Polixeni Papapetrou: Daylesford 1867 #2 (from ‘Haunted country’ series)

For her ‘Haunted Country’ series, Polixeni Papapetrou frames the Australian bush as a setting to explore some of the fears and anxieties experienced by people of European ancestry living on this continent. For this series, she photographed her son, daughter and their friends posing as children vulnerable to the elements. In Daylesford 1867 #2, Papapetrou stages a tragic scene from the well-known case of three young boys aged four, five and six, who perished after becoming lost in the Victorian bush. In Papapetrou’s photograph, the boys take cover under a shelter fashioned from sticks and bark, seeking shelter from the landscape that threatens them.

The fear of being lost has long influenced Australian art, with many non-Indigenous Australian artists having explored the terror of being swallowed up by a landscape seemingly imbued, from this perspective, with strangeness and danger. The country’s dense and sometimes treacherous geography is reflected in works ranging from paintings by ‘Heidelberg School’ artists Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin, made in the late nineteenth century, to author Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, which was then adapted into a film by Peter Weir in 1975.