An Australian agri-industrial landscape sublime

Agriculture has the largest visual and environmental impact on Australia’s landscape, ecologies and environments. It is frequently visually communicated through romantic imagery and reinforced by messaging that emphasizes trust, environmental stewardship, and ethical livestock practices. The quality of satellite imaging is generally inadequate for verifying these practices and illuminating the state of agricultural environments. This visual essay presents a photographic counter narrative based on a comprehensive visual research process spanning the breadth of the continent. It presents 56 unaltered still images selected from over 10,000 captured by the author using a consumer drone. Images have been chosen to represent all of Australia’s major commodities by economic value, all land-dominant practices, and all primary government classifications. Photographs are accompanied by industry quotes to challenge bucolic notions, and to posit that human production scales are superseded by commercial agribusiness. The research seeks to depict an ‘agri-industrial landscape sublime’ to highlight paradoxes within Australian agriculture as a Western practice providing food abundance from a weathered and volatile continent, while adversely affecting ecosystems and drawing animal suffering into question. Finally, the essay seeks to highlight the importance of recognising insensitive agribusiness as systemic of imposing neoliberal systems on Australian farmers and embracing extractive paradigms. Accordingly, this essay carefully composes imagery that both celebrates production capability while suggesting the need to evolve insensitive agri-philosophy and practice to food systems realising improved ecological, environmental, and animal welfare outcomes.