Across the glass panels at the eastern entrance to Werribee Train Station is the artwork In the smell of a river, in the flickering of light by palawa artist Jody Haines.
Artist statement
Country doesn’t wait for permission; we are on her time. She arrives in the body before the mind catches up — in the smell of a river, in the flickering of light, in the terror that jolts just before awakening.
I travel from tommeginne Country to Bunurong and Wadawurrung Country, carrying dreams and memories, salt and tears. I also carry gum leaves—in my nostrils and on my skin. Not as decoration, but as gifts of passage — a material Myki, exchanged at the threshold to somewhere new.
These leaves were pressed against light-sensitive paper beside Wirribi Yaluk and held up to the sun. Country co-made this work, across Bunurong Country and tommeginne both. The ashes of my father. Three pieces of foliage, each one a sibling. The gums and waters of the Wirribi Yaluk.
What you are looking at is a dystopian melding: my memories layered over a landscape I am learning, my childhood Country pressed against a river I am a guest alongside, waking hours tangled with the kind of dreaming that leaves a residue deep in your skin. This work does not resolve those collisions. It holds them the way glass holds light. It’s transparent, refracted, contorted and never fully one place or another.
It is work about loss, about remorse, about discovering a place and grieving the distance from another. It’s a work about what we carry when we cross into somewhere new, and what we surrender at the border.
You are standing at a threshold.
So is this work.
This work responds to Station Place as a site of threshold and transit — a space where Country and daily movement converge. A liminal space, an in-between space. Between here and there, now and then, imagination and reality, past and future. The liminal is the slivered convergence of time and place.
The work draws across time — family archive, moving-image stills from Against the Wind, and alternative-process images made on Country (lumen and cyanotype). The base layer of each side of the threshold is lifted from Against the Wind, a projection work. Through their inclusion, a base layer of tommeginne Country emerges — the place I know from — carrying a full moon and a shadowy crow. Both sides are foregrounded with a panoramic image of rocks, wrack line shells, and a crab from Werribee South Beach, each individually cut out and layered to connect to the site.
In the foreground and mid-ground are trees photographed beside the Wirribi Yaluk, masked and cut out to layer into an emergent, pressured environment. Gum leaves appear in raw form and as impressions of light through lumen prints, scattered across the image. You will find small images enclosed in shells, ghostly forms, critter kin, and symbols of transitioning and looping time.
Artist bio
Jody Haines is a palawa photo-media artist working at the intersections of memory, body and Country. Her light-based practice spans photography, projection, cyanotype and lumen printing, with public works delivered through the Metro Tunnel Creative Program, ACMI and councils across Victoria. She completed her PhD at RMIT in 2025, receiving the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence, and is a Researcher and Associate Lecturer in the School of Art at RMIT. She also runs Jody Haines Photography in Footscray.
Image caption
Jody Haines with her work In the smell of a river, in the flickering of light, 2026. Photographed by Steven Rhall
Commissioned by Wyndham Arts and Culture as part of the Station Place First Nations Art Commission 2026.