A sub-theme of heat has emerged in the ongoing, low key  Roadside project.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) , 2024 was Adelaide’s driest year since 2006, with the city receiving nearly 200 millimetres below the average rainfall.  Heat refers to   the extreme dryness of the landscape  in southern South Australia,  during  the  heatwave of the late summer/early autumn. This   dryness can be seen in the dusty paddocks and the  dead grass along the side of the road. It is the  dead grass that I've been  noticing  during my  afternoon poodlewalks with Maya on   Waitpinga's backcountry roads in the southern Fleurieu Peninsula.  

There has been no rain for months and none is forecast by   BOM for some time.  Only more  extreme temperatures  with the increased risk for bushfires.  People on water tanks in the Adelaide Hills and Yankalilla have run out of water and they are now relying on water cartage. This  is such a contrast to the  sub-tropical cyclones (eg., Cyclone Alfred) and the floods in north-eastern NSW and south-eastern Queensland, due to the  ocean and atmosphere being demonstrably warmer than even just a few years ago. The climate is changing because it is warming.

Dead grasses, no subsoil moisture, hot  road surfaces,  intense heat from the afternoon sun,   hot north-westerly winds,  and bodily suffering.   The heat melts the boundaries between human body and nature:  heat radiates into bodies,  dissolves clear-cut lines and boundaries,  distorts our view, and  intensifies our feelings. Mimesis refers to both our behaviour towards the thing we  stand before and acknowledging that non-human nature  including animals is a subject. 

It is the sensuous bodily  response with its  mimetic capacities  that connect us  to this  natural history --  the nexus of the  entangling of  nature and history.  Heat radiates into bodies.  We are not on a path in modernity toward  a separation of man and nature  so that we are  outside of, liberated from,  or superior to nature. Rather, we are immersed in heat. 

Whilst walking in the extreme heat I  kept thinking that this drought  like dryness --- the suffering of nature  -- is a portend of the region's future under climate heating. A climate changed future in  the Anthropocene, that is becoming hotter  and drier. This is an  era when the  burning of fossil fuels in greater and greater quantities. has  been the primary driver of a more than 50% increase in the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since pre-industrial times.

Dead roadside grasses are the effects of heat and they  offer one way for a contemporary  photography to critically engage with  the Anthropocene's climate warming.  Dead grass  as non-human nature is  what remains outside of,  or is repressed and hidden  by, the conceptual framework of the Anthropocene's  instrumental economic reason's concern with domination and  control of nature to increase profitability. 

The dead  grasses on the  roadside  are a metaphor for global warming and this  aesthetics of heat offers a critical  insight into  the damage done to nature by the overpowering forces of a fossil fuel capitalism.