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Mothers and Fathers
Pat Sweet
Pat Sweet
Fifty Years on Block K
20 May to 20 June 2010 - extended to 11 July
Goolhi Station, a sheep run in northwestern NSW, was subdivided into soldier settlement farming blocks in 1949. Block K was won by Pat Sweet's father in a ballot and he took his young family there to work the 1500 acres. There were no roads, no mains electricity and the only phone was on the homestead block.
For her eleventh birthday Pat was given a Baby Brownie camera with which she
photographed her family and the farm in the late 1950s. The images show a simple country life from a child's perspective - playing games, helping Mum, watching Dad work. These early films, processed by a local chemist at the time, provided the negatives from which Pat has made the present photographs.
Fifty years later, at the end of a prolonged period of drought in the area, Pat
photographed Block K where her brother still worked the family farm. She has
photographed it with a nostalgic passion and a telling eye for the abstract.
The resulting work is an important window into a way of life, both then and now, which few of us ever experience firsthand but which remains a fundamental part of the Australian psyche.