A stencil on a post-industrial landscape: Mt Morgan Goldmine 1882-1990

Public art installation, ‘A stencil on a post-industrial landscape: Mt Morgan Goldmine 1882-1990’. It is an artwork acknowledging the industrial impact of goldmining, but it easily represents so many other industries: coal, bauxite, uranium, copper, timber, sugar and pastoralism, to name the most exploitive. The explanatory plaque begins: ‘This topographical cut-out is a synthesis of the Mt Morgan range, that Edwin Morgan walked over on the afternoon of the 10^th July, 1882. The outcome of that walk was the development of the Mt Morgan goldmining industry.’ It goes on: ‘The passage of time can romanticise the impact of goldmining on the landscape and the human spirit’. With its rusted steel and carefully placed rocks at the base of the sculpture, over time it will leave its own stains on the land, a reflection ‘of the ongoing decay of the post-industrial environment in the Australian landscape’. The artist, Peter Wolden, concludes: ‘This decay process should not be thought of as an end, but as a beginning or genesis of a new landscape and era’. Photograph by Luke Keogh, 2009.