A Canberra kangaroo's corpse being eaten by teeming maggots. A pale blue moon floating in a matchingly pale blue Canberra sky. Two living kangaroos looking as if they are the sole occupants of the national capital metropolis. The ''tangerine goodness'' of the Australian National University campus. We have a right to expect some originality and eccentricity from our university students (what else are they for?) and our expectations are met in the Canberra In My Eyes photography exhibition that opened in Civic last night.
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The Australian National University invited students of all nationalities and disciplines to join in celebrating Canberra by contributing, to a competition, a photograph of Canberra as they have experienced it. The result is, mostly, a refreshing improvement on those suburban photography and painting exhibitions of the works in which every bland image of Canberra looks like something that belongs on the lid of a box of chocolates or in one of those awful Canberra calendars.
Yesterday afternoon the photographers were arranging their works on the walls of the Theo Notaras Multicultural Centre, where they will be hanging their photographs for the exhibition opening. Hannah O'Neill explained how she came to do her striking nocturnal work in which two kangaroos, looking down Anzac Parade across to a distant illuminated old Parliament House, seem to be the only living things in a town that's a kangaroopolis.
''I had a friend staying from America. She wanted to see some kangaroos, and the sights too I guess. We went one night at 10 o'clock (it was last winter and it was freezing!) to take photographs of Anzac Parade and the War Memorial. And when we got there, there were all these kangaroos, just hanging about. The first time my friend saw just one kangaroo she freaked out but then she saw there were about 20 there all at once!''
There's not a single human soul in the picture and O'Neill liked the way in which the picture is of Canberra the metropolis but also of Canberra the bush place.
At last a Canberran has photographed that iconic Canberra structure, a suburban stormwater underpass! Lachlan Pini explains in a caption that he's always lived ''on the edge of Florey'' and that one day when he was only three or four and when his mother's vigilance had lapsed, he walked down into an underpass where ''I was mesmerised by the discovery that somewhere could be so dark and black in the middle of the day … I've never been able to get it out of my head. That solid black place between suburbs could be a gateway to anywhere. Somewhere beyond my greatest imagination''.
Late one night, Jessica Hieo explained yesterday, she was bored and wide awake and went for a walk around the ANU's campus, finding it ''at its most stunning'' with ''dim fluorescent lights and glowing lamps casting hazy and eerie shadows''. In her rather ghostly photograph of ANU billboards crammed with flapping notices ancient and modern, the nearby lamps are casting an orange glow she likes to think of as the nocturnal campuses ''tangerine goodness''.
Details of the exhibition are next door in this page's What's On section.
