Plottings - commentary by poet and historian Barry Hill
The photographs of Ian Roberts To live near the heads of Port Phillip Bay is to live with a sense of drama. The place is an exemplary case of what the early Romantics would have called the Sublime, that indefinable cocktail of Beauty and Danger. The beauty, of course, is palpable, and was noticed by the first settlers who exclaimed about the sparking blues and zestful Ozone. This was to register beauty in its gentle form--- the kind that would please holidaymakers. More dramatically, that same beauty could blow up into indigo, where the sea met the sky operatically, and where the perils of the sea were manifest in a vortex of waters called The Rip, the stretch of water between the heads where the tides of the bay meet the ocean, and below which, hundreds of feet below, great pinnacles of rock tower up from their subterranean gorges. For the first thirty years of white settlement ships sank in the vicinity of the Heads with terrible frequency. Newspapers revelled in description...
