In Gallery 1, Two Fields is a photographic journey through two of the most mythological periods of Australian history: The Gallipoli Campaign and the frontier conflicts between Indigenous Australians and white settlers. The latter, writes Darwin-based Glenn Campbell, also represents a war, ‘though undeclared in a legal sense, that defined our nation as much as the ANZAC Campaign’. Glenn Campbell is no stranger to zones of conflict through his work as a photojournalist at home and abroad and as an Australian War Memorial official photographer. For this series he has travelled across Australia and to ANZAC Cove searching for links between the nation’s pathological reverence for the myth of ANZAC and its amnesia regarding its own frontier battles.
Glenn Campbell has been producing image-driven stories from around Australia and Southeast Asia for nearly 20 years, including the past decade or so based in Darwin. In 2011, Campbell was honoured with a Walkley Award for his photo essay Stolen Spirits documenting the return of ancestral remains to tribal lands in Arnhem Land. Apart from his newspaper reportage-related work, Campbell has initiated several photographic and multimedia projects for exhibition, mostly reflecting his interest in sites of wartime and memorial interest. He was a co-curator for the inaugural edition of the NCCA exhibition PROOF: Photo Essays from the Top End (2014).
Glenn Campbell, ‘Lone Pine’, 2013, photographic print; image courtesy the artist