Whilst we--Suzanne, myself and our  two standard poodles (Kayla and Maleko) --- were  in Melbourne in late November for family reasons I was able  to do a little bit of  photographic scoping around the North Melbourne  drosscapes  before the  cloud cover evaporated.  This scoping was  to find  sites for a future large  format  photo session in the autumn of 2019 so as  to  continue  the topographic photography of old  industrial  Melbourne that  I am working  in association with Stuart Murdoch. 

As it was early summer,  what was substantial early morning cloud cover on the Morning Peninsula, quickly disappeared over the city in the early afternoon.  That meant the end of any photography scoping for the day.    I was wanting to see this Industrial Melbourne Festival so Stuart and I decided to check out The Substation in Newport and the  Trocadero Art Space  in Footscray,   but, unfortunately, we were too late. The Industrial  Festival had been and gone. So we looked at these art spaces as possibilities  for future exhibitions for our industrial Melbourne work in 2019/2020  as we wanted to build on our 2018 exhibition in Adelaide  at Atkins Photo Lab  by exhibiting in  Melbourne.  

Whilst  we were at  the Trocadero Art Space we came across the adjacent  Five Walls Project and meet its founder and director Aaron Martin. He wasn't interested in exhibiting our contemporary topographical photography of industrial Melbourne,  as his gallery solely exhibited  abstract painting. This was a pity because it was a good,  white cube  art gallery with lots of small rooms.  

However,  Martin  did  inform us that he had co-curated a modern  ruin exhibition  at The Substation with Michael Brennan  in 2013. Though this modern ruin exhibition is tangential to our contemporary collaborative photographic  work, given the  emphasis on sculpture,  it is about a similar industrial subject matter.  This provides some  historical context for our drosscapes project that is different to Warren Kirk's Westography . 

Then I remembered other bodies of work with an industrial focus or  theme re Melbourne,  namely the 2014 Wolfgang Sievers Project organised by the Centre of Contemporary Photography,   and further back,  Les Walkling's images of industrial Melbourne  entitled  The site of his last embrace that formed  a part of his  Nothing is as it appears series 1983-88.