I have an ongoing photographic interest in edgelands. Edgelands are usually understood as  the banal hinterlands that exists between urban and rural environments, and they disrupt and  challenge the common notion of beauty in the landscape.

The picture below  is a  recent (2024) attempt at an interpretation of edgelands in Waitpinga. This   earlier attempt (in 2022)  was centred around  the early morning light and it adopts a pictureesque approach.   The more recent interpretation below is bleaker.

The more recent interpretation builds on earlier work here (in 2020) and here (in 2019). It is the bleak interpretation  that is more fitting   to this particular edgeland, rather  than the earlier  picturesque  approach.  It fits with the aesthetic experience of being in (walking in) a  degraded landscape.They are very modest compared to the work of Naoya Hatekeyama.

The 2024 version  of this wasteland is a  (digital) b+w  photo that was made as  a scoping  photo for a possible  5x4 b+w  view camera version. Judging from the scoped photo  It looks as if a 5x4  would be a possibility,  once the late afternoon  cloud cover returns to this region  of the  southern Fleurieu Peninsula. 

This coastal landscape's history  was initially being  cleared for  grazing by the white settlers in the 1850s (eg., Eli King).   In the 1970s  it became  the local dump/landfill for the Victor Harbor Council.  This  landfill consisted of a resource recovery and waste transfer facility, a green organics processing area, a main landfill waste disposal area, and a leachate interception system that was constructed in 2011. The dump was closed in 2013.

This micro waste area  has  an east-west trending valley  and though this ex-council dump looks abandoned, it is currently being illegally grazed, used by the occasional local dogwalker, and a site for the council to leave old pine trees, ponds for contaminated liquids, rocks and railway sleepers. This temporary storage facility for waste and garbage  is surrounded by the paddocks of  grazing and cropping land of the small farms. 

There is no attempt to regenerate, rehabilitate  or  rewild this derelict landfill  of consumer waste  in response to the increasing tourism along this part of the coast. So it remains an undervalued edgeland (or drossscape)  that people drive past on they way to stay for a few days in a wilderness lodge  that overlooks Encounter Bay. The edgeland is not an object of pleasure worthy of attention by tourists. It is seen as an 'empty',  non-place and not the  postcard landscape they are going to.