When restricted by COVID travel limitations a few years ago, I started hunting within my permitted radius for suitable locales for sketching. Although I live in an urban area, close to the city, I found many green corridors within proximity. I discovered that these areas were once linked by creeks and rivers, and I was intrigued by the thought of what they would have looked like before urbanisation.

These green ways are something we may register while walking the dog, or going for a morning run, so quietly absorbed into the suburban landscape as to be barely noticeable. The creeks and waterways once followed the undulations of quite a different landscape but are now much disrupted by underground barrel draining and rerouting.

‘The Lost Ways’ came about as I researched old maps and written accounts of the original landscape from Blackburn Lake through to Back Creek, Gardiner’s Creek/Kooyonkoot and on to the Yarra River/Birrarung. Attracted by the beauty of this area, Heidelberg School artists such as Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin set up an artist camp in Box Hill, and an idea of how the landscape appeared at this time can be gleaned from their paintings completed at the site.

‘The Lost Ways’ is the culmination of my “treasure hunt” as I set out to record the remnants of the original waterways that can still be found above ground and tried to retrace their original paths.

Artist Bio

Debra J. Marshall is a visual artist living and working on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung country in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. Her art practice is grounded within the exploration of landscape. As an ex-dancer, for her, drawing is an expansion of bodily movement through the environment.

She usually works in site-responsive ways, so her methodology is a mixture of on-site sketching and reference photography taken back to the studio for further investigation. The drawn line helps her progressively discover the tapestry of the landscape, and how she is situated within it.

Catalogue