Walking Upstream: Waterways of the Illawarra:
Lucas Ihlein, Kim Williams, Brogan Bunt, 2014-18


Walking Upstream: a project involving “creek walks” undertaken in the Illawarra (the region surrounding Wollongong, NSW).

Friends, colleagues, experts joind us for irregularly-scheduled walks which begin at a creek mouth, and work their way upstream for as far as possible.

These walks generate experiences, and spin off into discussions, new associations, stories, maps, videos, found things, jerry-rigged tools, and whatnot.


More info about Walking Upstream - Waterways of the Illawarra

Visit the Walking Upstream - Waterways of the Illawarra blog, active from 2014-2018.

In 2017, the project was presented as a major exhibition at Wollongong Art Gallery. Details here.

Our artist book 12 Creek Walks was published in 2017 by Leech Press in association with the exhibition at Wollongong Art Gallery - download here. The book is now out of print. 

Click here to download or view the exhibition catalogue from the Wollongong Art Gallery, with essay by Vincent Bicego.

In 2016 we participated in a "nearly carbon neutral conference" at University of California, Santa Barbara. Our contribution was a video essay featuring a walk up Bellambi Creek:



Desiree Savage, "Illawarra’s 50+ creeks have become works of art at Wollongong Art Gallery", Illawarra Mercury, October 25, 2017.

The video below was made in collaboration with Hayden Griffiths of Phoenix Media, and was included in the exhibition at the Wollongong Art Gallery:



The video below – a slideshow featuring diverse plant species – was made in collaboration with botanist Charles Huxtable, during a walk along Byarong Creek:



In 2015, Walking Upstream: Waterways of the Illawarra was part of the Fluid States: Performing Mobilities programme in Melbourne. Exhibition catalogue available on this page.



Background info about the project

The geographical boundaries of the project are (roughly) Stanwell Park to the north, and Nowra in the south – about a 100km range.

This is a resolutely local project – born from the desire of the walkers to engage more deeply with the topographical, ecological and social fabric of “our own place”. We are all artists and researchers living near Wollongong.

The Illawarra is hemmed in by the sea to the east, and a steep escarpment on the west. Rainwater seeps down the escarpment forming countless waterways: rivulets, creeks, gullies, brooks. Some are named, many are not. Often, these creeks run through backyards, alongside sports ovals, through industrial estates, and variously constitute picturesque (desirable) water features and unsightly concrete-lined drains.

We begin at the sea, at an identifiable “mouth”. We walk our way upstream, hacking through weeds and undergrowth, skirting along property boundaries, talking our way into people’s yards. We continue for as long as geography, topography, and social boundaries allow.

Unlike in large cities, where they are often paved over, the waterways of the Illawarra are visible. They criss-cross the landscape, intersecting with every aspect of life in this region.

By undertaking a relatively straightforward task – “to walk as far as possible upstream” – we envisage that our trajectories will intersect with key aspects of the Illawarra around cultures of land use: coal seam gas; black coal mining; bush regeneration; weed infestations; rapid gentrification; land as “property”.

The walks are a form of “ground truthing” – a way of comparing official maps and aerial photographs with the lived experience of tramping through space, on the ground. By definition, we cannot know what might emerge through this process. It is longitudinal – in terms of time, the project could take many months, even years – and there is no hurry, and is deliberately open ended.

We actively adopt Donald Brook’s definition of art as “unspecific experimental modelling”. In this way of understanding art, one does not stick one’s hand out the window “to see if it is raining” – rather, our hands are stuck out “to see…”

In other words, we do not know what we are trying to find out, but we trust that the process, set in motion by the score “to walk as far as possible upstream” will yield something revealing and new about our local environment. Our previous work in this area of practice demonstrates the potential for insights generated by unspecific experimental modelling.

The project has deep roots in the avant-garde of the past century: conceptual art, socially engaged art practice, land art, and “happenings” for example. In her book Artificial Hells, Claire Bishop describes this sort of practice as possessing a “double finality” or “double ontology” – ie, it is work which speaks to an autonomous disciplinary field of art, and to the realpolitik of the world-beyond-the-artworld.

The project needs to be done – to be carried out – physically, by people. It cannot exist as a proposition or score without being performed. But it is also a score – something which could be carried out by other personnel, and/or in other places.


See also:
Rebecca Mayo, Labours of care: Art practice and urban ecological restoration, PhD Thesis, ANU, 2018.