Contributors
Malcolm McKinnon
Malcolm McKinnon is an artist and filmmaker working mainly in rural communities. He first travelled through the north and west of South Australia about twenty years ago and has spent regular periods living and working in this part of the country ever since.
Articles
Promoting the long view
Artist and filmmaker Malcolm McKinnon's current practice is focused around documentary filmmaking and social history, motivated by an appreciation of living memory and local vernacular. He writes about the Illuminated by Fire project, an initiative of Regional Arts Victoria, that involved a dozen artists working with eleven local communities in the wake of Black Saturday.
Disaster & Fortitude
Simulating the Flow
Alfred Deakin was not a man to muck about. As well as being a major player in the long campaign to establish an Australian Federation, he was an indefatigable crusader for irrigation, pushing hard to establish a pioneer industry. As President of a Royal Commission on Water Supply & Irrigation, Deakin visited and studied Californian irrigation schemes in 1885.
Taking in Water
Places Not Forgotten: In Rural South Australia
The Flinders Ranges in South Australia where Malcolm McKinnon lives is a place of diminishing population, sparse landscapes and resilient social memory. It's a place that reveals itself only over time, as the stories, names and explanations for particular places and people become gradually apparent. It's a place where most of the people of the land carry memories and maps of special places around in their heads. McKinnon's aim in writing this article is to use these places and the claims attached to them by many non-indigenous people to show that they are just as legitimate as those of indigenous people.
Place
The World in Talc
Looks at the works of Talc Alf working in Lyndhurst South Australia.
Naive & Outsider Art
Strategies for Debunking the Myth of Artist as Wanker
or what I learned at school... the artist Malcolm McKinnon examines his training through the art school in Melbourne in the 1980s.
The Art of Survival
Portrait of the Farmer as a Mature Potato
"As with everything else, the country that I have been talking about is frequently regarded as a commodity, be it in relation to yields of primary produce or to spectacles and hypothetical experiences marketed for tourist consumption. Here's the main thing to understand: this commodification is entirely at odds with the appreciation of landscape that I've been trying to tell you about."
Culture/Agriculture