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 descriptions of a ship as it went down, or of the crowd at the cliff top as a ship burnt to the gunnels, with locals and visitors standing there together in the dark, faces lit, almost, by the flames out there at sea, the cries of the wrecked reaching them across the water. Such events produced, one might say, some high points of the Sublime, as it was manifested in the lives of those who knew the Rip. Pilot services would help, but not definitively, never absolutely, not even when every vessel was motorized. Today, as we contemplate the sea at the heads we know in our bones that we are looking out across a graveyard.

One needs to say this-- at the risk of Gothic touches (though Gothic is a close cousin of the Sublime)--to appreciate the consequence of living with fear. When there is danger, we seek refuge. From the wilds, we create safe havens. And so, against the roar of the ocean, and the treachery of the rocks that stretch into the Rip, we have always valued the rim of dune and scrub that abut the sea. We have turned our back on the wind, and gone down behind the dune, and then into the scrub where the first beach houses were built. Point Lonsdale, from the very beginning, preferred to nest behind the dunes in the ti-trees, nest modestly, in structures made for simple domestic pleasures. At the Point, which was closest to the ocean, you could get your strongest dose of the Sublime and so by contrast, get your deepest most peaceful rest in the of your equally natural retreat. One aspect fed the other: the more acute the danger on the cliff top, the sweet path back to the hearth.

Meanwhile, over at Queenscliff, Nature, with a little help from Society, provided for the gentle co-existence of sea and retreat from the sea. Along the cliff top facing the Heads the pioneers encouraged a bower between the ti-trees which they called Lover's Walk. Initially, Lover's Walk began near what was called the Botanical Gardens, but the latter was let go in favour of a sports ground, leaving Lover's Walk to stand as a reminder of how romantic things were from the beginning. It was an impulse that lasted: Lover's Walk was still there during the 1930's Depression, and precautions were taken to protect the bracken along it (only the officially unemployed had permission to collect the loose wood). Besides, the truth was, there were other walks further along, and certainly over at the Point, along the dunes at the surf beach. There you could move along bowers for hundreds of metres. I was still taking my kids into them the early 1980's, long wonderland tunnels of ti-tree that even as they kept one from the blasts of ocean wind, seemed, as they kept going, to solicit risks. How far to go now? Where will the path end? Retreats have their mysteries. Retreats are deep.

This is the habitat of the resonant photographs taken by Ian Roberts. Ian lives, as most of us know, with his family at Point Lonsdale, a stone's throw from the Heads. Walk down the end of his street and there it is: the Rip in all its glory. Put your head on a pillow at Ian's place, and the sound of the ocean fills the sleep, a sleep so naturally filled with dreams of making one's way along the ti-tree path to the sea, or along the path beside the sea, or along the path away from the sea-- whatever. The path to the sea. The dappled path. The path lit with light from sea spray. The salty path, the path of salt crystals in the light. The path going in and out of the light. The path going on, then further on, as dreams do, into a greater darkness. A path that could feel, at some turns, as deeply submerged as those terrifying gorges below the calm surface of the Rip. The interior path that kept posing the question: will we come to the clearing? Will there be a clearing?

The first time I saw Ian's pictures, he'd set them to music. He put me in front of the big TV screen, upon which I had last watched that anti-thesis to innerness, the broadcast of the last State election, and with hardly a comment, he set the images rolling. There were about (IAN FIX PLS), and he said they were in no particular order. One by one they prompted that pleasure of recognition: gnarled trunks, the filigree of branches and twigs, the downy path and its speckled light-- 'glory be to God for dappled things', as the poet of dark religious praise, Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote. Effortlessly, you moved with the light and the dark of the images; they drew you along. I had a sense of going somewhere, though to where I was not sure. Ah, one image would say, you have come into the clearing. Ah, the next one would say, you are approaching the sea. But no, the next would signal, more path to go yet. 

The music? It was (IAN FIX PLS). A light, open, almost edgy set of notes, enhancing a movement towards the unknown. The music went with the pictures as sea goes with sky--a Taoist ensemble, I felt. It was music for the Way along the path to the sea or from the sea, or along the path to its middle-- was this the middle of the journey now?- before the next step in and out of the light. The Chinese music helped, I think, to temper the melancholia of the images. And Ian seemed to resist my initial feeling that he was creating a narrative, and that he should perhaps make more of the movement towards… I would not now say this. I'd let their mood be. It was all there, narrative or not. We don't need to separate everything out.

Months later, my next viewing was on the laptop screen. A smaller selection. No music. The flow of images (my sense of their flow) was interrupted by Ian taking pleasure in details: we would stop and take a branch of a tree to the limits of its digital resolution. The light breaks down, a mist forms on the image, a kind of tunnel runs back into the retina as the mind hangs onto the last crystal of light. Ian was rightly revelling in the beauty of the things in themselves, and which he had captured so true to life on the path where he dwells. I was too, but as we blew things up to the point of dissolution, I kept thinking that that's what his 'images from a path' are offering: a stroll with oneself into that interior where every thing-- each cell, each nerve end, each twig and branch of the self-- is so poignant that it could, with a breath, or with another step, dissolve. I don't mean to imply death here, not absolute death. But the extinction that comes when our eye holds the object so intensely-- such is its clarity and precision, its natural perfection, right down to the differences of each leaf--  that what is OUT there seems to implode inwards: reality feels like it has a vanishing point. 

Photographic images endemically invoke the possibility of their opposite: of their not being. These pictures are a reminder of emptiness. The path Ian has created seems to me to give us a lovely choice: value that emptiness or not… It started off as a Lover's Path but there is no one else on the path. The bower is tangible with growth, but things dissolve the closer we inspect them. Each image, each step of the way, is complete in itself, but as we move through them they also dissolve as if to hollow one out. This is not the Australian bush (though it is) but it draws out that trepidation, that sense of soul-lessness that has been in the white imagination since 1788.

It is tempting to locate Ian's images against the history of painting. All one has to say is that these images belong to glades, and much European landscape painting springs to mind. You can no more get away from the depth of Ian's Romantic impulse than you can the affinity the Rip has with the Sublime. But at the same time, considering the aridity, the rough tangibility of our local bush at close quarters--Ian's path is as prickly as anything painted by, say, Neil Douglas. This after all is native scrub, our native scrub, and we can't nowadays go along it bare footed--the pictures make one feel barefooted-- without sensing the shadows of William Buckley and his Wathaurung friends. Tread softly, the images suggest, twigs snap beneath the feet. Every path has its Dreaming.

These pictures invoke a path felt to be deeply, secretly our own, a path at one with a melancholy self seeking refuge. Tangibly, they are native habitat that draws us on and in, and each picture has a birdcall that makes us stand still. 

Barry Hill

November 2005