In the above photo, you can see the “Yobarnie Map Wall” at the Yeomans Project exhibition at AGNSW.
There are four digital video screens hung on the wall, amongst a range of photographs taken from PA Yeomans’ books. None of the videos was made by us.
From left to right, these are the videos used in the show:
This is a short clip of “gopro” footage of a Yeomans Keyline Plow in action. It was made by Mark Russell & Nate Mitchell from Adventure Artists, and uploaded by Darren Doherty. I really love how the plow carves up the soil effortlessly, and the lovely metallic sound of it slicing through the turf.
Darren features in the next video as well, which is a kind of pegagogical doco in 5 parts called “Keyline Design at the Beach”. Even though the video is “rough and ready”, I found it gives one of the most tangible explanations of the way that Keyline design works that I’ve come across (compared to say, diagrams in books). The video was made by Jill Clautier and Carol Hirashima from Sustainable World Media:
Next along the wall was a video which directly related to the big maps of Yobarnie. It is called “Yeomans Property Threat from Development – Part 1” and it was made by Gary Caganoff of Lysis Films. The film was made back in 2009, when bits of the iconic Yobarnie began to be sold off for housing developments and a retirement village:
Sadly, much of the battle to save Yobarnie from this banal fate has been lost by now, but there is still a substantial portion that hasn’t yet been built over. We explored these issues on our recent Field Trip to North Richmond, where we met and were introduced to the complex tangle of real estate versus heritage by some of the members of the North Richmond and Districts Community Action Association, NRDCAA.
The final video at the right hand side of the wall was from 1955. It was a “Rural Bank” sponsored film which puts forward PA Yeomans as a heroic man of the land with ideas to save Australia from the drought. It’s a ripper (thanks to the archiving work of Geoffrey Booth for keeping this one alive):
There were a few more videos that we would have liked to include in the show, but we didn’t because they belong to the ABC, which would have charged us upwards of sixty dollars a minute. The strange thing about this is that both of these ABC clips are already freely available on the internet! Go figure.
The ABC videos, which are really quite good, are these:
“Keyline in the Kiewa Valley”:
and a clip from the 7:30 Report which discusses the Yobarnie property development issue:
Here’s a direct link to the TV programme.
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