AUSTRALIA’S  sense of identity came from the art of the likes of Frederick McCubbin and Arthur Streeton, drawing on heroic struggles on the land, but that’s changing as country folk head to a softer life in the cities, sculptor Steward Scambler says.

As the country dries, times get tougher and family farms are sold and corporations move in, eroding an essential essence of Australian-ness, he says.

“It’s become more corporation on the land, than man on the land. [And] the corporate view of Australia is the land is there to make money.”

• Stuart Scambler’s latest works (above) look at a drying country. Photo by Jarrad Seng.

The concentration of populations to a narrow band around the coast, and the environmental impact of a drying interior are behind his latest exhibition Parched: Australia is a Dry land, at the Fremantle Arts Centre.

“The drying of the land is going to change what it means to be Australian,” Scambler says

He predicts Aussie ideals of stoicism and ingenuity are at risk, as contact with country is reduced to fly-in-fly-out workers swapping a comfortable city life, for largely sheltered stints in mining camps, where dongas, offices and trucks are air-conditioned.

“I think people will become less resilient, less able to cope with challenges,” Scambler says.

The current treatment of asylum seekers demonstrates an already altered attitude to “strangers” in our midst: “There was a time we were generous in accepting people arriving,” he says, perhaps forgetting the White Australia Policy that underpinned our national character for much of the 20th century.

His sculptures, some up to 12-metres long, are created at his Palmyra home, but fired in a massive kiln on his York property, where he grows his own trees to fire the kiln.

“We have never had to cut down a live tree, they have either blown over or dropped branches.”

A look around York is enough to show the drying of Australia is set to have catastrophic impacts and dying trees can be seen everywhere, Scambler says, hoping his exhibition will highlight the problem.

Scambler (left) gets ready for a firing in York.

Some 40 years ago he honed his sculpting craft at the-then Fremantle Technical College, “[where] my teacher threatened to fail me if I didn’t decorate my work”.

He began air-brushing landscapes onto pieces, “but that couldn’t express the whole landscape”.

Wood-firing achieved the desired effect and Scambler says while Jackson Pollock famously threw paint at canvasses, “Im throwing fire and ash”.

Parched is on at FAC until September 20.