Loosely hinged doors flap in a blowfly haze; John Meillon slapping his wet dishtowel on the bar. A goods train unfurls like an endless necklace of rust, clanking out the minutes over the forever flat landscape. It is the opening scene of Wake in Fright; the indentured schoolteacher has done his best to scrub up besuited, hair slicked, suitcased, to make his holiday bid to escape Tiboonda, from salt-bush small town to daydreaming of the sweat and sand of Bondi, and beers. It is a potent film image that dominates our conception of rural life, and evinces our eagerness to equate the small with the parochial. In art the parallel lies in the looming skeletal trees Drysdale rudely parked in the uninhabited emptiness of small towns; all verandahs, brown sinews, and nothingness.

Not until an artist such as John Wolseley in the 1980s began living and working in the Simpson desert do we second-hand Europeans begin to mount strong visual arguments that these landscapes were never really empty, but inhabited by shifting sands, by lichen, by sand birds, grasshoppers, cicadas, dragonflies, and all the layered tidal disfigurements of summer. "When you are in a place, you slow down to the time of that place, to lizard time, to sand dune time"1 Teeming microcosms of petulant activity are there beyond the ghost curtain of the readily apparent. All that changes is whether or not we are prepared to see it.

Even the lyrical, ropey tangles of dried lake beds of Olsen's landscapes are largely unpopulated; filled with the perfume of stillness and separation. They perpetuate the mythologising of rural isolation fostered by an England, and by our own cities, that saw nationalism reside in the bushranger, the drought, the sheep stampede, and the stoic drover's wife. White man adrift and amok in Arcadia conquering an untamed bush. Banished to the boondocks of a café-latte-less non-Sydney hell. The notion that an artist today would live and work in regional Australia by choice rather than by damnation scarcely penetrates this mindset.

The black stump is not so much a signpost, it is a state of mind. The edge of the earth where the sailing ship topples over; the place where civilisation draws its last line with a stick. It is art culture measured by how far you are from a metropolitan centre. If Sydney and Melbourne historically consider the word "regional" to be interchangeable with "backwater", it is through the constructed conceit of viewing themselves as the creative epicentres, based on the miopic logic that more galleries automatically translates to innovation in art. Often, however, it merely translates to infinite sameness. Packs of dogs, not necessarily better dogs. Of a Saturday morning in Melbourne, one can visit up to 160 galleries, whereas in Wagga there are only two. The advantages and disdvantages of this are one and the same; whilst an artist can readily see work that mirrors their own concerns, it also makes them subject to tacit influence. Whereas in space, no-one can hear you scream. In the country an artist is thrown back onto their own resources, and immersed in the personal journey to resolve their ideas.

The concept of the provincial requires our acquiesce to the notion that rural areas produce only narrow, restricted art disengaged from the major critical debates inflamed in capital centres. This key proposition is flawed; as more often than not the brushfires in Australian art have manifestly emerged from regional centres. In 1977 and 1978 the Perth International Survey of Drawing exhibitions, under Lou Klepac's guiding intelligence, set the agenda for defining the activity in the field for years to come. In textile, Ararat and Tamworth in the 1980s - 90s led the exhibition focus in fibre/textile through successive biennials. Repeatedly, recent history points to regional areas exercising exactly the kind of independent curatorial will from which critical debate springs; whether it is from Perth, Tasmania, Castlemaine, Newcastle, Kedumba, Toowomba, Broken Hill or Mildura.

For most of these nine artists, the Transference was from city based arts practice to a country context, and whether or not that transportation changed their aesthetic in response to place. The lure of the magnetic pull of centres is no longer necessary for artists to ensure representation in major galleries. Of the nine, only Mullins trained here, but nothing about his work can be attributed directly to location; it exists as contemporary silversmithing parallel stylistically to any in Sydney or Germany. The traffic of opportunity for exhibiting nationally and internationally flows more readily now than in the decades after the war; and as Mullins evidences, one can live in Wagga and still maintain a gallery profile in cities, a website of images, and active participation in the growing plethora of biennale or touring exhibitions. The rural artist is not stranded away from the mechanisms of exhibition in the way they were in the 1950s, when networking meant Hal Missingham might drive to your property and take your work back in a ute.2

Mullins integrates old and new technologies in his approach to folded aluminium which necessitates a laser cutting precision that can only can be conducted in Sydney. That the researched technical challenges he sets can only be resolved by straddling Wagga to Sydney is testimony to the capacity for a rurally based artist to conduct their practice unfettered by distance, and cognisant of technological advances. His use of non-opulent material, aluminium, is perhaps the one direct concession to the climate and outdoor life of this region.

