Why bother describing the creek when I have photographed it, when I include the five photographs here? Is it to provide a context for the images, to explain that they depict a flooded Byarong creek – a creek that runs just behind our house and that has in the past torn our rear fence away? Is it to convey other dimensions of the event, to indicate, for instance, that the roaring sound of the creek’s flow can be heard in our bedroom? Is it to characterise an explicit subjectivity – perhaps my own? Is it to play upon the difference between written description and photographic documentation? Or is it to indicate an excessive level of attention that is determined – even if not strictly necessary – to employ a surfeit of descriptive means? Most likely all of these, but it is the latter that especially interests me. It is as though the excess of the moment, the rush of the flooded creek, however slight this event may seem, demands an excessive effort of representation. This excess is plainly never sufficient, but nonetheless works, precisely through its awkwardness, to summon the otherness of the flooded creek and the otherness of the moment that I stood within it. For shortly afterwards, the rain, which had been incessant for six days, stopped. A wall of blue and bright sunlight shunted aside grey with the abruptness of a bright image in a previously dark slide show.
flooded crossing
turbulent flow
waterfall drain
hint of sun
run off