Expressions through painting and poetry speak to hearts and minds

Two artists have expressed through their work the emotional history of the Murray Darling Basin, where the past ten years have been recorded in megalitres.

This data is only a small proportion of the totality and these artists have captured their experiences and revealed a new reality of this wondrous part of Australia.

Spending years finding, matching, selecting and posing words on a page is the gift of poet Homer Rieth.

Now residing in the tiny Wimmera town of Minyip, his epic publication The Garden of Earth is where gives voice to many memories.

Originally from Melbourne, he relocated to Minyip a few years ago, where, he experienced the huge and diverse area.  

In 2009, Dr Rieth published his first epic, Wimmera, an ode applying lyrical style to his keen observations in his new landscape.

His words prick memories of childhood when there was time to breathe. he wrote in Wimmera:

A year five years ten perhaps  and the ivy runs wild over the wall the hard cold ground grows harder, colder than ever and the heart once a seat of animal radiance is now tongue-tied like a child’s first confession and the soul’s is only a reflected light all cast and filigree of lead light of iron and half-life the road has vanished into a tangle of wrong turns and only the poplars swaying in the wash up of the road.

His most recent publication, The Garden of Earth is told in Thirty Five Books, each a long-breathed sentence taking you in its flow with the hues of nature, history, culture and philosophy. It invites the reader to consider the plenitude of the world, and how precarious a thing this is.

Out on the river you’ll see there are swifts and babblers and other assorted thieves all of whom have their own bush telegraphy, a kind of Morse passing quietly from one landmark to the next, disappearing and reappearing with wild insouciance at the waterline—some, in fact, say that’s where another life begins, more secret than you know, to do with the keeping alive of memory, all those residual mysteries that tend to hang around towns

A prevalent theme is the relationship between humans and the rivers which enabled them to settle and establish communities.

As much as this work is about the Murray Darling River and the plethora of other rivers, tributaries, streams, creeks and floodplains in this footprint.

It also refers to histories of the Nile,Tigres, Mississippi and Rhine rivers and the riparian connections created and continued over millennia.  

Lived experiences are collected and shared between generations with specific language created and used to convey precise meanings and descriptions of every element of life, from the tiniest invertebrates to the wealth of plants. 

“This is a poem, not a manifesto or socio-economic analysis or blue-print,” Dr Reith said.

It is a work of my imagination drawing upon observations, history, listening, feeling, travelling, reading, hearing and knowledge.

“I believe the emotional intelligence of individuals is disregarded as too much emphasis is given to economic imperatives at the expense of ecology and our future within this place.”

“When I talk to people, eight out of ten of them agree we need to be more careful and thoughtful about what is happening to the Basin but, when solutions are sought, politics, power, money, governments and vested interests start struggling for supremacy and the people and ecosystems, both reliant on water, become collateral.” 

Joy Engelman, visual artist from Orange, said her painting, This Sacred Place, was inspired after visiting Lake Mungo.

“I visited in the midst of a huge drought, when all was laid bare so it seemed the landscape was lifeless,” Ms Engelman said.

“Of course it’s not but, until you learn to see with different eyes you think nothing can ever change.

“White fellas live in such short life cycles so we don’t have perspective and patience to know nothing ever stays the same.

“Sand dunes form arcs like fish bones on the desert and water flows intermittently in the rich red earth.

"Salt bush is strung like pearls around ancient riverbeds and land forms and floats above mirages on the far horizon.

“Dried saltpans glisten in the harsh light. Sand ridges stretch like frozen waves. An unhindered and merciless sun drops quickly into a night of deep rich darkness.