3 days ago
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Photographer Juno Gemes was often surprised as she excavated 50 years of her creative partnership with the poet Robert Adamson, choosing images, texts and objects for an exhibition of their intertwined lives on the Hawkesbury River.
“Some people might be disappointed I’m not the weepy widow. Not to say that I don’t have a lot of grief but I’ve used it to examine our lives,” she said. “While we were living it we were always dealing with the latest challenge.”
Gemes cared for Adamson until he died from cancer in December 2022, and organised a soulful send-off with smoking ceremony, poetry readings and a feast of oysters. Then she worked on a book, Until Justice Comes, which is her photographic record of the Indigenous rights movement since the 1970s, and went on a speaking tour from Australia to London, Paris and Arles.
“I’m living for myself for the first time in many years,” she said, showing the same passion, optimism and curiosity in her 80s as ever.
She turned inward again to sort through Adamson’s and her own archives. The best material went to library collections and she found inspiration for a show of their art and activism: photography, poems, paintings, notebooks, documentaries, books published by their Paper Bark Press and others in Australia, the US and UK.
On the walls of the Grace Cossington Smith Gallery are Gemes’ black-and-white images of river people, printed large at last, as the artist Brett Whiteley urged many years ago.
When Gemes, an urban bohemian born in Budapest and raised in Sydney, moved in the 1980s with her son and Adamson to Cheero Point near Brooklyn (NSW), she had to learn about the ancient environment and the community of oyster growers and fishing families.
“It took me 10 years to explore the river with my camera. It was so mysterious. I went out with people on their boats and said, ‘Show me the place that is most meaningful to you’.” She was “ecstatic” to rediscover a favourite photograph of one “old river rat” taking his boat up to his grandfather’s house.
“The Hawkesbury is unique,” she said. “The culture is deep, complex and invisible to most people. They see prawn trawlers or fishing boats. But it was a first-contact place and I was looking for Aboriginal connections from the beginning. It took a long time to find them because they are secret and closed.”
Adamson had always fished on the Hawkesbury with his resident grandfather. He returned there at Gemes’ insistence, as a retreat from alcohol, drugs and other wild city pursuits. His poems, too, became quieter philosophical celebrations of his “spiritual home”.
Revelations about her husband came to Gemes as she emptied his desk, re-read his poems and filled vitrines in the gallery with his (and her) notebooks and his near-ornithological drawings.
“I realised he is a great love poet, not only to me but to the fish and the birds.”
His first poem to her, Songs for Juno, speaks of “Hawkesbury mud”, “feathers for sails”, “and you sleeping, curled around the stern”. One of his many bird poems is Looking into a Bowerbird’s Eye.
An astute bird lover, Adamson raised a baby satin bowerbird in his last years. Six months after his death, Spinoza flew away, too, but still visits.
Rhonda Davis, head curator at Macquarie University Art Gallery, selected the exhibition, an intimate process in which “fields of imagery and words collided, revealing how Juno and Bob’s practices entwined. I was awed by the way the Hawkesbury River is so deeply embedded in the work of both.”
Having worked with Gemes for 30 years, she said, “this exhibition reveals her strength as a leading photographer, the honest brilliance and rawness of her images”.
Celebrations will continue in June with the launch of a book edited by poet Judith Beveridge. Wingspan: A Festschrift for Robert Adamson is a collection of personal essays and poems by many Australian and international poets who admired him.
Juno Gemes and Robert Adamson on the Hawkesbury River is at Grace Cossington Smith Gallery, Abbotsleigh, Wahroonga, until May 30.
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