Traveston Dam: looking behind the lens
Arkin during her 4-day kayak trip down the Mary River. image: Dan Lyons.
It’s often said that a picture paints a thousand words. Photographs of faces of anguish after the initial announcement, beautiful natural scenes that were so close to being lost forever and finally faces of joy and relief after the simple word, ‘no’ echoed throughout the Mary Valley.
Arkin Mackay’s images made the issue personal. They spawned far more than a thousand words. They brought us face to face with the product of government decisions.
And most importantly they reminded us that although a river can physically divide communities, rivers can also bring people together in a way not often seen before.
Ian Mackay, Arkin’s father, proudly reminds us about the importance of her work. (The ed)
When Arkin accepted her “Froggie” Environment Award for her role in the Mary River campaign, her acceptance speech was brief and humble.
“I'm absolutely besotted with my award,” said Arkin. “And I’m genuinely surprised to realise that what I thought was me just doing what I could for the campaign, has been really beneficial to quite a few people.” image: Jackie Smith.
“I can’t write submissions,” she said, “so I take photos.”
Arkin’s involvement in the Traveston campaign came after a decision, back in 2006, to make the then-parlous state of south-east Queensland’s dams more widely appreciated. This was before the Courier Mail had realised how simple it was to dispatch a photographer to Wivenhoe to produce cracked-mud images of its retreating water line.
It seemed a simple enough task, dig out photographs of dry dams and circulate them more widely, but it met a fundamental hitch. By and large, dams only get photographed when they’re full, so it’s perhaps not surprising that people come to think that a new dam comes already filled with water.
Arkin wasn’t daunted by the absence of images of dry dams and set out with her son Tanis and I, to visit and document failing dams across the state’s southeast, going as far north as the state’s most recent dam, Paradise Dam on the Burnett River.
What she found stretched the credibility of the notion that it was just population growth straining our water resources. Dam after dam was drying up, not just here but across the whole country, and it became pretty apparent that to think you were solving the water crisis by proposing another one was the height of folly.
Arkin’s graphic photographs appeared on her Stop Press website which she devoted entirely to “activism in pictures” and she went on to produce other albums.
One of the most memorable, “Something in the Water” tackled the residual phobia about drinking recycled water, highlighting the absurd assumption that water from rivers and dams is somehow of great quality, while recycled water, purified to a level far greater, is full of risks.
“Far from trying to scare people about the quality of the water people were drinking now, I just wanted to show the confidence we have in water treatment works to produce a safe product to drink,” she says.
Her 4-day kayak trip, with fellow photographer Chris van Wyk through the stretch of the Mary that would disappear under the dam gave a wider audience an understanding of what we stood to lose.
“Chris had taken these wonderful “algal-affro’ed” Mary River Turtle photos,”she explains, “and I wanted to match these with shots of the vegetation in areas that could really only be readily accessed by canoe.”
As well, as these special albums, Arkin’s camera has been a regular chronicler of some of the highlights of the campaign, the rallies and actions, culminating in the jubilation at Peter Garrett’s Remembrance Day announcement.
“That was certainly a day the Mary Valley will never forget,” she says.
Arkin added a letter generator to the Stop Press website, ever expanded her mailing list, and played an important role in the more than 30,000 protest letters that went to politicians, both state and federal. She also produced posters, cards for both election campaigns and for fund-raising and was heavily involved in the photography for the Love, Mary book.
She has freely provided her photographs to reporters, writers and researchers and some of her Paradise Dam fishway photographs have been used in the Paradise Dam court case in the Federal Court.
Recognition of the role that Arkin and her camera have played in the campaign came just a few days after Peter Garrett’s “no” announcement, when she was contacted by the National Library asking permission to archive the Stop Press website as part of its history of the Traveston campaign.
Arkin protests that her effort was just one of many in fighting the dam.
The results, I think, say otherwise.
Related articles:
Leave a Response
Entries(RSS)