Australian backyard

The Australian backyard is an ordinary place, yet one filled with cultural meaning. Dried grass, a clothesline, a garden shed, a broken fence separating one domestic world from another. These familiar spaces tell me something about how Australians live, what they value and how they imagine home.

I grew up on a dairy farm in rural Poland, where my relationship with land and domestic space was shaped by a very different landscape. After migrating to Australia, I became fascinated by the contrast between the rural landscape of my childhood and the suburban backyard, with its particular place in the Australian imagination

There is something theatrical about these spaces, where everyday objects invite different interpretations. I often come across discarded belongings, sometimes a photograph in a shattered glass frame. These small traces of domestic life make me wonder what stories they hold. What happens to the memories attached to these places when the physical landscape changes?

Having lived between two cultures, I often find myself looking at ordinary Australian landscapes through the eyes of both an insider and an outsider. For me, it is this distance that makes the familiar seem so extraordinary.