The internet mitigates the tyranny of distance, but it cannot compete with the inherited predisposition Australia evidenced prior to WWII for remaining a nation of "image-scavengers" hungry for any modernist morsel that made its way by intermittent art magazines from Europe. Any image of a Dali or a Henry Moore would be torn out and kept folded in a pocket in Albury during disembarkation; where Drysdale made his sketches of the railway station. If an artist was any good,

the expectation and ambition was to follow in the footsteps of Tom Roberts, and take a ship to England or France to test their mettle against the weight of art history. "And I am the water boy, the real game's not over here." 3

The 1939 Herald touring exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art which first brought the work of the moderns to Australia - Picasso, Dali, Modigliani, Bonnard, Matisse, Braque et al - saw a record three day attendance then in the Melbourne Town Hall. Doggedly we continued to measure our art through the eyes of
otherness; held up against the yardstick of Europe. Again, by 1967 the Two Decades of American Painting exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria set in motion a decade of sanctioned obsequiousness, as imitators of dominant American house styles moved cap in hand to the altar of a glaring orange Rothko. Localized art was further eschewed as provincial; to not aspire to be international was to be left behind. In the borrowed rags of European art culture, we enshrined our dependence on ratification from overseas. More damaging than any sense of being marooned by distance, what continued to hold artists in its thrall was "the tyranny of the unseen masterpiece"4 which deceived us into thinking merit in art always lay beyond evolving our own sense of location and space.

Transference is an umbrella title interpreted variously throughout the works, but most clearly articulated by Holcombe in his statement about it being a contract between maker and viewer, of watchers in front of an art work wordlessly acknowledging a mutual understanding transferred by the image on the wall. The nine artists represented in this exhibition have fallen to earth here, seemingly parachuted from some intermittent night-drop of fate over the past 20 years. From Wee Waa, to London, Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, and Melbourne, they established themselves here as lecturers in the School of Visual and Performing Arts in Wagga, and in photography at Albury.

They reflect a wide diversity of cultural backgrounds, media, and careers prior to landing here. Half of them would arguably be working in much the same manner wherever they lived; half have clearly adapted and responded by making strong attachments to the landscape here. Are they regional artists, or merely artists working in the region? To live in a place is to absorb its cadences and light; the dirt road drives to work laden with flipping images, a constant memory-sketchbook of visual stimuli that inevitably saturate an artist's perception. The relationship to place intrigues me, because it cannot be fabricated. Although they differ in their response to place, all disprove the myth of isolation by maintaining art careers unfettered by urban preconceptions of parochialism.

In fact, as a photographer bombarded in the 1980s by conceptual teaching, Holcombe found the weight of postmodern theorizing he

encountered as a student in Sydney dissipated in direct proportion to geographic distance. His whole approach to photography now finds a direct, character driven language, where formal composition is
mediated by an apparent artlessness. It is guided by a conscious regard for the wandering moment that reflects Waggan space; in its windows, doorways, heat and ribboned light. "To pursue that mental snapshot, to show a certain vulnerability I seek the balance between control and spontaneity, the mind's eye image and the unpredictable."

"Besides, the vision of the freedom of eternity which I saw and which all wilderness hermitage saints have seen, is of little use in cities and warring societies such as we have." ­ Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels 5.

The physical isolation from city centres encourages contemplation in quietude, and a different relationship with one's own art work, a less public one. Nott has been here for only a year, in which time his aesthetic has not markedly shifted. His trawling of the internet for images continues unabated by distance, rifling from "a whole palace of images in the 20th century..." From surveillance images, satellite photos, art images, to shots of cheap motel interiors The "flash on camera type images" of crime scene or car accident forensic
photography selected for their "perfunctory, non-aesthetic" qualities. The transference he enacts is to set up "spurious narratives" dragging digital prints onto canvas, into the wider narrative of painting. "Photography is always seen as a discourse of the real, and painting as a discourse of the imaginary but a photo can be every bit as expressionistic as a painting". The transfer of a semi-random image from internet to the gallery shifts its meaning, forcing consideration of the reality we confer on a photo. De Weerdt's photo-imaging is equally concerned with the reality of the holiday photograph, and the aesthetics of blurred, bad photography to act as a record between the Netherlands and Albury "like visual epiphanies, a blurry moment of a place that I know well."

Last's aeroware is less a metaphor for flight than it is for scale. The fuselage of an airplane keys the works to a certain monumentality not usually associated with silversmithing. His works fall into that sculptural twilight through their monolithic form, yet are designed by precepts of functionality, mathematical precision and hand-made perfectionism that betoken a jeweller's instincts. "I lived near an airport and began to construct plane forms at some point you are responsive to your surroundings." The panoply of uncluttered corrugated iron in this landscape, its tin rooves and water-tanks, find a perfect mirror in the fins and grooves of his aluminium works. "I don't know that I would be working differently if I still lived in Melbourne but I get my sense of space from here. What changes is your sense of space."

