In Princeton exhibition, Australian photographers show fear for — and pride in — their homeland

“Burning Ayer” by Rosemary Laing is part of the “Under a Southern Star: Identity and Environment in Australian Photography” exhibition at Art on Hulfish in Princeton.

Australia is trying to kill you. So say the wags (many of them Australian) who have noted the inhospitable nature of the terrain, the extreme weather, the fearsome fauna. This prejudice isn’t unsupported by science: Human beings didn’t arrive Down Under until well after we had established ourselves elsewhere. The biome hasn’t had as much time to adjust to our presence as it has in other precincts of the globe. The pacifying symbiosis that occurs after millennia of mutual adaptation had a huge head start elsewhere. If Eurasia and Africa are comfortable, well-worn shoes for humans to slip into, Australia will still give us blisters.

But it is in the nature of human beings, invasive as we are, to impose ourselves aggressively even where we don’t exactly fit. In recent decades, we have asked a lot of Australia, taxed its environment terribly, and set ourselves up for disaster. A place of astonishing beauty has also become a land of drought and wildfire. It might be better to ask whether we are the ones who are trying to kill Australia.

Harold Cazneaux’s “Spirit of Endurance” (1937) is part of the “Under a Southern Star” exhibition.

All of this mortal combat is inscribed in “Under a Southern Star: Identity and Environment in Australian Photography” at Art on Hulfish in Princeton. As befits a continent known for open skies and wide vistas, many of the prints in the show are big as a throw rug, flashy as a solar flare, grabby, and demanding of your attention. Some of this show is ridiculously on the nose. Yet the same might be said of anthropogenic climate change, and people keep missing that, so it is understandable that these artists are laying on the horn. When “Southern Star” works — and it often does — it is ferocious, uncompromising, and touchingly patriotic. When it connects, it does so with a flourish. Co-curators Deborah Klochko, Graham Howe and Ashley Lumb bring us pictures of a strange and unfamiliar place with problems that are disturbingly similar to ours in the States: environmental degradation and habitat destruction, racism, injustice and inequality, and a tendency to get lost in a dream.

Rosemary Laing, for instance, takes the most famous symbol of the physical landscape Down Under and reimagines it as a roaring blaze. Even if this wasn’t a show dedicated to Australia, “Burning Ayer” would probably remind you of Uluru, the great Outback rock formation sacred to indigenous people and reproduced in artifacts of Australiana worldwide. The deep red of the flames, the flat top of the bonfire, the desert extending, solemnly, in all directions: It’s all reminiscent of a landmark revered for its antediluvian austerity. Her meaning is plain. Laing is showing us a continent with its heart on fire.

To make sure you don’t miss the point, Lang has made it big. Her “Burning Ayer” is as tall, wide and bright as a battle standard, and it blazes from the wall with urgency uncommon in photography exhibitions.

This photo by Anne Zahalka is part of the “Under a Southern Star” exhibition.

Its accusatory radiance and expressions of peril are echoed elsewhere in the show. Anne Zahalka shakes up the back gallery at Art on Hulfish with a pair of scorchingly dramatic photo prints that share Laing’s taste for scale — and high temperatures. In one, a quartet of beleaguered koalas take refuge in a tree as flames lick roots and dry earth around them. In another, the fire consumes the bush around an indigenous man with a heavy mustache and a Carlos Santana T-shirt. As the air turns opaque with white smoke, he clings to his guitar and his didgeridoo like a seafarer rowing through a storm.

Subtler pieces send similar signals. Tracey Moffatt contributes a gorgeous, artfully blurred shot of a building of indeterminate purpose on the Brisbane shore. The sky is a baked-cookie yellow dotted with black clouds, and the reeds around the structure look like they haven’t seen a drink in weeks. This is a seaside image, but the water present is inadequate to the needs of a landscape that looks very much like kindling. There is no need to explain why Moffatt’s hand is shaking. Yet she has named her piece “The Bunker” — and bunkers are redoubts against the incursions of hostile forces. Bunkers are where survivors go to ride out misfortune, and that streak of defiance is visible throughout “Under a Southern Star.” It’s there on the craggy face of Zahalka’s indigenous musician, and it’s there in Uluru itself, exposed to the elements but stunting, brilliantly, in the middle of a wasteland. There is fear and regret all over this show, but there is also an unmistakable undercurrent of pride. If the land is harsh, Australians, linked to the land as they are, must be tough, too.

