Belinda Allen
Landscape and memory: 'We walked to Cooks River ...' 1835 
(triptych) 

watercolour paper with botanical print and mixed media
100 x 60cm

In my ‘Landscape & memory’ series of works I acknowledge hidden histories in the landscape. To represent the history of fishing in the Cook's River, I have collected fallen leaves of native trees along the riverside and printed them directly onto paper together with artefacts representing human usage of the landscape. The text is from the journal of James Backhouse, a 19th century missionary, who visited the River, and recorded the fishing practices of local Aboriginal people. The fish pictured are among the species noted as inhabiting the Cooks River in 2007, when an audit was done prior to installing a fishway at Turella.