The first time that I saw the grey headed flying foxes they were destroying the trees in the Botanical Gardens in Sydney. It was 2008 and I instinctively started to photograph the bats, majestic and yet uncanny, as they hung upside down sleeping during the day and nursing their young. Their colonies were being destroyed in the continuous development of real estate up and down the New South Wales coast and coastal hinterlands and now they had begun to build a new colony in these heartbreakingly beautiful gardens full of the trees of Empire and beyond. A decision was taken to protect the Gardens and the trees and to move the bats on and in 2012 loud rock music and industrial sounds were directed at the nesting colony in the evening and early morning and before long they had started to migrate again, this time to Centennial Park just a short flight south-east of the Botanical Gardens. By now, I had come to live in the city and was directing the photography department at The National Art School (NAS) in Darlinghurst. NAS was housed in an old nineteenth-century gaol built as a panopticon with a central tower, that now housed the drawing studios, and with a number of blocks emanating from the tower and each containing an art discipline – painting, sculpture, ceramics, art history and photography. NAS was directly below the flight path of the bats, flying from the Botanical Gardens and on towards Centennial Park. As the sun went down the skies of Sydney were filled with them, filled with their distinctive sound and their shadowy presence just a few metres above the streets of Darlinghurst. The combination of fast flying creatures filling the skies as the sun went down provided a technical challenge and one that was solved by recourse to high ISO settings and a very long lens. But the compromise seemed to be the resultant digital noise. The files were filled with the dirty grain and pink, purple, blues that reminded me of that earlier photographic technology of autochromes and their granular colour, like stained sugar coating the surface of their glass plates. At first I rejected these images but then gradually came to appreciate this degraded aesthetic as being symbolic of what I was witnessing, a distressed technology recording a distressed natural phenomenon.
At this time I was documenting the rehearsals for conflict that were taking place just off of the New South Wales coast. Sydney was the epicentre of Operation Talisman Sabre, where the Australian armed forces were joined by a large US contingent of warships and aircraft along with the armed forces of many other countries throughout the Pacific. Around this time, American politicians had started to articulate that the twenty-first century would be The Pacific Century, a pivot from post-WWII Europe and into the Pacific to confront the rise of China as an emerging super power.
However, these two elements - the bats and the technology of war, would end up on my screen and intertwined as I downloaded my images each day, creating an uncanny collage, a mosaic of nature and global conflict. It was hard to make sense of as the two elements seemed to be at odds with one another, opposites as subject matter, uneasy in their juxtaposition and like some discordant modernist music score, dissonant in their opposition. Very slowly, I realised that this was both a document and a collage of our conflictual present where we wage war on ourselves as well as the natural world and it is exactly this tension that articulates the contradictory equation of our current global unease.
The Colony was shot between 2008 and 2016 in Sydney, Australia. Each new edit and configuration of the work is dated to when the narrative is created.