By Peter Munro
Staring from a great height at the endless plains, red-dirt roads and mining pits cut like open wounds across Western Australia, artist Bec Juniper sees something surprising. This rugged, bullish land seems strangely soft and feminine to her.
She calls it "the Great Southern", that stretch of country sauntering down from Perth to the coast and across to the Great Australian Bight, passing salt lakes, goldfields and paddocks. So flat that, from an aircraft's cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, she can't even see the horizon. "It just disappears into the distance."
West Australian artist Bec Juniper with one of her abstract landscapes.Credit:James Brickwood
To the eyes of an east-coast Australian, the wild west looks tough and unpitying. But Juniper, a landscape artist from Fremantle, sees something different. "WA is exported as a masculine place of mining, men in hi-vis, big machinery, big trucks. It's tough, it's rough, it's hard. You can work there for 10 years and come back 30 years older," she says.
"But the opposite is actually true. It's a very fragile landscape. Yes, some things are spiky and horrible. Yes, it can kill you if you don't know what you're doing. But there is a lot of softness there; perhaps a feminine magic. It is really quite beautiful and changeable."
Part of Juniper's abstract landscape "Astral", on show in Sydney.
That changeability of the Australian landscape has long challenged artists. Early artistic depictions, after colonisation, sought to impose an English sensibility on the bush and scrub - like planting a rose in dry, cracked soil. Mother Nature was gentile, refined and not at all like the land beyond the canvas – as artists were soon to discover.
Art historian Bronwyn Hanna says there have been several shifts in how landscape artists portray this country. Those initial, idyllic images were soon replaced by a more scientific gaze, which saw the landscape as exotic and strange.
By the early 1900s, artists such as Arthur Streeton saw beauty and grandeur in the bush. Australia was a land of light, heat, space and pastoral plenty. But a further shift was to come. By the mid-20th century, landscape artists, notably Russell Drysdale, began highlighting the harshness of the environment. Australia was isolated, stifling, blighted by drought.
Through it all, the landscape was seen as something feminine. But the nature of that perception shifted between being "a good woman or a bad woman", Hanna says. "The good woman is well-groomed and under control. The bad woman might be a source of riches but she is also dangerous," she says.
Juniper's landscape "Great Southern Fields".
"Where the first colonial view almost imposed the image of a desired landscape, with Drysdale you are looking more at desert landscapes, a sense of danger and being exotic ... It is almost like moving from wife to mistress."
Juniper says there is power and beauty in the rugged terrain. An exhibition of her abstract landscapes titled More Than I Imagine, based in part on flying over the Great Southern and from Google Earth images, reveals colour and softness in the outback. She sees water popping through the red desert. Mauve, lavender and light blue in the sunsets.
"It's not romanticising the view," she says. "It still is shocking and harsh in some places. The salt lakes are terrible and fascinating at the same time. But it's about being as comfortable as we can be in our Australian skins."
She sees fragility in the endless, rugged plains. And the continued perception of this landscape as Mother Nature might help preserve it from threats, such as climate change, she says. "It's a good idea because most healthy, functional humans love their mother. But at the moment, we're like a disgusting teenager who's treating our mother so badly," she says.
"The whole mother thing is to be respected, it gives us life. We've just got to grow up a little bit and do the right thing by her."
More Than I Imagine is at Wagner Contemporary gallery, Paddington, until July 26