REFUGE BELT

FELIX CEHAK

14 - 24 July 2022 @ CCAS MANUKA

The late David Liem is credited with discovering the Gastric-Brooding Frog (Rheobatrachus silus) in the mountains north of Brisbane in 1973. Its survival until that point, alongside other ancient rainforest organisms, was possible due to what Liem termed the ‘refuge belt’ provided by these ecosystems. Initially of interest because of its primitive features, and apparently staying undetected so close to Queensland’s most populous area, the frog was later discovered to swallow its own young, only to regurgitate the fully developed froglets months later. It was known for roughly a decade before its sudden extinction, later understood as a casualty of a fungal pathogen. In this time, it drew intense scientific interest.

Refuge Belt encompasses both photography of the frog’s former habitat with quasi-dioramas, restaging the few photographs of the amphibian in life. These scale models have taken the input of ecologists and naturalists who had field experience of the species when it was common in these streams in the 1970s. The medium of chemical photography, intrinsically related to the memory, has been used to relay the mnemonic; how do we consider something that has vanished, when no truly new memories have calcified in four decades?