Mellor is used to connecting seemingly divergent things: his childhood was spent in many places around Australia and abroad, and his family history stretches in many directions on both sides.
On the paternal side, Mellor’s grandparents were sugarcane farmers in Mackay; his great-grandfather migrated here from California and was a gifted horseman known as Bronco George (or “The Arkansas Kid” when he was riding in “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show in the US). On his mother’s side, the Atkinson images informed part of Mellor’s early career research and PhD, and, along with other archives, are a foundation for his current focus.
“I recall seeing these images from our family archive at a young age and beginning to understand a sense of temporal depth to human life that stretches beyond the experience we have of our own selves,” Mellor says. “I didn’t have words to conceptualise that at the time, but felt it was somehow important, particularly as my great-grandmother was alive into my teenage years, and I was able to hold and look at portraits of her and several generations of our family taken by Atkinson.”
Mellor, who has served on the Australia Council for the Arts, and as a senior lecturer at the Sydney College of the Arts, has won many prestigious prizes, and has work in most major Australian collections. He has always kept a tight focus on his work and research, which has included travelling around parts of northern Queensland with Indigenous elders, and hearing of various sites and stories of the ancestors.
Mellor’s images often show a landscape augmented with infra-red, and layered with other historic and cultural references. A simple nature scene – a bend in the river at the Tully Gorge, for example – might incorporate references to an Indigenous creation story, a tourist stopping for a quick snapshot, or a colonial explorer bent on “discovery”.
Mellor says that of the many places he spent time in when he was younger, Sutton Grange (near Bendigo) and Stirling (Scotland), seem to have influenced him in particular, alongside the tropical environments of northern Queensland.
“I was particularly captivated by the feeling of arriving in a world of heat and swirling humidity when travelling from where we lived for a few years in Sutton Grange on visits back to Queensland,” he says. “I remember each time when getting off the plane, having travelled north, there was a sense of returning to something very familiar in a deep sort of way.”
Landscape is a tricky concept: the word has long been challenged by scholars and artists, for it implicitly suggests that we humans are separate from nature as we look “at” the “landscape”. In his monumental reverie, Landscape and Memory (1996), British historian Simon Schama traces the word’s origins to the 16th century Dutch term, “landschap”, which meant “a unit of human occupation” that might also be “a pleasing object of depiction”. This contrasts with the Australian Indigenous understanding of “Country”, which incorporates complex unifying relationships between nature, family and ancestors.
“My earliest memories of landscape have marked contrasts, from the snow and the melodies of fast-flowing burns in Stirling, against a backdrop of the castle, to the extraordinary granite country of the landscape around Mount Alexander/Lanjanuc, where we lived for a few years,” Mellor says. “Our house was close by the mountain and I recall the profound, if gentle, impact of seeing it every day and driving over its lower slopes to school in the morning and home in the afternoons.”
But what seems to have embedded itself the most, he says, is the sensual nature of tropical regions. “They are places I can revisit internally or through travel, much like an oasis or well.” Mellor says Redux continues his long-range research into a sense of place and history, but also acknowledges how significant those spaces are ecologically, and how they have been affected – often disastrously – since colonial times. The show also reveals how colonial photography was used to shape “the perception of the ownership of land and the environment”.
“Each photograph is a frozen moment in time and this is what I find quite captivating about any photographs, and especially archival photographs,” he says. “They not only tell us so much about the image or the subject of that photograph, but also what people were searching for and how they were framing the images that were then translated into photographs, published and kept as a collected memory. It is important to understand the life unfolding within that image, but also what was happening beyond the frame of the camera.”
