Bec Bigg-Wither

Working Thesis Title: Air-to-Ground: Earthing the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo moon landing program

Supervisors: Dr Baden Pailthorpe, Dr Chaitanya Sambrani, Professor Joan Leach

This thesis, which coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo moon landing program, uses photomontage anchored by original NASA imagery to investigate how the program and the psyche that conceived it might best be remembered at half a century’s remove. As an epic work of Cold War public diplomacy, the Apollo program sought to influence the “minds of men everywhere” through appeals to logos, political internationalism and expert knowledge. Framed by recent counter-cultural shifts, informed by interviews with “trackers” who worked on Apollo locally, and drawing on a close mining of Apollo’s visual artefacts, the creative works produced for this thesis invert these modes of persuasion. The works visualise Apollo’s affective and supra-rational moments while earthing the program in the site of the former Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station near Canberra which helped to track the Apollo missions. In doing so, they invite more heart-felt reflections on Apollo’s legacy while capturing the local resonances of a significant moment of public remembrance.