Julien Playoust

Since 1977, my family has owned Millambri, a 4175 acre mixed-farming property in the Central West Slopes and Plains of New South Wales, approximately sixty kilometres south-west of Orange, on which we run more than 8,000 merino sheep. On Wiradjuri country, it borders twelve kilometres of Belubula River frontage. The property has been a place of great labour and love for my family for fifty years, and a source of great personal and artistic inspiration for me. Its contours are etched into my memory. The time spent there, particularly with my father, rests deep in my soul.

From 1977 we’ve cared for the land and built houses, a wool shed, machinery sheds, roads, water infrastructure and a business. We worked as a family with managers, station-hands, contractors and shearers. Mum backed dad up every step of the way. She kept us warm and well fed. The family lived in the city and we worked in the bush in our school holidays. ‘Pitt Street Farmers’ the locals called us. Still do, fifty years on. Dad loved the bush, loved Millambri, worked really hard at it, and hated being called that. Dad’s father Fernand was a wool buyer, as was his grandfather Joseph, who came to Australia from France with his brother George in 1889–91.

In 1977, I started walking around Millambri on my own. I was ten years old, with a single shot Lithgow .22 looking for rabbits. I have lived and worked in this landscape for half a century now. I have walked every part of the property. I have trod quietly and looked carefully. I have felt the sting of nettles and barbed wire, and the tiredness of an honest day’s labour. I have taken stock and smelled the diesel, blood and dust of success and failure. I have sat with the unpredictability of the season and the joy of rain, watching from the Top of the World as storms ghost through the district and miss us. I have enjoyed moments of bare courage and simplicity, like an ironbark tree still standing after being hit by lightning, and the sentience of the Hills Hoist in our back yard. These visceral punches and nods awaken me– slowly like a calloused hand or suddenly like the crack of a shot.

In 2011, I started drawing the Millambri landscape through the eyes of my personal and family connection to it: its landscape and labour being part of my consciousness. In June 2019, I commenced a sketchbook of drawings that became known as my ‘Landscape Codex’ – a typology of landscape, existence, memory and impermanence. I draw every time I go there now. My drawings are a reflection on person and place, investigations over time. A remembrance of trees and toil and the things we build, and the things we leave behind. A dialogue of observation and reflection on how we exist in the landscape, how we yield to it and how it yields to us: How we bend the knee, and how much we extract. Drawings of places that resonate: boundaries juxtaposed by fences, old gates, old yards and old memories.

Julien Playoust, 2024

Julien Playoust

Investigating Landscape