal and weed eradication on Tasmania’s many offshore islands.
