The GreenWay Art Prize presents We Walked to Cooks River 1835 triptych, a three-panel work that holds two timelines at once: 1835 and now. The triptych draws on the landscape and memory of the Cooks River corridor in Sydney, asking what it means to walk a path that colonists once recorded, across Country that Cadigal and Wangal peoples had walked for thousands of years before them. It's a question that doesn't resolve neatly. That's the point.
The Cooks River as a site of memory
The Cooks River runs through south-western Sydney, connecting the inner suburbs to Botany Bay. In 1835 the river was already a contested space: wetlands being drained, timber being cleared, the waterway beginning its long transformation into an engineered channel. Walking it today, you can still find remnant paperbark stands and mangrove fringing, small pockets that survived the century of concrete that followed. This triptych treats those remnants as evidence, not decoration.
Memory in landscape art isn't nostalgia. It's forensic. The work asks the viewer to hold both the 1835 record and the 2026 view simultaneously, letting the distance between them do the work. The river itself becomes the measure of what was lost and what remains.
That layered approach connects directly to other works in the GreenWay Art Prize collection. Banksia integrifolia at Goolay-yari Cook's River also roots an ecological story in this exact waterway, tracing the coast banksia's persistence through urban pressure. Together, the two works form an informal dialogue about the same river at very different scales.
Reading the three panels
A triptych divides and reunites. In this work, that structure carries real meaning: past, present, and the threshold between them each claim a panel. The first anchors to the historical record, drawing on the language and cartography of 1835 colonial documentation. The second opens into the present landscape, the same corridor rendered in the artist's own visual terms. The third panel is the one that sits least comfortably, because it refuses to offer synthesis. It holds the tension rather than resolving it.
This refusal to conclude is characteristic of ecological art at its sharpest. Works that offer easy reconciliation between historical damage and present recovery tend to comfort rather than clarify. We Walked to Cooks River 1835 triptych doesn't let the viewer off that easily.
Walking as an ecological and artistic act
The title names the action: walking. Not surveying, not documenting, not mapping. Walking implies a pace and a body. It implies that the person making the record was also changed by the path. This matters for how the work sits alongside other pieces in the GreenWay Art Prize that engage with movement through landscape.
Bay Run Sojourn 01 turns a familiar Sydney walking circuit into a meditation on water and ecological attention. Both works understand that walking is already an interpretive act: you choose what to look at, what to step around, what to name. In 1835 those choices had consequences for the land. They still do.
The NSW Environment and Heritage office recognises the Cooks River corridor as a site of ecological significance, particularly for migratory shorebirds and remnant riparian vegetation. That official designation sits alongside the cultural one. The triptych acknowledges both without privileging either.
Landscape, memory, and ecological urgency
There's a risk with historical ecological art: that the past becomes a baseline for despair, a way of saying things were better then and nothing can return. We Walked to Cooks River 1835 triptych sidesteps that trap by keeping the present active in each panel. The 1835 data isn't presented as a lost paradise. It's presented as information, useful for understanding how systems work and how quickly they can shift.
The GreenWay Art Prize consistently supports work that treats ecology as dynamic rather than fixed. Loss is real, but so is recovery. The Cooks River has seen both, and this triptych records neither with sentimentality.
What the work finally offers is attention. Sustained, structured, three-part attention to a stretch of river that most Sydneysiders cross by car without looking down. Slowing that crossing into a triptych is its own form of advocacy.