Rory King is a photographer. His work sits in the hybrid space between documentary practice and personal narratives fleshed out through an evocative and ambiguous visual discourse. He published his debut monograph, ‘Plumwood’ with Tall Poppy Press in 2022, which was partially developed during his residency at Plumwood Mountain in 2021.

Rory King surviving a Plumwood winter (Clancy Walker, 2021)

Preface of Plumwood, published 2022 by Tall Poppy Press.

I began photographing for Plumwood long before I knew I would make this book. The first pictures I took were made as a participant on a workshop lead by Dr. Natasha Fijn, an anthropologist at the Australian National University, in which we visited the mythic Plumwood Mountain on Yuin Country. This densely vegetated, mountain sanctuary was home to activist and philosopher, Val Plumwood, a pioneer in establishing a powerful eco-feminist critique of the Western, nature/ culture divide. This mountain is also home to an abundance of native plants and animals, one of which is the endemic Plumwood tree from which Val took her name. It was this interplay of Plumwood the place, Plumwood the person, and Plumwood the tree that was the first spark of inspiration that lead me to make this book.

Val lived atop this mountain for three decades in a cottage that she built from stones on the property, cohabiting with the wonderful variety of non-human residents in this ancient temperate rainforest. On this workshop, I learnt of a defining event in Val's life that gave rise to her later thinking on death and predation. In the mid 1980's, as Val was assessing walking trails and canoeing in Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, she was violently mauled and 'death-rolled' three times by a salt-water crocodile. Narrowly surviving the attack, she crawled for hours through remote tropical scrub to safety. Val later wrote of her experience, processing it with the sobering realisation that society is. predicated on an illusory divide between the Culture of humanity and the Nature of animals. It is this fallacy, she concluded, which has distanced humanity from the reality of our place as inextricable constituents to immense ecological systems - that we too, are capable of being prey. The futile belief that we are in some way superior, dominant, or exempt from natural processes has, in turn, lead to the ongoing destruction and deprivation of the Earth and its environments. I became fascinated of Val's work and hastily applied for a 10-day residency to live at her cottage through BREW (Bush Retreats for Eco Writers). Once accepted, bracing the bitter winter nights off-grid and warmed only with a wood burner, I photographed Val's possessions, her cottage and the enchanting rainforest which engulfed it.

After this residency, I participated in a year long Indigenous Cultural Arts Exchange program in affiliation with the Australian National University. Throughout this program I continued to make work about our inextricable relationship to nature, bolstered by the invaluable wisdom of First Nations writers, educators, astronomers, artists, and poets all sharing the ways in which they care for Country through truth-telling and how non-Indigenous people may adopt the responsibility of stewardship to do the same.

At this point, Plumwood was rapidly evolving into a visual interpretation of Val's ecologically concerned philosophy as well as a personal response to the cultural critiques and ideas raised in her writing. The final chapter of Plumwood took me four thousand kilometres North, to the exact site of Val's attack in 1985.

As I photographed here, engaging with the rich and vibrant Indigenous culture of the area, chasing crocodiles and the lurid, smokey light in this tropical landscape, I searched for parallels between Val's work and local Indigenous knowledge of the natural environment.Now, Plumwood exists as an interpretive union of these different philosophical and cultural ideas. At it's core, behind the wonderful life and work of Val, her rainforest home, and the defining moments in her life, Plumwood attempts to bridge the fissures we have pried open between us and Nature, asking us all to consider our place as custodians, integral to the protection and conservation of our environment.

This book would not have been made possible without the love and support of so many. My heart goes out to Ella, Claire, Dan, Jayden, Nettie, Wolfer, my family, and Matt, who has encouraged and supported this work from the very first step.

These photographs were made on the unceded lands of the Walbunja, Woiwurrung, Ngunawal/Ngambri, Gumbainggir, Biripi, Palawa, Bininj and Mungguy people. I acknowledge the tradition owners and custodians of Country throughout Australia, whose wisdom, stewardship, and care for this land is invaluable in its protection and conservation. May we all learn to listen to and love Country as they have done for millennia. I pay my respects to Elders past and present.

Rory King: 19 - 30 July, 2021

Abi Andrews: 12 - 22 December, 2021