Photographer Marie Watt will exhibit her haunting images of former gold rush towns at the Gold Museum as part of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.
Majorca Store (Photo: Marie Watt)
The discovery of gold in Victoria in 1851 changed the state forever. We are familiar with the grand buildings constructed during the gold rush period in thriving regional centres such as Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine.
Methodist Church in Tarnagulla (Photo: Marie Watt)
But the gold rush also left a ghostly but beautiful landscape, with its abandoned mines and ruins and towns frozen in time.
Antimony Mine in Costerfield (Photo: Marie Watt)
Marie’s exhibition, After the Rush, uses infrared photography to emphasise the atmospheric solitude of the lesser known gold rush sites in a bid to remind us of a flourishing but harsher past.
Ballarat International Foto Biennale is on from Saturday 22 August until Sunday 20 September, 2015.
Written by Marie Watt and Snjez Cosic, Gold Museum Curator