John Bennett and John Laidler: Yurruun.ga wetlands – an album. 17 May to 22 June 2025. Yarrila Arts and Museum (YAM), 27 Gordon Street, Coffs Harbour NSW 2450. 

Multi Award winning poet and photographer, John Bennett has teamed up with well-known musician and sound engineer John Laidler, of Okapi Guitars (longstanding Sydney based African Pop Band) to produce a story of hope and beauty, celebrating endangered wetlands reclaimed after years of industrial pollution. John, who also works as a citizen scientist on the site, explains this collaborative project:

Wetlands are vital habitats, but vanishing faster than rainforests. This artwork explores a newly reclaimed wetland, Yuurrun.ga in Gumbaynggirr Country, NSW. The area housed a mineral processing plant and that left the site dead, poisoned with arsenic, lead, mercury and cyanide.

Sixty videos probe the wetland from a range of perspectives from natural aesthetics to fine art. The videos are ‘photographs’ that extend for 60 seconds. They are not edits excised from longer takes. In times of environmental chaos what can artists do? I undertake regular bird surveys for an ecological restoration journey. Citizen science projects are becoming increasingly important for people and science

John Bennett is a poet/ writer/ visual artist who lives in Gumbaynggirr Country. He has published five books, won significant poetry prizes. He worked for NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service then undertook a PhD exploring poetics. Since moving to regional NSW, he is heavily involved in the cultural life of the mid-north-coast. He reads poems live on ABC Regional radio once a week. He was Artistic Director of the Bellingen Readers and Writers Festival for five years and taught ecopoetry at Camp Creative, Bellingen. He has worked with Aboriginal storytellers for the Saltwater Freshwater Arts Alliance.

He and John Laidler, a well-known musician from Sydney, have worked together for over fifteen years on a wide variety of projects: music documentaries, conceptual works and poetry journals. ‘VIRUS 2020’, a digital album from 2020 is on Bandcamp. A piece on the project appeared in Art Almanac, December 2020.

John Laidler was seized by sound many years ago, and has only recently given up trying to escape its clutches. He mostly plays guitar, but he is passing familiar with other stringed instruments, such as the bass, dulcimer, and pedal steel, as well as the digital audio workhorse. 

Currently he plays pedal steel with local country and rock bands, and records original songs as a member of the Gumbramorra Swamp Walkers, and the Okapi Guitars, in his studio under the flightpath in Sydney. http://cutsnakestudio.com

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John Bennett – five Haiku 

Parched guuru wetland
arsenic, cyanide, lead
purged – swans splash sunshine

They made their money
left cracked mud stuffed with poison
then they walked away

Python in a tree
slowly unravels the coils
sunlight abseils down

The earth is in bloom
whispers from moist wooden lips
evanesce now

A fish bounces light
trees capsized in the water
stitch back together

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Bronwyn Rodden is an award-winning artist and writer who grew up in Sydney but now lives on the Mid North Coast of NSW. Her most recent publication is Stranded a selection of her poetry published by Flying Island Press (2024).

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