I had planned  to go on a roadtrip to the Mallee this week on my own, but an infected tooth has seen that trip cancelled. Instead I am reading Don Watson’s   book The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia (2016). From what I can gather the book is based Watson  buying  a 4WD in 2009 and setting off across the eastern part of the country on a road trip. Along the way he… Read More

Photographing the rural landscapes of  the Mallee  country  needs to be distinguished from the idyllic  pastoral tradition in Australian visual culture  that in the Heidelberg tradition   emphasised the tamed farmland with its  abundance of natural resources.  The  artists represent this  in the almost mandatory blue and gold palette. This  form of pastoralism  refers to representations of a rural landscape during the European colonial settlement of the land, with its sheep grazing and cropping,… Read More

In a previous post I mentioned how  I had reconnected to  an old  photo trip  that I made in the 1980s in the VW Kombi to  Mantung and Galga in the South Australian Mallee. However,  I didn’t  mention that I had some re-photography possibilities  in mind.  On the earlier  trip  I  made several black and white photos with a large format camera ( these are in my film gallery on the Mallee Routes website), and… Read More

This part of the South Australia Mallee is an empty landscape. It has been de-populated. An example of the process of depopulation in this landscape the East Murray Area School, which used to have around 270 pupils in the 1960s and it now has 19 pupils.

I made a day  trip into the South Australian mallee along the Karoonda Highway on Tuesday. Elders Weather website said that  there would be rain,  cloud and sunshine on that day–conditions that are  more congenial for my style of photography than the blues skies and sunshine that was forecast  for the next 5 days including Easter.   The dryland region along the  Karoonda Highway  was new territory for me,  as I’d only… Read More