It is important to first look back to white colonisation of the land of the Bunurong Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation and the myth of terra nullius, as explored through the work of Sharon West. Broadly, West’s work seeks to dispel the narrative of an uninhabited and uninhabitable Australian landscape.

Using colonial landscape paintings as a visual reference, West presents a retelling of Aboriginal encounters with white colonisers, and the dispossession of their land. This is evident in John Batman and his Party Encounter the Budgeroo of Bundoora, 2011, in which West’s fictional creature, which she describes as “Budgeroo, which once inhabited the terraces of Mt. Cooper”(4), towers over the party and dominates the scene. The work satirises the myth of a harsh landscape of dangerous creatures, uninhabitable and thus uninhabited, adopted as a justification for white settlement.

This hyperbolic scene repositions the narrative of colonial landscape paintings as a singular perspective open to critical discernment, rather than as ‘History’. Further, as the work is a photograph of a diorama, it alludes to the process of building and communicating historical narratives, particularly through cultural institutions, and the way in which the Australian historical narrative is commonly simplified and distorted.

In his work A Brief History of Preston, 2010, Warren Lane also looks back to European colonisation in order to examine the notion of ‘progress’ in the particular locale of Preston. In this work an Aboriginal man, located in an empty shopping strip car park, is standing on the land of the Wurundjeri-willam people. Behind him are two Holstein Friesian dairy cattle, with the Northlands shopping centre further again in the distance.

Lane’s merging of three contrasting historical periods in one image, which he refers to as a “compression of time”(5), references over two hundred years of history in the area since white colonisation, where farming, industry and commerce have become dominant. Significantly, the composition places the Aboriginal man in the foreground, with the most recent developments in the background. This relocates the past to the forefront of the image, directly confronting the contemporary viewer with the area’s history.

The figure looks directly ahead, toward the future, rather than reflecting back on the past. This perspective confronts the viewer, who rather than looking at a past fixed in time, is challenged to look toward the future and reflect on ideas of progress, its consequences, and the agency we have in shaping the next stage in the history of Preston.

Dale Cox also references colonial paintings in his work, providing a commentary on the commodification of the environment through the logging industry, and the use of the environment as an endless resource without thought to traditional ownership or the substance of place.

In Ghost, 2012, Cox’s white, plastic logging truck carries the cargo of a John Glover landscape painted onto blocks of wood. The ghostly nature of the truck makes it elusive, and denies a point of reference to attribute responsibility or blame for the environmental degradation. Rather than viewing logging as the harvest of individual trees for industry, Cox repositions logging as a broader removal of the landscape, a landscape revered and celebrated through colonial painting.

In this way, Ghost serves as a commentary on our contradictory view of nature as both a source of beauty and intrigue, and as an industrial resource, highlighting the lasting consequences of treating the environment as a commodity.

While Cox’s work is a symbolic statement, Marilyn Smith’s photograph Diamond Valley Tree Protest 2019 documents a grass-roots approach to protesting the removal of trees for urban expansion. This demonstration related to the planned removal of ‘Tree 10’ for the development of a proposed multi-storey apartment building in the Diamond Village redevelopment.

Bearing signs reading ‘Our community trees are not for sale’ and ‘Our trees are not Banyule Council cash cows’, as well as ‘Save Tree 10 – The Biggest Tree on Nepean Street’, it can be derived that the protestors believed profit was a primary motivator for the removal of the tree.

Smith’s photograph captures the spirit of protest, and the ability of individuals to have a voice against the established bodies who hold power over decisions of development and progress, on behalf of their local communities.

Distinct from the grass-roots approach to the Diamond Valley Tree Protest, artist Ash Keating engages with a more conceptual protest, ritualised and aestheticised, then documented to provide a broader commentary on the process of development in the urban fringes.

The video installation West Park Proposition, 2012, is a documentation of an “endurance painting intervention undertaken on the morning of 01 September 2012 on the east facing wall of a newly built tilt-slab industrial building, situated on the direct edge of the current urban and rural boundary in Truganina, Victoria”(6).

In this eight-hour performance, Keating engaged in a reclamation of space, in protest against prioritising budget and functionality without consideration of aesthetics. Throwing red paint on to the wall, Keating symbolically engaged in an act of forceful protest while also taking part in the aestheticisation of the building.

In North Park Proposition, 2013, Keating uses a fire extinguisher to paint the concrete exterior of a warehouse until the building appears to recede into the landscape, ultimately as if not there at all.

Without community consultation, industrial developments often seem to appear in the landscape without warning or acknowledgement, where they are both large and dominating, but quickly become a foreign but unquestioned feature of the landscape.

