We are excited to present 'Wongari (dingo)', a never before released, one-off work by Michael Cook. The work was photographed in 2012 but never published.
In this evocative image, Cook traces his own memory of dingoes as a child on K’gari (Fraser Island). He spent long periods there with his mother who volunteered, in the 1970s and 1980s, with the Fraser Island Defence Organisation (Fido) on the cessation of sand mining and logging. In Wongari the dingo is muscular, like the animals of the past, prior to the removal of feral brumbies from the island, which had been adopted by dingoes as a food source. Behind the female figure and her companion dingo, the detail of the sea is unreadable, the horizon mysterious, an unknown – like the future which arrived unheralded from across the globe. (Michael Cook)