Remains to be Seen: Leanganook After the Fires was made following the January 2026 bushfires at Harcourt and Leanganook (Mount Alexander), near my home in Central Victoria. I returned repeatedly in the weeks and months after the fire, photographing a landscape undergoing rapid change.
I know this place well, but after the fires, I found myself looking at it differently. Familiar tracks and stands of trees had changed, granite formations were newly exposed. The scale of the damage was confronting. At the same time, there were already signs of recovery and regrowth. Returning with my camera became a way of paying close attention to a landscape that continued to change.
The work combines photographs made during these visits with layered archival imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. I wanted to move the landscape away from a straightforward record of bushfire damage and make it feel slightly unfamiliar. Bringing together something close and familiar with something vastly distant disrupts the sense of scale and asks the viewer to look again.
I am drawn to landscapes that sit on a threshold between beauty and unease. After the fire, I was struck by moments of extraordinary beauty while looking at the evidence of destruction, and uncomfortable with how easily I could be drawn to it. Vegetation is already returning and some traces of the fire are becoming less visible.
I am interested in what remains, what disappears, and how much of a place's history we can understand simply by looking at it. Remains to be Seen – Leanganook After the Fires asks what becomes visible when we look again, and how this might change our relationship to landscape.
Marylou Verberne is a photographic artist based in the Central Victorian Goldfields on Dja Dja Wurrung Country. Her practice spans photography, mixed media and installation, and is concerned with landscape, memory and the ways past events remain present in place. She is currently completing a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Her recent work has focused on landscapes altered by mining, fire and environmental change, using photography alongside archival research and material experimentation. In 2026, her work was shortlisted for the Australian Photography Awards, and she will present a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in November.
