Contributions to ‘Parched’ exhibition at La Trobe Art Institute for Parched Research Project: Cultures of Drought in Regional Victoria.

‘Pipe Dream’, Yaseera Moosa and Bridget Chappell, 2024.

‘Pipe Dream’ is a collaboration between Parched artist in residence Yaseera Moosa and Bridget Chappell, artist and former Mildura resident. The video illustrates Bridget’s essay ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, named after John Steinbeck’s novel. The book makes for pertinent reading in Palestine and Mildura alike. The book is set in another dust-cum-fruit bowl of European expansion, California. Here, ‘Okies’ (subsistence farmers in Oklahoma) are duped mid-Great Depression/Drought by Big Ag to sell up and move west. There, the easy living of river-irrigated grape and citrus farming awaits. What really met them after the arduous journey was corrupt corporate farms oversupplied with desperate labour, amputation from the means of production, shitty work camps, and union busting.

By the time the Murray arrives in Latji Latji country, the river appears as a miracle. Rolling slowly past banks of red dunes, white clay, red gum and black box trees, it’s the only surface water for hundreds of kilometres. Sprawling middens that line the banks evidence the rich, dense communities it has supported since time immemorial. They are intersected by the labyrinthine system of locks, weirs, pipes and channels that tap the river, preoccupied with “making the desert bloom”. Everywhere you look there’s a sprinkler going. It’s stressful. You can attend an Almond Blossom Festival in the Mallee, Israel, and California. 

‘Follow The Drip Tape’, Bridget Chappell, 2024.

This large-scale stained glass sculpture traces the fate of a tapped river system - that of the Murray Darling Basin’s - from its alpine headwaters to effective irrigation channel.