The Mallee Routes project has been placed on hold for 8 months or more due to the Covid -19 pandemic, which resulted in South Australia’s state borders being closed to Victoria and NSW in 2021. That month was my last photographic trip for the project. It was a brief one, as it was part of a journey to Melbourne, rather than a trip in its own right. It took place when SA’s state borders were briefly opened between Melbourne’s major lockdowns for the Delta variant of Covid-19.

Mallee Routes was put on the backburner in 2021 due to the closed borders and I then more or less forgot about it whilst I worked on The Bowden Archives for most of the year. It was only when SA’s borders were opened in late 2021 that I started to think about picking up the Mallee Routes project.

I started to reconnect with it by scanning the few medium format film negatives that I’d made whilst on that May 2021 trip. This is one that I made whilst I was passing through Sea Lake.

I reckon the next step is to deepen the tentative reconnection with the Mallee Routes project by making a photo trip in its own right. Maybe one option is to return to exploring the Calder Highway from Ouyen to Charlton with a large format camera in the autumn of 2022?