City - Muswellbrook State - NEW SOUTH WALES Country - Australia
About
Artists Statement So.. looking back and you have to consider the tons of images that never made it. To me it was an odds on chance that in terms of remembering stuff, the most significant thing that stuck in people's minds about Muswellbrook was the old showground fence. One remembers and basks in its simplistic rural vigor. Like most things in our world there are a raft of memories and stories that blend to become folklore in a small town. Milk Is Health.. it proclaimed to all who were ignorant of the towns once strong rural economy and background. But a less than fantastic cropping capability, coupled with the vagaries of the weather led to an inevitable decline. Rural societies around the country dwindled and the money to support the more peripheral bucolic ostentation, declined with it. The agricultural financial base declined and the showground with it, to a point where maintenance was the less preferred option to permanence of the showground boundary and an architectural icon disappeared from our landscape. The replacement was brutally functional, purposeful and detached, vulgar and generic, ubiquitous, and expedient... antiseptically devoid of style, function triumphed over form and the town lost out