The Last Stand

In 2021, the New South Wales Government committed $36 million to expanding and improving the Powerhouse run Museums Discovery Centre in north-west Sydney. The project necessitated the removal of 327 trees from the site, which museum staff planted in the early 1940s and managed till the late 1970s. Ahead of the removal of these stands of eucalypts and melaleuca, and in conjunction with the Eucalyptusdom project, Powerhouse commissioned artist Amanda Williams to interpret the former Castle Hill Experimental Research Plantation through experimental photography. The hundreds of images she produced now form an essential part of documentation of the site and are intended to facilitate institutional and public contemplation and discussion around the purpose and legacy of the former plantation.

Long days were spent with the trees at the museum's former research plantation in Castle Hill. The significance of the trees and their imminent loss, their legacy, resonated in my mind. I felt a sense of duty to listen to the trees and hold them close. These images record my experience of the plantation, my observations; they are a document of its visible and invisible qualities, recorded with light and time.

The material forms of analogue photography come from the earth. The minerals and chemical trace elements that constitute the silver-gelatin emulsion in film rolls and light-sensitive paper are a precious resource; and so are trees. This series of images captures the plantation on the cusp of change, offering the viewer a walk through the stands of eucalypt and melaleuca: progressing from a wide view to intimate portraits and finally distilling into abstraction, mirroring my experience engaging with this place and its recent history.