high country: critical relations

By Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman with Andrew Ferris

Once settlers arrived in northeastern Victoria, Mount Buffalo was documented by painters such as Nicholas Chevalier and Eugene von Guerard, as well as photographers from the 1860s, as a site of sublime beauty —a pristine wilderness that should be protected.  While this visual culture contributed to the protection of the Mountain through the establishment of the Mount Buffalo National Park in 1898, as Jarrod Hore has forcibly articulated in ‘Visions of Nature’, it also erased the significant occupation of the mountain by the Mogullumbidj People, their care for Country, and the mountain’s exceptional cultural importance to the First Peoples of Australia. ‘High Country: Critical Relations’ utilises performance and costume to interrogate the critical relations between archives and settler-ways of seeing and being in the Victorian High Country.

The artists would like to acknowledge the Taungurung as the Traditional Custodians of Mt Buffalo. We pay our deepest respects to Elders past and present and acknowledge their connection and custodianship of the Mountain as well as their extraordinary survival and resistance in the face of the settler-based practices that we explore through these artworks. We also pay our deepest respect to the other First Peoples of the region, who have a sacred connection to the Mountain and its surrounds.

This is an ongoing and growing project. Reach out to the artists if you would like to know when it is being exhibited. Exhibited at Wangaratta Gallery, 2024 and Library at the Dock Gallery, 2025. By Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman with Andrew Ferris.

The Photography of Alice Manfield

Born in the Buckland Valley in 1878, Alice Manfield was the daughter of prospectors who had arrived during the Buckland Valley gold rush.  With the railway extension to Myrtleford in 1883 and then onto Bright in 1890, tourists could access Mount Buffalo and its distinct rock formations and ecology.  Alice Manfield, known as Guide Alice, led tours up the mountain and eventually lived on it, managing Granny’s Place, a chalet built by the Manfield family near Bents Lookout (1).  Guide Alice was also a photographer and she captured some of the first images of settlers staying on and exploring the National Park. This imagery, which depicts settler balancing on rocks and up trees, or sheltering beneath dramatic piles of teetering rocks, is often surprisingly similar to contemporary settler photography of the mountain as seen on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.   

1. Harper, M 2007, The ways of the bushwalker: on foot in Australia, UNSW Press. 

High Country Costumes

To help us bridge the gap between the historical and contemporary visual culture of Mt Buffalo, we crafted these High Country costumes. The jacket of the costume is inspired by the men and women captured in Alice Manfield’s photography. Made from recycled safari jackets with imperial buttons, the jackets have been dyed at the base to match the granite rocks of the mountain. Screen-printed alpine lichen also works its way up the base of the jacket and arms. Lichen inexorably changes the chemical weathering of rocks as it excretes various organic acids, particularly oxalic acid, which dissolves minerals. As it does so, it creates soil that fosters life in the form of plants. The safari jackets are therefore being conceptually eroded by the lichen. The safari jacks are paired with a puffer scarf (the costumes of contemporary hikers and mountain climbers), covered in granite frottage and a large skit that mirrors some of the outfits in Alice’s photography but also the sails of the first European ships that brought convicts, soldiers, migrants, and introduced species to the continent.

Bogong, Pigmy, Sallee and Sallow: critical relations

Eurobin Falls is one of the most photographed sites on Mount Buffalo. It features prominently in historical imagery and on Instagram today.  In this action, the artists use movement and the camera shutter to erase themselves – settlers – from the heart of the photo to make room for other histories, futures and the mountain’s non-human companions. Mount Buffalo is a site of critical relations that have been impacted by colonisation and climate change. Formed approximately 420 million years ago, the mountain's rocks have witnessed these relations form and begin to crumble.  Long after the departure of the settler, the rocks will remember the First Custodians of the Mountain and its name before Hume and Hovel likened it to a yoked buffalo. They will also remember the endangered Bogong moth, and the pygmy possum that eats the moth, the Buffalo sallee and sallow, a gum tree and wattle endemic to the mountain that are not found anywhere else in the world and rely on cool temperatures and pollinators like the pygmy possum for survival. The rocks of Mount Buffalo, moving skyward by a tenth of a millimetre each year, will remember the fast violence of colonisation and the slow violence, as Rob Nixon has described it, of climate change until they crack, fragment and roll down the mountain.

TIPPING POINT

Baron Ferdinand von Mueller was appointed the government botanist for the colony of Victoria in 1853. For his first expedition, he rode on horseback to Mount Buffalo, collecting what western science considered ‘undiscovered’ species. As von Mueller travelled, he famously scattered blackberry seeds. Like many regions of Australia, invasive species cause significant ecological damage on Mount Buffalo.  In particular, blackberries, deer, rabbits, foxes, and cats. In this action, the artists carry two prints of botanical samples held in the Victorian and NSW herbaria, including one harvested by von Mueller, up Mount Buffalo, seeking higher and thus colder ground. These species have been listed as endangered or critically endangered since the colonisation of Australia. Due to climate change, their future remains uncertain. If only settlers responded to climate change with the same care they have invested in their intergenerational archives.  . 

Flattening the Sublime

In this action the artists struggle into the fog, tripping over their sail like skirts as they go.