These works force a pause to consider how easily and continuously development is encroaching on the environment when we do not pay attention or take action. While one act is reminiscent of violence and the other more serene, both are acts of protest and the reclaiming of space.

In contrast to the pointed commentary on urban development presented by Keating, photographer Robert Pointon has captured the essence of meeting points between the natural and the urban on Melbourne’s fringes, through his series of photographs taken around the City of Brimbank in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Pointon’s photographs capture mundane elements of suburbia on the peripheries, from empty carparks and winding footpaths to landscape sitting cleared but vacant.

In some photographs, such as Footpaths each side of Kororoit Creek, 1989, the scene appears largely developed, the land cleared, grass manicured and stark footpaths dominating the landscape. However, these footpaths subtly follow the natural conduits of the terrain, gently winding around and passing over the Kororoit Creek which runs below.

Similarly, in Untitled, c1994, Pointon captures the sudden end of a boundary fence, just short of the natural boundary created by the presence of the creek. This image highlights that while the landscape can have borders imposed upon it, natural elements often dictate the divisions and use of the environment.

The creek as a natural boundary and persistent force within urban environments continues as a theme in the works of both Jason Emilianowicz and Katherine Hattam. In his painting Untitled, 2010, Emilianowicz captures a distinctly suburban landscape which, while ubiquitous, foregrounds the path that lays between Merri Creek and the South Morang railway line in Melbourne’s inner northern suburbs.

This streetscape highlights the man-made in opposition with the natural, through its depiction of a harsh Australian summer within an urban environment. The deep blue sky, browning grass and stark concrete create a feeling of unrelenting heat, with the single remaining tree unable to provide shade. Rather than a treeline, a wooden fence stretches across the streetscape; a utilitarian object reclaimed and aestheticised through graffiti.

This painting draws attention to the liminal spaces between areas of development, such as the often-forgotten trails and reserves where utility and nature meet.

Like Emilianowicz, Katherine Hattam’s work Powerlines Merri Creek, 2010, explores the liminal spaces where nature and urban services and amenities converge.

In this scene, the powerlines command attention as they tower over the landscape. However, Hattam’s vibrant pink and red foreground allows the treeline to compete for dominance, with both the natural and developed features of the landscape asserting a strong presence. These colours feel out of place, creating a sense of unnaturalness that is heightened as the exposed plywood is found not in the treeline but in the sky, where it conveys a heaviness.

The work portrays the convergence of the man-made and the natural environment as a type of ‘alien’ landscape that is both natural and developed, weaving through suburbia, following the paths of natural creek and installed powerlines alike.

In the Westgarth precinct public art installation, 1998, by Helen Bodycomb, Chris Rak and Enver Camdal, references to the natural environment are inserted back into an area of high development, through a public artwork located in a shopping strip.

The work consists of a series of pieces which reference indigenous fauna, including steel dragonfly wings affixed to power poles, skeletal formations on the street, and mosaic dragonfly wings inset in the pavement. The elements are both individually subtle and collectively strong as they traverse the ground, street level and move overhead.

The installation both adds an aesthetic element to the functional power poles and footpaths, and incorporates functionality into the aesthetic as the skeletal forms serve as bike racks.

In a high-traffic area crowded by development, this work demonstrates the way in which aesthetic design and references to nature may be incorporated into an existing urban landscape, when it is too late for the preservation of natural elements of the environment in an area of development.

Similarly, through their work Benchmark, 1997, Susie Kumar and Naomi Kumar respond to site and integrate both aesthetics and functionality into a landscape that exists in the boundary between the natural and the developed.

Benchmark consists of a 60m curved bench following the topography of the Coventry Oval location in Diamond Creek, drawing attention to the space where elements of the natural environment dictate the course and boundaries of man-made developments.

In this site, the Diamond Creek Trail moves between the sports oval and the Diamond Creek, as a link between the natural and the developed. The curved bench, while humorous, is functional and serves as a statement on the way in which man-made interventions can respond to and work with the natural environment rather than exist in opposition to it. The use of red paint draws attention to a bench that may otherwise blend more subtly into the tree-line surrounding the oval, however this red is the local football team’s strip, reinforcing the subtle balance of aesthetic, functional and environmental considerations that arise when living on the urban fringe.

These artists and photographers have collectively explored Melbourne’s urban fringe; both the periurban fringe of the outer regions where sprawling new suburbs push the green-edge of the city further outwards, and the liminal spaces where nature and the man-made meet, as creeks and powerlines weave their way through the developed inner suburbs. Their works provide a commentary on the ongoing cost of ‘progress’ since white colonisation, where urban and natural environments meet, clash and coexist, through artistic portrayals of the interventions, protests and localised narratives occupying Melbourne’s urban fringe.