Wild Ryde

Abstract

In 2007 I completed a meandering two-year pilgrimage on foot across Sydney, from my home in urban Rozelle to suburban Dundas, where I grew up. In 2011 I swam home. Discombobulated and increasingly remote from the local at a time of ever-faster global connectivity, I had felt the need to re-acquaint myself with my ‘country’, the seemingly bland ‘relaxed and comfortable’ mortgage-belt municipalities of the Parramatta River corridor. Walking west from the city via Victoria Road I immersed myself in a suburbia laced with three generations of my family, seeking out strands of lost and lesser-known cultural fabric. Whilst acknowledging the flâneur and the work of more recent walking artists, my path echoed increasingly with antipodean walking traditions: those of aboriginal people, early settlers, artists and swagmen. At the core of my journey lay a quest for memories I felt that I should, but did not, possess. This latency, which also has infused my photo-based studio work, is pursued, teased out and examined in the chapters which follow. In the midst of a golden age of plenitude here in the South (when most of us lack only time) I have demonstrated, to myself at least, that by slowing to a walking pace and immersing oneself physically in local place, by following one’s nose hither and thither, it is possible to re-enchant one’s locale, one’s ‘country’. Wild Ryde is a municipal embroidery, an idiosyncratic local emotional history. Born of six years’ practice-based creative research and experimentation, the dissertation is my means of making home, and an artwork in its own right.