This is, at times, overdone. Ricky Maynard’s black and white headshots of wronged Aborigines are striking, and they communicate the dignity and determination of people who have managed to rise above discrimination. Yet they also look like the sort of glossy shots of wounded people that accompany exposés in glossy news magazines. The imagination that characterizes much of this show isn’t present here. Instead, we get high-contrast black and white, piercing eyes, all the hallmarks of the heartstring-tugging photograph meant to provide supporting evidence for a journalistic claim. They’re effective and emotional, but in no way experimental. Worse than that is a full wall of pictures of indigenous Australians paired with shakily scribbled handwritten notes. The attempt to give voice to the voiceless is commendable in intention. In practice, it feels awfully condescending.

This work by Judith Nangala Crispin is on display at Art on Hulfish in Princeton.

“Under a Southern Star” works better when its indigenous artists are creators and innovators rather than subjects. Judith Nangala Crispin, for instance, gets unusual results from an uncommon photographic practice that verges on the spiritual. She presses remains of road-killed animals on light-sensitive paper. At times, she even uses their blood as pigment. (She also stains her substrate with that most Australian of materials — Vegemite.) What sounds as if it might be gruesome is, under her guidance, something of a revelation, and a curious kind of last rite for these creatures. Her combinations of ash, sand, ink, household chemicals and spectral forms created by the interaction between light, time and glass plates are vibrant in color and gentle in texture, and seem to capture the transmigration of animal spirits that, in turn, double as souls of human Australians. They don’t look like photos or paintings; they don’t even look like a hybrid between the two. They are that rare thing that all artists shoot for: something else. As an exquisitely depicted kookaburra rests in a burrow, emanations of its essence rise from the ground to mingle with the sky. A pair of magpies, so close they practically share a breast, appear to be evaporating into the stars. The translucency makes the subjects of these experimental photos ghostly — they’re shedding their earthly forms and returning to a universe alive with the breaths of millions of living beings.

Not for Crispin is the revenge fantasy of Michael Cook’s “Telephone,” an elaborately staged photographic allusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” in which native avians create havoc on an uptight British street. Her beasts are distinctively Australian, too, but they are not going to waste time worrying about the rest of the world. They’ve got appointments to keep with the cosmos.

The Aussie sky is not for animals only. In Bill Henson’s “Untitled,” a human body floats above a landscape of amber dots. The scene is otherwise dark, and the subject is weightless and dressed for bed. Is she dreaming, or has something else loosened her moorings on Earth and taken her up into the night? She may be heeding the same call as the kookaburra.

Tracey Moffatt’s “Something More No. 1.”

The reverie continues in daylight in Moffatt’s hallucination “Something More No. 1.” The giant photographic print resembles a blown-up still from a wonderfully terrible B-movie: a hopeful but wary protagonist in a red floral dress, a cigarette-smoking strumpet and a whiskey-swilling bruiser in a lean-to wallpapered with newsprint, and a ring of unreal mountains in the distance. It looks like an Aussie take on Tennessee Williams at his most over-the-top. But even in this cinematic daydream, politics creeps into the picture. A Chinese laborer in a conical hat peers out from behind the house. Two children are overtaken by the haze. The dirt is so sun-blasted that it looks volcanic.

This is melodrama, but it is rooted in sincere emotions. The sardonic edge common to works in “Southern Star” barely conceals rage and an appetite for vengeance: against colonial powers, against settlers, against institutional polluters, against those who have exploited the natural environment. In many of the pieces, the land itself seems driven to take revenge against humanity.

Are the artists cheering it on as it lashes back against its tormentors (us)? They certainly don’t seem to mind depicting their nation as a lethal place. Australians, “Southern Star” argues, are survivors: They’ve been given a bad turn, they’ve been scorched and drenched, and they’ve become as tough as air-dried beef jerky. Hardy spirits they are, caught somewhere between the searing ground and the distant sky. They’re travelers, they’re fighters, they’re endurers of injustice. But they’re never, ever victims.

The Princeton University Art Museum will present “Under a Southern Star: Identity and Environment in Australian Photography” at Art on Hulfish through Jan. 5. Visit artmuseum.princeton.edu.

A virtual conversation with curator Graham Howe and three of the artists in this show, including Judith Nangala Crispin, will take place Sept. 26 at 4:30 p.m. Follow the Zoom link on the website.