Menindee Fish Kill – a performance for camera – continues a body of field research and creative outcomes which I began in 1977. For four and a half decades I’ve been investigating the effects of pollution, drought and floods on the waters of the Murray–Darling Basin.

In January 2019, to emphasise the culpability of non-Indigenous Australians in the destruction of the Darling River and the cause of the fish kill then occurring, I travelled to Menindee from Sydney and immersed myself in the gross toxic water. Surrounded by dead fish and maggots, and with flies landing on my face, I took up the pose of Shakespeare’s tragic heroine Ophelia in John Everett Millais’ 1851–52 Pre-Raphaelite painting of the same name.

In the photograph I’m dressed in a paisley-patterned garment. This now ubiquitous textile design is based on the boteh (or buta), an ancient Persian motif shaped like a teardrop with a curved top which was appropriated by weavers in the Scottish town of Paisley in the nineteenth century. The performance refers to colonialism, deep despair and environmental culpability. The fish kill is an outcome of our mismanagement of the river. We are to blame for this. I put us in with the dead fish.

In Menindee I was fortunate to meet award-winning Adelaide-based photographer Melissa Williams-Brown. Melissa – a professional portrait and environmental photographer with a passion for our rural communities – has been documenting Menindee and its people and environment for years, and enthusiastically photographed my performance.