By NOEL MURPHY
RUSTED nuts and washers sit cobwebbed, fixed to weather-beaten bricks, while corroded mechanical contraptions, long since fallen into disuse, sit nearby garnished in fluff and woollen tufts.
It’s a long time since the Phoenix Wool Scouring Works at Marnock Vale – beside Balyang Sanctuary – rumbled and whirred their industry, and the brick structures that housed them today stand sentinel to a past more or less forgotten.
Not by photographers such as Geelong West’s Lindsay Tucker, however.
Drawn to history and its lighting and textural possibilities, she’s captured a striking black and white portfolio of the old plant’s bricks and chimney stacks, its skewiff pipes and coils, its pigeons and guano and leafless scrubby surrounds.
She’s recorded a sharp, stark stab at that passage of time that’s turned a Geelong agrarian industry into a rusticated memento of the past.
Lindsay says she’s more student than photographer, and only part-way through a certificate IV in the craft. A singer-songwriter and well-known performer around Geelong, she was laid low by a workplace spinal injury and has been tackling photography and music production as she fights her way back to health.
“I didn’t even know it was called Marnock Vale,” she said of her wool scouring works shots.
“I’d been there to photographs ducks a few times and knew the buildings. I was there and thought I’ll see what it looked like close and far away.
“My Pop used to work there. I had no idea, I just showed my Mum the photos and she said he was a boiler maker.
“So now it kind of has a sentimental value to my family as well.
“I love historical buildings – there are lots of different textures and old world feel and I love black and white. It surprises me when you convert some photos in colour to black and white – in colour, they’d just be lost in the pile, but they can become amazing.
“I’m still very much a beginner and I wonder sometimes if I’m getting them right. I feel like I’m winging it but I have a very clear vision how I want things to look.”
