Current Exhibitions

At the beach, three habitats meet – air, sand and seawater. Many kinds of living things – including people – coexist there. Each picture invites the viewer imaginatively to step into the footprints of one or two of them at a moment in time.

I photographed the tracks and the images of sea and sky three years ago at Mapoon, north of Weipa on the eastern shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where traditional owners manage a project to protect turtle nesting grounds, on a beach that has also been the site of much human history.

The actual place would have been far inland for most of its tens of thousands of years of human habitation, being reached by rising seawater only a few thousand years ago. Right here, in1606, was the first recorded contact between Australian and European people. A mission settlement was built in the 1890s, destroyed in the 1950s and re-occupied in the 1970s. Residents rescued an Australian airforce crew in the war with Japan in the 1940s. Refugees from Asia landed in the 1990s. Fishermen from Indonesia have visited for hundreds of years; their lost, drifting nets snag nesting turtles and are a constant nuisance for the rangers.

We can wonder what the future holds.

I would like to thank the Tjungundji people for the opportunity to visit and photograph the beach and also thank Steve Gregg and Glen Miller for introducing me to them.

Peter Annand

Peter Annand (1949) lives in Brisbane. He has English literature and law degrees from Queensland and Oxford universities and is undertaking a Master of Visual Arts by studio practice at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.