In her Other histories: photography and Australia essay Helen Ennis says that up to the late 1960s a strict hierarchy operated  in art history in Australia. In this  hierarchy the traditional art forms of painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, were regarded as most important, followed by drawing and printmaking. Art photography was mostly confined to a medium specific realm, rarely penetrating the larger art world. It occupied a peripheral position in relation to mainstream art practice in the art institution. 

Moreover, as Geoffrey Batchen, points in his essay  ‘Australian made’,  in  his Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History, Australia's photographic history is:

positioned, when it is thought of it all, as no more than a supplement to The History of Photography as we have come to know it through Helmut Gersheim and Beaumont Newhall  and all their more recent followers. This establishment history, already circumscribed by its monotonous quest for orginality, priority, and the heights of artistic sensibilty, has by and large confined its attention to developments in France and Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth.  As a consequence, no photographs from Australia are featured in its hallowed lineup of masterworks.   

Since the scholarly  history of Australian photographic tradition was only constructed in the 1980s Australian art photographers (photography as 'self-expression')  took their bearings from American art photography in the 1960 and 1970s. 

The regional or Australian history of art photographic that emerged late in the 1980s was premised on the modernist, essentialist approach championed by Szarkowski and others with its conventions and categories  of artistic genius, an oeuvre, innovation, technical excellence, period style and rarity. Modernist formalism ruled.  

 Gael Newton in her  Shades of Light: Photography and Australia 1839-1988 was  an attempt to establish some sort of local artistic tradition for the medium.  The above  categories were simplified into ‘pictorial power’ and ‘artistic merit’  and the  text was premised on the  search for exceptional images produced by a few clebrated photographers. It was organized into photographic art history's  stylistic categories of pictorialism, modernism, documentary and  postmodernism.  

The painter that is the most significant for me is James Cant's representations of the local  bush and scrub around Aldinga and Willunga. Less important is  Lee Friedlander's  interesting photographs of  trees and shrubs in the US are not as crucial, as these do not refer to this particular place. Nor did I know about  the colonial photography produced in  the nineteenth century as the first South Australian survey history of photography, A Century in Focus: South Australian Photography 1840s-1940s by  Julie Robertson and Maria Zaagla,  was not produced until  2007. 

Often it is the detail in the landscape  along the coastline of Victor Harbor that is significant. It is not the big panorama images  or the picturesque, which has been absorbed by the  tourist aesthetic to sell the tourist product for discerrning consumers seeking a quality experience. 

But it is difficult to represent the details in terms of the identity of the landscape: what we have is ordinariness and familiarity or the simple being there  of  particular objects in the material world but which do appear strange. They are near but far.    

We are familiar with the landscape from being in it, but though it is ordinary, nondescript and banal it also eludes us and slips away from us. What eludes us is the non-identical. It doesn't fit our comfortable categories and it slips away from them.

The image  becomes enigmaticas they have the duality of being determinate and indeterminate.They become questions marks because of  their unfamiliarity and we apprehend them  apart from the dominate synthesizing function of our everyday categories. 

The way or the path is into  the "non-identity" between "concept and object, mind and matter, the individual and nature". The landscape, in contrast to philosophy,    pa foregrounds the "primacy of the object" over thought and the "non-identity" between concept and object.  Modern philosophy, in contrast,  has privileged thought and its concepts and,  as a result, philosophy has not done justice to that in the object which does not fit under the rigid classifying gaze of our concepts.  

If the recognition of conceptual limits necessarily leads to conceptual attempts to overcome them, then the  non-identical resists this. The landscape detail in  recognizing the limitations to our conceptual understanding and the irreducibility of objects to our concepts, assists the non-identical against the idenity represented by the static systems of concepts embodied in the  tourist aesthetic.  

In a world of becoming  the non-identical lets us recognize the limitations to conceptual understanding, the dependence of our concepts upon objects, and the irreducibility of objects to our concepts. What is left behind by the concept is not an inaccessible and indefinable X as it represents a turn  to our embodied existence in the world.  

This path here is away from the particular object  to an experience of the object standing in a pattern of relations to other  particulars---a historically sedimented constellation.