Facing It
There’s an image that the renowned Australian photographer Max Dupain took six years before he died. Titled Life and Death in the Garden, it shows the mummified remains of a ringtail possum curved around the stem of a slipper orchid.[i]
This monochrome still life is reproduced in Helen Ennis’s Reveries: Photography and Mortality and coming across it when I was leafing through her book jogged my memory: years ago I’d found a similarly mummified ringtail when, needing somewhere to store boxes filled with old vertical files stuffed with photocopies and news clippings, as well as books I had no room for, I cleared out some space under my parents’ house.
The dead creature was lying in a corner near a pile of wood. I left off moving boxes and carried its kite-light body up to the verandah. After brushing away the dirt, and shaking insects from the holes in the membrane stretched taut over its bones, I went to my mother’s workroom and took some brown wool from one of the fleeces she kept in a low cupboard. Perhaps I found the possum’s nakedness too much to bear, for I fashioned cuffs around its legs and, from white wool tugged from another fleece, I then shaped a tail.
*
Responding to the intentions signalled by Dupain’s title, Ennis says that the photographer is “referring to life cycles and the regenerative power of nature.” [ii] Interestingly, in her description of his artwork, she misidentifies the slipper orchid as a lily, and it was this error that prompted me to consider this decidedly ambiguous image more closely.
Perhaps unconsciously, Ennis was attuned to the spiritual implications of Life and Death in the Garden, ones that Dupain, as an avowed rationalist, no doubt didn’t intend but which nonetheless ghost his image.
Her slip with the slipper orchid is understandable because his flower — positioned so as to amplify the arc of the possum’s spine, with its two outflung, bright-edged petals and upstanding, glowing sepal, which is alive with a strangely luminous light — distinctly resembles a cross. This bloom contrasts dramatically with the dark creature below that seems to not only merge with the black background but to hang in space because the support on which it lies is invisible.
Such details are compelling because, although it isn’t a lily, symbolically the orchid seems to serve the same function as the annunciatory, trumpeting flowers we’re familiar with from countless paintings and stained glass windows where, due to their immaculate whiteness, they stand for perfection and purity, linking them not only to the Virgin Mary but also to Christ. [iii]
Dupain’s orchid’s animating presence is met with the answering aliveness of the possum’s limbs: they’re poised, as though on the verge of movement, and its front claws are delicately pinched as if they’ve only just closed around some tiny morsel. The questing head appears to be intently focused, the eye socket to look deep into illuminating darkness.
With this in mind, might not Life and Death in the Garden be interpreted as an image of the promise of resurrection as well as implying natural regeneration?
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Putting Ennis’s book aside, I removed the possum from where it had been tucked away, shrouded in white polyfoam wrap, inside a Sussan’s bag. There was an ootheca (a cockroach’s egg case) adhering to the taut skin of one shoulder, which I flicked off with a fingernail. When I shook the desiccated carcass, unidentifiable bits and pieces scattered onto the paper I had laid down. Parts of insects, by the looks, or more probably, their leavings.
I used a heavy, faux-bone-handled butter knife to knock along the spine, dislodging even more unidentifiable, frangible stuff. Still there was something rattling around inside so I tap-tap-tapped until, eventually, the dried brain fell out.
Oh!
I was horrified by what I’d done: such a sense of desecration, of a total emptying out.
*
Our motivations — and in this instance some might think of mine as macabre — can often seem strange to ourselves, can’t they, especially when we’re in the midst, mired and muddled, unable to see straight, to divine the truth of why we do what we do.
It’s in this state that I decide to take photographs. Fortuitously, the sky is uniformly grey covered at is with stratus cloud; my technical expertise with a camera is minimal.
*
Given the rigid posture of “my” possum, I decide to stand it upright against a draped backdrop, balanced on its prehensile tail. I’ve picked a Brazilian jasmine, a flower lacking symbolic resonance, the throat of which, although shallow and pale, seems to absorb light.
When I finally look at what I’ve shot, unexpected details are revealed: the parchment skin is pimpled and wrinkled, stretched so tight it might tear. There are the clenched claws, the scooped out hollow where once there was a belly and, most painfully, the agonized, poking tongue.
*
When our parents needed care — Mum suddenly and drastically demented, Dad in the last stages of emphysema — we had to ditch most of their belongings in preparation for selling the house. We quickly got rid of countless books, our mother’s floor weaving loom and spinning wheel, furniture, rugs, mirrors, artworks … to friends, to the op shop, and to the local tip.
A whirlwind time of disbelief and terror during which we dared not ask ourselves: what’s next, what’s next?
And then came the days of dying. We watched over my father for hours until, finally, when we had all fallen into exhausted sleep, he let go (“It’s time to let go,” we’d whispered to him throughout the night). During Covid was when my mother fell into her deeper silence and, because it was forbidden, I couldn’t be there to kiss her, hold her, tell her how much I loved her.
Maybe this is why I took the photographs, ones resisting any hint of regeneration or rebirth: so I could face a truth I’d dodged around, unwilling and unable to grieve — that my parents are most resolutely dead.
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End Notes
[i] This photograph can be viewed online via the State Library of NSW at https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/9yM0e6x9
[ii] Ennis, H. (2007) Reveries: Photography and Mortality. Canberra. National Portrait Gallery, p. 25.
[iii] In his short but fascinating paper, John Edwards writes about the rare phenomenon of what are known as ‘Lily-Crucifixions’ where the figure of Christ is shown crucified on a lily. ‘Lily Crucifixions in the Oxford District,’ Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, April 1979, pp. 43-45.