It is a point Dan Zero reiterates; "From the Netherlands to Wagga is a sharper contrast, a sharper focus than if I still lived in Sydney, and it translates in terms of awareness of space." Klabbers once described himself as a "frustrated poet", and his work fulfils a literary as much as a visual intent in its analysis and layering of language. Image, sound and text are utilized through different pseudonyms, each with their own baggage of autobiographical content. The motivations in his art are far removed from the drunk-on-technology applications of the new media; if anything the art language he explores is an anachronistic Dadaist one, that of juxtaposition, layering and montage. To which end he seizes on the computer as a perfect collagist tool; like a Cornell fleshing out poetic visions of a France he never saw.

If Klabbers is on a poetic and personal journey, Green's work delves into a similar interior terrain. For the past few years he has focussed on an autobiographical journey to track his war-time years as a young boy in London. It is unashamedly narrative, returning to his late 70s palette in painting the Australian landscape when he first arrived here. In the way that Alberto Burri's training as a surgeon was evident in his surfaces, so too is Green's background as an embroiderer. His signature mark is the stitch, and it links and unifies collage, drawing and paint in distressed surfaces lit by the scattered poppies of fields of the fallen. The sense of landscape reflects where he lives now, while the razor of memory hones in on one pivotal moment in his youth. The painting in the Art Gallery of NSW by Frederic Leighton, Cyron and Iphigenia, 1884, is of a young man contemplating a sleeping woman, as an apricot dawn breaks way off in the distance. According to the wall blurb, he is "changed by the transfiguring power of love". This stray, cementing thought of the notion of a transfiguring moment brought Green's images to mind; for their grasp of bringing the past closer from a distance.

Montgarrett's drift net is stitched together from the flotsam and jetsam of plastic shopping bags. "They carry immediate associations of the mundane and worthless; day-to-day chores, shopping, domesticity when heat stressed they acquire delicate, fragile organic patterns and rhythms which suggest lace and network the 'lace' of the polyester bag is a version of traditional lace " The metaphor of the net towards water, rafts, life-lines, and the horizontal casting of washing-line structures propped on poles also acts as a resonator of rural domestic iconography; hung high above the usual sightlines to emphasize their separateness ­ just beyond the range of sight, perhaps "Real drift nets are quite beautiful and delicate but also deadly ­ viciously trapping living creatures in their webs" This duality, and the contradictory character of nets as sieves, largely invisible in situ, reaches out across the gallery defying ideas of fragility and impermanence.

In his encaustic paintings and prints, Redlich incorporates found elements from the old farmhouse in which he lives. Perhaps 'making do' implies rural scarcity, but like Montgarrett the attraction of found media is in unqualified attachment to place. Some of which is visible within the work, and some invisible. But it is the journey not the destination which compels his work; in the making that the ritual of using dirt, or dried flowers that are significant to him gains meaning. The spectator may never know that the painted surface uses dirt from his surroundings, but its inclusion is not incidental. The impetus for Redlich is not gallery display, but in the need to make the work as a private meditation; it lies in what an artist chooses to kept hidden, as much as what they reveal.

"'New to the Yabba?' he asked, inevitably, holding a great stem of yellow flame to Grant's cigarette" 6

In conjuring up another smokescreen image from Wake in Fright, that of the stranded schoolteacher, through the rotating dust we see this outsider pinned between where he is from, and where he is now. At what point do these artists identify that they are no longer new to this place, that their vision and ideas have been remoulded by the light, land, space and time they occupy? Five years? Ten? Or is location simply not an issue when you are bathed in the white glow of the Mac room, or crating a bowl to Japan? Within this exhibition there are shadows of place that could not readily be cast from elsewhere. In the matt blades of aluminium, in the dirty brown mapping stitched planes of paint, or the starkness of blood red words in French, are found shards and visions of the idiosyncratic; evocations of the particular. None of these artists are tourists holding themselves aloof from the Riverina. Rather than a hinderance to their art making, it has acted as a catalyst that all too often crept up on them by stealth. It filters through in new sensibilities that trigger associative images stumbled across in Wagga whether it is a spectral clothes-line fluttering on an unlit street at night, or a photo incarcerating a frozen glimpse through the doorway of a kitchen, or the metal bones of farm implements that an artist like Redlich can resurrect into rust, beeswax and paint. Small resurrections; where the value of the art resides in each small act of transforming the ordinary, through rather than against the pull of locality.

Neill Overton
Wagga Wagga, Feb. 2000

1 John Wolseley, in Interview with the author, 1991
2 Hal Missingham was the director of the AGNSW in the 1950s, and a great
supporter of Drysdale's work.
3 Lou Reed, "The Kids", Berlin, RCA records, 1973
4 Robert Hughes, Nothing if Not Critical, Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 1991, p.4.
5 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels, Andre Deutsch Ltd., London, 1960, p.66.
6 Kenneth Cook, Wake in Fright, Penguin Books, Australia, 1961, p.18.