Minutes to Midnight (Room Notes)

…SO BEGINS TRENT PARKE'S INTRODUCTION to his long-awaited new body of work, Minutes to Midnight. Made during a two-year road trip around Australia, his images are a bold fusion of documentary traditions and a radical contemporary imagination.

In the foyer, prefacing the exhibition, is a display of photographs documenting the trip which were taken by Trent's partner, photographer Narelle Autio. The story unfolds not only the passing of the kilometres, but a proposal of marriage and the birth of their son, Jem. These contemporary unframed prints are surrounded by images of their parents' courtships and early domestic lives, highlighting the curious synchronicities of these two families before Trent and Narelle met and connected them.

In sharp contrast to the colourful certainties of these old family photos, the exhibition in the main gallery is a brooding, darkly beautiful vision of contemporary Australia. Trent Parke began this extraordinary body of work in 2003 with a growing sense that Australia was reaching the end of an era and fast losing its innocence... Two years and 90,000 kms later, Minutes to Midnight is one man's attempt to find his place within a country vastly different from the one in which he grew up.

The year is 2003.

The fate of the world's largest island
hangs in the balance.
As the country thirsts from
the worst drought in recent history
and firestorms blaze across the land,
plagues of feral pigs, cats and cane toads
roam the countryside destroying all in their path.

In the major cities
people live in the shadow of terrorism.
Politicians prophesy it is only a matter of time.

While the world embraces advancing technology
and the global market,
many of Australia's Indigenous people have been
abandoned to alcohol and substance abuse,
poverty and ill health.

Escalating insurance premiums have closed down
long-running iconic community events.
The majority of the population believes
the country has reached the end of an era
and is fast losing its innocence...

The year is now 2005.

Nearly two years have passed
and 90,000 kms of Australia have flown by
in a road trip from beach to bush.

Minutes to Midnight is that journey.
One man's attempt to find his place
within an Australia vastly different from
the one in which he grew up.

This is what he saw...

INTERVIEW:
Trent Parke
in conversation with Alasdair Foster

Alasdair: This body of work has been a mammoth undertaking - what got you started?

Trent: I'd been working as a newspaper sports photographer travelling with the Australian cricket team. We'd go to all these places but all I ever saw was the hotel and the cricket ground. I was eager to get out and to see the country I was in and I'd been saving for over five years to do a big trip around Australia.

I read a survey in one of the Sunday newspapers that said that over half the population (something like 60%) thought that Australia had come to the end of an era and had somehow lost its innocence. So I felt that that was the right time to take off and find out for myself what Australia was.

How did what you saw differ from your preconceptions before you set out?

Even before I set out I felt Australia was a fairly dark and mysterious country. I'm very influenced by music and video clips - groups like Midnight Oil - and through their lyrics I got this incredible sense that there was so much going on out there - that there was something wrong - that we were heading in a direction that wasn't quite right. And Australia did prove to be a dark country. There is shit going on out there and it is so far-out and so far away that you just don't hear about it in the big cities: the feral animals, the racial tension between white and black, the alcohol and substance abuse, the rough treatment of women. We met this one young girl whose first paid job was to follow the roo shooter along, pull the baby joeys out of their pouches, smack their heads on the back of the ute and throw them off into the bushes… and that was when she was 14 years old!

I suppose it's a hard country with the droughts and the firestorms and the poverty. And while there is a kind of freedom to it, there is also a stifling sense of 'this is the way it is'. People in the outback live by standards that city people would never understand. But then you see that it's just the way people survive and have done for so long. There's no malice - it's just instinct. It's just the way it is… This is Australia just the way that I saw it.

The long distances between towns is very isolating and I had a strange feeling of loneliness on the trip, even though Narelle was with me the whole time. You get the sense that without the big community events that happen in these small places there'd be nothing. They happen maybe only once a year - a carnival, a B&S ball, a rodeo. Yet, now a lot of those events have been forced to close by the escalating cost of insurance premiums.

I honestly feel that Australia has come to the end of an era … even though the countryside is still raw there's an innocence there that's gone.

Why did you include the display of family and travel images in the foyer?

I definitely wanted to personalise the trip. No one person could ever document an entire country - this is my own take on things. Narelle's pictures of our journey [in the foyer] help establish that this is a very individual point of view. People aren't just looking at anonymous pictures. They can have a sense of what we went through on the trip and what my feelings for Australia are.

