Landscape photographers, including you, are losing rights

It is not just some of our state-based national park bureaucracies which have policies on filming and photography that run counter to Australia’s commitment to human rights vis-a-vis the right to freedom of expression. Waverley Council, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, requires photographers to obtain a permit for any filming and photography which is carried out within the boundaries of that municipality. And whether a photographer has any intention of carrying out a "commercial activity" would seem to be totally irrelevant as far as Waverley Council is concerned.

The most absurd thing about this policy is that it is probably being breached hundreds of times every day by people who take “happy snaps” of themselves, their friends or their family at play in places like Bondi Beach, Bronte Park or along the dramatic coastal walk that links Bondi to Bronte. And just how it can be enforced in an age in which nearly every mobile phone has an inbuilt camera simply defies belief.

But the prize for Australia’s most insidious controls on photography must go to Parks Australia, the federal body that manages our best known natural icon, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Under regulations that have been in force since mid-2000, the Director of National Parks has the power to ban all filming, photography and even sound recording in all Commonwealth Reserves - these include Kakadu National Park and Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park.

Parks Australia justifies these regulations on the basis of “respect for Anangu”, who are the traditional owners of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. According to Parks Australia, Anangu wanted commercial “image capture” and use to be controlled and actively managed because they were concerned that widespread dissemination of images through commercial use may have lead to images of sacred sites being seen by people who in accordance with Anangu custom should not view them, and that images of their country could also be used in ways that are culturally insensitive.

Certainly one can sympathise with the Anangu desire not to have pictures of Uluru used as backdrops for alcohol or fast food advertisements, but how realistic is it to put a prohibition on media use of images of the Valley of the Winds walk at Kata Tjuta when this area is tramped by hundreds of people on most days, virtually all of whom are carrying cameras?

Parks Australia faces a hefty problem here because, despite their regulations, widespread dissemination of images has been occurring on the internet from almost as soon as the day the Governor-General’s signature was dry on this piece of legislation. As of late March 2010, more than 90,000 images of Uluru can be viewed on the Flickr website. And many of these would breach guidelines that have been put in place by the park managers at Uluru as to what can and can’t be filmed, photographed or even painted.

The same happens on other websites across the internet. At the RedBubble website there are 639 images of Uluru that are available for sale and the vast majority of these would not have the necessary permit for them to be sold. Quite bizarrely one notable photographer even displays a close-up image of the domes of Kata Tjuta despite it having been specifically rejected by the park authorities for potential sale. While he isn’t commercialising this particular image, just by having it online it is reaching a widespread audience.

A Parks Australia document, Film and Photography: A Matter of Respect for the Park and its People, sets out the rationale for the severe restrictions on commercial photography at Uluru and Kata Tjuta. It says that in Anangu Law certain sites, ritual objects, designs and ceremonies are restricted to people who can “properly” view them. Because of this, artistic and photographic images of these secret, sacred areas are regarded by Anangu as wrong and immoral, no matter how beautiful that part of the landscape is.

However, this doesn’t explain why virtually all of the north-east face of Uluru is off-limits to commercial photography when Anangu who travel in and out of the Mutitjulu community, where many of them live, can see this area on a daily basis. Nor does it explain why it was appropriate for an Anangu artist to paint the north-east face of Uluru, and include the detail of two very sacred sites, while commercial artists and photographers are forbidden from including these same areas in their work.

The Uluru rules have also come under attack from civil libertarians. In 2002 the then-President of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties told The Sydney Morning Herald that the EPBC Regulations (which govern “image capture” at Uluru) were a “disgrace”, adding that the photography controls limit the media's freedom of speech. And in 2003 the Federal Environment Minister backed down from the legal pursuit of the authors of the children’s book, Bromley Climbs Uluru, because this would not have been “appropriate given the importance of principles of freedom of expression in our society”.

The Uluru rules also do not explain previous commentary about Anangu society by two authors who worked closely with the Mutitjulu community in the early 1990s. In his 1994 book, Uluru: Looking After Uluru-Kata Tjuta - The Anangu Way, the highly respected author and photographer Stanley Breeden noted that: “Anangu confided in Mountford (Charles P. Mountford - an anthropologist who first visited Uluru in 1935) and allowed him free rein with his camera. The result of the photography alone is a perceptive and wide-ranging view into traditional Anangu life”.

And in his 1994 book, The Rock: Travelling to Uluru, the prize-winning author and historian Barry Hill noted that the film and photography guidelines were one of the things that Anangu had to learn about from the “white fella” in the years after the Handback of 1985.