Return to Warkworth – Exhibition images
Here are images of the photographs I exhibited in the ‘Refraction’ Exhibition held at Lords Gallery in Leichhardt in September 2001. It was group show with four photographers exhibiting a diverse range of work.
My exhibition focused on a return to my childhood home at Warkworth in the Hunter Valley of NSW. I was the oldest of four children at the time and my father was principal of the one-teacher Warkworth Public Primary School. The school classroom and principal’s residence were in one combined building and the total school population each year was about 30 students. We lived there for 8 years, 1960-67. I arrived as a two-year old and left just after my 10th birthday.
I recall the Warkworth community was very warm and generous. Most of the students came primarily from dairy farming and fruit and vegetable grower families. The school had a tennis court which hosted Sunday picnic tennis days on a regular basis and there were dances and school concerts in the big tin shed called the Warkworth Hall.
When I returned in 2001 the school buildings had been purchased by Warkworth Mines and all the former farms had been bludgeoned by open cut coal mining. The once quiet roads had been widened to take a continuous stream of large trucks transporting the black gold for export to far off places. As I photographed I was shocked by the transformation and destruction of what I remembered as a quiet, bucolic environment. It was a melancholy trip down memory lane.
