Abstract

Back in 1986, Ross Gibson was interviewed in Filmnews by Adrian Martin and Tina Kaufman about his experimental short essay film Camera Natura. Accompanying that interview was a photo of Gibson ‘on location’ for his film, wearing a hat not unlike the one that features on the cover of his new book The Summer Exercises. Back then I understood the hat to be an explorer’s, someone like Charles Sturt, someone whose willingness to learn from his environment had impressed Gibson in fashioning his own history of Australian landscape imaging. Now the hat looks like a detective’s or, rather, Marcel Duchamp’s rendering of a detective’s hat: on display, ready for our re‐consideration.