Julie Clarke - Camping by the Murray River late 1950s

Julie Clarke - Camping by the Murray River late 1950s. Photographer unknown.

The photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination; false on the level of perception, true on the level of time (Roland Barthes, 1980).

I have imagined this photograph for over a decade, for my Uncle told me that there existed at least two photographs he'd taken of me whilst we were camping by the Murray River. As I look at the girl looking at me from the past, I realise that this is the me that smiled before the camera and that my 'Mona Lisa' grin that began back then as a smile, had, during my life diminished to that enigmatic half-grin that people tell me I do. When I look hard at the photograph I see that neither the girl nor the dog are looking at the photographer, they are captured by something else. The dog is distracted by movement in the sky, the girl by someone who stands next to the photographer. I imagine that I have been told to put my hand on my knee and to sit up straight, for my arm is stilted, revealing the self-consciousness that the smile conceals.

I remember the tartan skirt and the soft yellow jumper (I was always dressed in Autumn colours). The bowl haircut was a source of embarrassment; both myself and my sisters had the strange mark of my grandmother's unskilled craft. I can see the small gap in my fringe where my cowslip formed.

In this photograph I'm not caught in action. I am aware that I am to be photographed and that I am being photographed. This had not happened much before (I only know of one other photograph that was ever taken of me when I was a child) and so this would have been a special and unique moment in my life. I sit slightly forward on the chair, perhaps with anticipation, perhaps with interest. There is an easiness on one side of my body as I stroke the dog. It is the other side, the good Catholic girl side of me that has pulled her skirt down over her knees, and with legs crossed at the ankles smiles for the future.

It is important to me that over the past week or so I have been writing about the Infanta in the Diego Velazquez painting 'La Meninas' and the re-interpretation of it by the photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. In both the painting and the photograph there is a dog. In the former it stands alert, in the latter it sleeps. In both, the dog is connected to the girl child as companion and aid.

In is magical that in the midst of my writing this photograph of myself with a dog has been given to me belatedly for my Birthday. It has appeared at an opportune time, as a reminder of the past that is connected to now. My childhood was always something that was half-articulated through memory and fragmented stories, touched as they were by the shadows and blurred remembering of someone else. Now, the photograph somehow pins it down and is like the feet of the dog and the girl, fixed firmly on solid ground.


I wrote this to celebrate my 50th Birthday in 2001 and gave it to friends and acquaintenances I knew at the time as a photocopy with soft cardboard cover. It was my older sister Glyns who gave me the photo. I was writing about La Meninas in a chapter on cyborgs in my PhD thesis.