She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile

She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile works with Country through photographs that are cut, reassembled, and sutured into collaged forms. The seams have been left open; the ruptures are central to each work.

Observing the landscapes becomes a meditation on responsibility and on the uneasy coexistence of care, complicity, and inherited harm. The collages return the act of looking back onto the viewer. To engage with them is to confront one’s position within ongoing colonial systems and to acknowledge the violences that remain embedded in the land and in the structures that shape it.

To look to the land is to feel the weight of what has been done to it, while recognising how it continues to nourish, restore, and strengthen. Looking demands attentiveness and accountability, insisting on the ethical and relational dimensions of vision itself.

The images collaged throughout She was like the lizard that fell into the water and became a crocodile combine photographs taken by the artist on unceded Country in south-western Victoria over the past decade—across the lands of the Wauthaurong, Bunurong, Wadawurrung, and Gunditjmara—with archival material sourced from the State Library of Victoria of the same areas. The archival images, produced exclusively by white colonial settler photographers, documented and mapped the land, creating visual records that both precede and actively participate in the colonial inscription of place. By bringing these materials into dialogue, the work creates a confrontation between lived Indigenous presence and the extractive logic of the colonial archive.

I began creating these artworks to occupy my mind and hands at the end of each day, once work commitments were fulfilled and my thoughts unburdened by tasks. I used these ten images as interchangeable puzzles, shifting and reconfiguring them. I had been angry and confused in a way that sat in my physical being. I had been angry, and remain angry, directed at the ongoing justification and normalisation of
current events of invasion and colonisation, at the systems that sustain them, and at
those who mobilise in their favour.

During this time, I perceived this moment as part of a broader unravelling of Western imperial power—what is often called “the empire”—not as a sudden collapse, but as an escalating weakening, becoming increasingly visible in less overt, more discernible forms, in such ways that could no longer be ignored.

It was from this disturbance that I turned assiduously to this self-imposed project.

Like a daydream, I would enter this psychological state in which I could chart my internal irritation, bordering on incredulity, as I made this work: I meditated on what harm I had observed that day, what harm I had learned, what harm I had read, and what harm I could not unsee. And in doing this, I would tuck myself into the cuts of these mental landscapes and sit within them. Stitching them anew, the past with the present, pulling things together and not quite sealing them, I would intentionally leave the seams sharp, because they are sharp.

I found myself retreating into these images on my screen, treating the flat, 2D land as a refuge, as I do with the physical land when I need rest and respite. It served as a moment to breathe. It became a conversation between me and the land: saw the images as a conduit for the ancestors, trying to find a healing through these exchanges. Every night, for that year, I immersed myself in decompressing my heavy mind through these conversations, constructing a mental map that the land hadn’t made itself and never would.

This process of introspection, whilst making, has been a reflective meditation I’ve practiced for the past decade, so much so that it has become second nature to me. I was trying to keep my focus on the method—working on the images, cutting, aligning, splicing, and finding matches through my library of photographs.

Because I was creating in this lazy river that I had built myself—this continuous, slow-moving current of return, where each night resembled the last but never quite
repeated itself, without clear direction, plan, or outcome—I realised I was treating
these small windows, which I now prefer to call ‘portals’ rather than landscapes, as altar pieces. They were serving as tiny sites of worship, instruction, and ritual. Diminutive but demanding, I would ask them if I could look again, concentrate harder, speak to them, and hope they’d speak back.

While each collage in this series suggests a unified, continuous landscape, it is in fact assembled from distinct locations, with no place appearing twice within a single image. I dressed each portal with shades of unforgettable and unforgivable red, symbolising the duality of violence and passion, corruption and yearning— a visceral terror and love that sits uncomfortably close.

The works remind me of both bloodshed and the blood coursing through my veins, connecting me to the Indigenous continuum, both materially and psychologically, enduring beyond the designs of colonial power. Only now that I have decided these will be artworks, and this series is complete, have I come to understand that what I was seeking was solace, which I find in all the breaks in the sunder. This piecemeal fragmentation and the final, finished outcome are both wound and opening.

So, who is she, and why did she transform from a lizard into a crocodile after falling
into the water? Am I the lizard who fell into the water, strengthened at the molecular level, water cells infiltrating my Indigenous pores? Have I become the resilient, formidable crocodile, strengthened anew to withstand this colony and the relentless pain and destruction it sows, fiercely guarding the ancestral ground?

Or are you the lizard—the naive, harmless one—who has fallen into the comfort and offerings of privilege within the colony, and in doing so, become something else, something more dangerous, whether you realise it or not? Are you a crocodile, but not in the same way that I am?