Wongari

In this evocative image, Michael Cook traces his own memory of dingoes as a child on K’gari (Fraser Island). He spent long periods there with his mother who volunteered, in the 1970s and 1980s, with the Fraser Island Defence Organisation (Fido) on the cessation of sandmining and logging. In Wongari the dingo is muscular, like the animals of the past, prior to the removal of feral brumbies from the island, which had been adopted by dingoes as a food source. Behind the female figure and her companion dingo, the detail of the sea is unreadable, the horizon mysterious, an unknown – like the future which arrived unheralded from across the globe. The light is muted, the atmosphere portentous, signifying the attacks to come as a direct result of colonisation and the changing nature of this place.