It was strange. We went up to Sea World on the Gold Coast just because I knew from a picture in my old family album that my Mum had fed the dolphins there. When we arrived Narelle said she had the same sort of pictures amongst her family photos. So when we got back we went through both families' albums. You could get a sense of that period in Australian life just through these two families - Narelle's from suburban Adelaide and mine from suburban Newcastle. Yet, although we came from different sides of the country, in these pictures it looked like we lived next door. I got an incredible sense of childhood and suburbia in those times. So I am juxtaposing that period with the contemporary images in Minutes to Midnight to show how very different Australia is today with its commercialised use-up-throw-away society…

The work in the main gallery is also staged in a very unconventional and multi-layer way. How did you come to this approach?

I always wanted to create an experience for people - something on the grand scale of epic cinema. I want people to be able to come in and feel they are really part of my trip. And while a picture is simply of what it depicts (a dog with a piglet in its mouth for example), it can also be experienced in terms of much larger ideas. Something intense. I honestly don't think that that comes across with small pictures that are all the same size presented on white walls. I never like to sit still. Always restless. Always wanting to push forward to the next thing. I want my photographs to be going to the next level and not just doing what I've done before. And I want to push the boundaries of what others have done. That's very important.

The whole journey became about such big themes for me. I didn't really set out to make these symbols appear in the pictures it was just that they somehow started to emerge - so, for example, a picture of a jellyfish turned into a nuclear explosion. And that's when the whole trip came into focus for me. I started looking for these sorts of images. Turning a simple subject into something else - something multilayered.

I also became interested in what happens when you put images together and completely change the outcome and meaning of the work. This is the most important aspect of the show: that I am hinting at and working towards much bigger themes than just what the images represent.

What do you hope the viewer will take away from the show?

All I want is for them to have an emotional response. Whether they think the pictures are sad or even if they think they are disgusting, I don't really mind. I just want people to feel something. That's all I ever what - that someone is moved.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Trent Parke was born in Newcastle in 1971 and lives in Sydney. He is the only Australian photographer in the celebrated Magnum group.

Trent won the prestigious W Eugene Smith Award for humanistic photography in 2003 and World Press Photo Awards in 1999 (Bathurst Car Races ), 2000 (The Seventh Wave ) and 2001 (Australian Road Kill series). He has been awarded five Gold Lenses from the International Olympic Committee (1996, 1997 and 1998) and the Canon Photo Essay Prize in the 2000 Sasakawa World Sports Awards. He was also selected in the World Press Photo Masterclass in 1999.

Trent self-published his first two books Dream/Life in 1999 and (with Narelle Autio) The Seventh Wave in 2000. Both publications were in the top two awards for a book at the Picture of the Year International in USA. His work has been exhibited widely including recent solo exhibitions in New York and Germany. Minutes to Midnight will form the basis of a book to be published in America later in 2005.

Trent Parke is represented by Magnum Photos, London and Stills Gallery, Sydney

Image Credits:

• © Trent Parke Midnight, self portrait &endash; Menindee, outback NSW 2003 Courtesy Magnum Photos
• © Trent Parke Five-metre shark, Cottesloe Beach, WA 2004 Courtesy Magnum Photos
• © Trent Parke Mildura drag races, Victoria 2003 Courtesy Magnum Photos
• © Trent Parke Beauty Queens, Babinda Annual Harvest Festival, Queensland 2003 Courtesy Magnum Photos
• © Trent Parke B&S Ball, New Year's Eve, Gunnedah, NSW 2003 Courtesy Magnum Photos
• © Trent Parke Feral pig hunters sleeping under mosquito nets as a feral pig hangs from nearby tree 2003 Courtesy Magnum Photos
• © Narelle Autio Campsite, outback Queensland 2003
• © Narelle Autio Trent driving in the outback 2003
• © Trent Parke Street scene, Wiluna, WA 2004 Courtesy Magnum Photos
• © Trent Parke Plague of flying foxes, Mataranka, Northern Territory 2004 Courtesy Magnum Photos
• © Trent Parke Feral pig hunters cooling off at the end of the day, outback Queensland 2003 Courtesy Magnum Photos
• © Trent Parke Kangaroo hunter, Wiluna, WA 2004 Courtesy Magnum Photos
• © Narelle Autio Trent Parke on Fraser Island 2003