Wild Country: the Ovens River

*Wild Country: all that is lost and sometimes found,* 2024. By Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman. Photograph by Andrew Ferris.

By Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman with Andrew Ferris, Scarlet Sykes Hesterman and Xander Reichard

It is believed that the water flowing through the Ovens River is the same water that has always been on Earth, arriving four and a half billion years ago as the solar system formed. Therefore, the water of the Ovens has moved through the capillaries of plants, nurtured new life in wombs, leisurely advanced through underground aquifers and lapped against tall ships, canoes and bulk carriers. Like the imprint from a child’s hand, or the turbulence of a ship’s wake, water records the past in its molecular architecture; pasts that we may be incapable of seeing or pasts that have been actively erased. Therefore, to think with water - to think with the Ovens River - is to remember.

With impressive granite rocks and majestic river red gums, the Ovens River and its watershed are picturesque, making it a much-loved spot for camping, swimming, paddling, and fishing. However, historical and ongoing ecological impacts, including gold mining, water mining, agriculture, and climate change, have significantly changed its landscape. This exhibition explores the environmental history and social significance of the Ovens River and its watershed through narrative nonfiction writing, participatory arts practices, and documentation of performative fieldwork.

The artists would like to acknowledge the Dhudhuroa, Taungurung, Waywurru, Gunaikurnai, and Jaithmathang as the First Peoples and Traditional Custodians of the upper Ovens River and its watershed. We pay our deepest respects to Elders past and present and acknowledge their connection and custodianship of the River as well as their extraordinary survival and resistance in the face of the settler-based extractionist practices that we explore through these artworks.

Exhibited at Wangaratta Gallery, 2024 and Library at the Dock Gallery, 2025. By Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman with Andrew Ferris, Scarlet Sykes Hesterman and Xander Reichard. To access the narrative nonfiction audiobook that supports this project, please follow this link.

All that is lost and sometimes found

Inspired by the clothing of the first squatters or contemporary farm managers, these costumes bridge the imaginary gap between the ecological history of the Ovens River and its contemporary state. The yellow cuffs and tails reference the DDT that flowed through the land and water system, while their patchworked fabric featuring printed native grasses and detailed with golden quilting represents the loss of native grasses due to settler land use and land management practices including the introduction of hooved animals, mining and dredging, land division into farms, and the violent disruption of cultural burning practices. The artists wore these costumes on a series of walks along the river, carrying native vegetation indigenous to the region in their pockets. In doing so, they momentarily reintroduced the plants that now struggle to grow along the terraformed River.

Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman. *All that is lost and sometimes found,* 2024. Digital print on Ilford Gold, 39 x 26cm. Photograph by Andrew Ferris. *River Valley Costume,* 2024 by Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman. Modified recycled suit jackets and pockets, dyed recycled sheets, screen-printing with embroidered gold thread. Photograph by Andrew Ferris.

Ground TRUTHING

In the 1930s, “susso workers” (people who worked for their government ‘sustenance payment’ during the Great Depression) cleared vast areas of native vegetation beside the Ovens River to make way for radiata pine plantations. In this performative action, the artists fed an image of those felled forests, printed on eucalyptus composite ply, through a mulching machine, replacing the image with a photo of Braithwaites Pine Plantation (located beside the River) printed onto plywood made in the local mill from the region's plantations. In doing so, the artists render visible the extractionist rhythms that still shape the River and its watershed. Recently, despite considerable local protest, freshwater harvesting for bottled water and deep deposit gold mining have also established themselves in the region. This destructive action will be performed 30 times over the next few years, corresponding to the radiata pine harvest cycle.

Feral Actions

In this action, the artists transformed the River Valley costumes into agents of care, filling their pockets with rubbish and the introduced plant species that line the river’s banks. The Ovens River has an impressive history of volunteer-led environmental campaigning, from the anti-sludge campaigners, which grew out of the first gold rush, to the anti-dredge and DDT volunteers (1). Today, volunteers regularly clean, replant and care for the river.

(1) See Lawrence, S and Davies, P 2019, Sludge, La Trobe University Press, Melbourne and Robertson, K 1973 Myrtleford: Gateway to the Alps, Rigby Limited, Hong Kong.

Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman. Wild Country: Feral actions, 2024. 1080p, infinite loop. Videography by Scarlet Sykes Hesterman.

Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman. *Reading Letters to the RIver in our River Vests,* 2024. Digital print on Ilford Gold, 100 x 130cm

River Letters

Communities members, prior and during the exhibition, wrote letters to the Ovens River. These letters explored a forgotten history, a memory or an aspiration for the river. In this action Clare and Heather read the letters to the river while wearing their River Vests; vests that were designed to explore the recreational and social importance of the river. When the work was exhibited at the Library at the Dock, audience members wrote letters to the Ovens River or another body of water that was precious to them.