This photo of an agricultural landscape between the towns of St Arnaud and Rupanyup in the eastern part of Victorian Wimmera was made in May 2018 prior to the winter rains. I was on my way to Adelaide after spending time photographing in Melbourne, including some explorations of drosscapes in Melbourne’s west.

The conceptual background to the photo is the unknown futures of the Mallee in the Anthropocene: a future shaped by the slowly increasing climate warming, less rain in the Wimmera, hotter temperatures, and presumably, an ever greater reliance on irrigated water from Lake Belfield in the Grampians.