Climate Crisis Photography: Australian Women Capture The Climate Crisis 2023

When artist and activist Hilary Wardhaugh asked female photographers across Australia to capture the climate crisis, they answered her call.

Together, they created a powerful visual petition to drive our governments to action.

“I gathered rubbish and invasive weeds from Merri Creek in Melbourne and made dresses from these materials. Then I photographed the dresses being worn in the same area of the creek where the materials were found. This creek is one of the few slivers of remnant bushland in the inner city of Melbourne, and it has borne the title of the city’s most polluted waterway for decades now. This project is an attempt to intervene in a local site of coloniser-induced ecological destruction. It’s also a way to wrestle with my own eco-anxiety around the catastrophes we are leaving for my kids’ generation.”

— Daisy Noyes

“This image was taken in 2019 at the first School Strike for Climate march in Melbourne, in which more than 100,000 people participated – many of them children. This image speaks to the drastic inaction of our elected representatives and the equally urgent action of our next generation. Then-PM Scott Morrison was right when he said that students should be at school. They shouldn’t have to march for their future. The fact they felt they had to is indicative of the everyday social impact of the climate crisis.”

— Emma Yench

“Lismore resident Bonnie Aungle stands in front of the contents of her home in Northern NSW after the record-breaking flood destroyed it in February 2022. The house, which was built in the 1800s, shifted sideways in the flood. Bonnie shared the home with her partner and son. They were priced out of the nearby town Mullumbimby and didn’t want to live in a flood zone, but it was all they – along with many other residents in Lismore – could afford. Hundreds of homes in the flood-ravaged town have been condemned, leaving thousands of people displaced.”

— Elise Derwin

“Potato Point Beach, NSW, December 2019, Fires raged all around us, birds dropped out of the sky with the heat and smoke. The millions of ladybirds were all dead, from heat and smoke. It was like my childhood was ripped away from me, seeing them in amongst the ash and devastation all along the 1km length beach. This image was my inspiration for the whole project.”

— Hilary Wardhaugh

“This shot was taken during the 2019/2020 bushfires when the air was filled with orange smoke and our children had to breathe it in day after day.”

— Karen Webb

“Boys from Patterson River on Bunurong Country look at rubbish in the river after a downpour around the Patterson Lakes Marina, Carrum, in 2018. Their posture seems resigned to the overwhelming magnitude of the climate crisis we face.”

— Penny Stephens

Visual Climate protest — *(Credit: Photography: Heide Smith)*

“I took this image of Eusebia Puantulura on Bathurst Island [part of the Tiwi Islands] in 1989. The Tiwi Islands are … vulnerable to the effects of global warming because they are lying very low and are open to the environment.”

— Heide Smith

“I have been documenting degraded landscapes and rivers in drought for many years, including Lake Eyre in South Australia [pictured above]. The level of mismanagement of water and river systems has become blatantly clear. If I could make one plea to our government it would be to urgently institute a holistic plan for the health of our rivers and water systems, including the government buyback of water rights from private investors. Water should never be privatised.”

— Belinda Allen