And awe was all we could feel

Helen Grace’s documentary photography constitutes a critical archive. For more than 40 years, Grace has been recording the social and political fabric of her surrounds. The history her photographs trace is the history of feminism and queer politics in Australia. This series is from the body of work Grace produced during the early days of Amazon Acres, a remote female-only commune in northern NSW. Shot during different visits in 1978, 1979 and 1980, the photographs memorialise an important, and often under-recognised, cultural moment. Amazon Acres, also known as The Mountain, was established in 1974 by Kerryn Higgs. It was an experiment in alternative social structure, its spirit encapsulated by the slogan ‘No men, no meat, no machines’. Utopic in its ideal, it was grounded in anti-capitalist sentiment and modelled as a sanctuary for women.

Grace’s photographs are resonant political documents that carry the commune’s ideological incentive but also confer the intimate sense of community it fostered. This sequence, its title taken from an Emily Dickinson poem, has been concieved as a storyboard. It is cinematic in its intent; it opens with an establishing shot and alternates throughout between tight close-ups and landscape scenes. The commune’s hand-made structures are shown in their raw state, and its inhabitants go about their day as if unaware of the camera’s presence. We catch tender moments, the quiet rhythms of everyday life set against the monumental task of building a community from scratch. There is little sense of voyeurism here. Grace is not an outsider, she is herself part of the community. The photographs, then, appear to us – 40 years after they were taken – as an honest and poignant record.