Coral Carter: KALGOORLIE KALGOORLIE KALGOORLIE KALGOORLIE and Kalgoorlie 2010

Coral Carter is well known for her active association with Mulla Mulla Press but she also has an intensive photographic practice concerned with the everyday environment that she lives in. She produced two books for the Western Australian Photographic Book Survey.

Kalgoorlie 2010 is a  self produced/self published wire bound book of 51 ink jet black and white photographs with captions taken in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.

 As I was born in Kalgoorlie and lived here until my mid teens I was excited to return to live in 2010. I loved that some of the buildings and houses had not changed at all, some houses unaltered and even still painted the same colour. I chose to live in an older part of town close to where I grew up and featured everything I loved about Kalgoorlie, gum lined, gridded wide streets, and back lanes. My daily exercise regime became a walk through the streets of my Goldfield’s childhood. As I walked I revisited my past, photographing as I went. In an era where people were just beginning to own a family car, walking was how my cousins and I went to school, the pictures, friends and relations houses and the bush. I chose black and white as that was the box Brownie format of my childhood. I think black and white added to the nostalgia.

KALGOORLIE KALGOORLIE KALGOORLIE KALGOORLIE is a handfolded A4 sheet in the form of an 8 page booklet with photographs of Kalgoorlie Western Australia. Published by Mulla Mulla Press in November 2010 it is available in an limited edition of 100.

The corrugated iron on the cover is a ubiquitous building material of the Goldfields and feature of back lanes in the older parts of town. The lane was the domain of the dunny man and the rubbish man. Dunnies backed onto the lanes with a wooden flap for the pan to be taken and emptied into the dunny cart. School kids may be dared to lift the wooden hatch to see if any bottoms were to be seen. I did not see one but there were kids who swore they had.

The photograph ‘the dunny’ features the new water flushing toilets which were built the mid fifties, concrete with a neat curved roof they replaced the spider infested corrugated backyard dunnies and although still outside were much closer to the house, more comfortable and certainly smelled sweeter.. The dunny pictured is in my yard, still works and offers a nice view.

The title of this work is a quote from an Allan Boyd Kalgoorlie Poem

Carter’s photography can be seen at www.rubbishphotographer.blogspot.com (photographs often of rubbish discarded from households and industry found in the bush in the Goldfields) http://sky-porn.blogspot.com.au (a daily photograph of the sky where ever I happen to be) and www.365daysofsky.blogspot.com.