2 paragraphs + 4 images
An occasional blog providing brief context for a particular sequence of images...
1) Skin and Bone: Shooting Uluru
2) Last Light: Cheela by Chopper
3) Diabolical Geology: Dimalurru (Tunnel Creek)
4) Down the Duncan
1) Skin and Bone: Shooting Uluru
Perspectives on Uluru are so tightly proscribed the chances of capturing something unique rely solely on atmospheric conditions beyond your control, like a rare thunderstorm sweeping through. It also depends heavily on unreliable light; I joined the tourist hordes for two sunsets and a sunrise under promising skies, all of which fizzled out to flat greys. This creates the challenge of finding a more personal take on what is, after all, a global photographic cliché.
Nobody can accuse me of being a spiritual person but it’s clear even to me the Rock has a Presence that pings some primal impulse in the most primitive corners of our psyche. In an age when the word awesome has lost its meaning, the first glimpses of Uluru inspire genuine awe; an irrational, emotional response at the same time individual and universal. The closer you get the more it seems to breathe, to slumber like a living thing in the landscape, until you can reach out and touch its skin, pitted, pocked and patterned with the passage of eons. Here and there the softer surfaces have eroded to reveal skeletal shapes that reminded me vaguely of the bleached carcasses which litter the arid outback; desiccated leather, gaping nasal cavities, the internal honeycomb of splintered bone.
Here are four images exploring these intimate details of Uluru’s ancient anatomy.
2) Last Light: Cheela by Chopper
We leave the ground in the Robinson R22 about 1630, climb steadily to 2000ft and track north-west over the vast Cheela Plains cattle station. This is my maiden helicopter flight and it's already shaping up as something special. Pilot Owen has flown across from another station where he’s spent the past several days mustering and I was quietly thrilled to see the tiny two-seater has no doors, so I’m be able to hang out over the side and feel the warm wind in my face as I fire away with the camera. I’ve set up for maximum depth of field and the fastest shutter speed I can get away with, resisting the temptation to fix aperture or speed priorities so I can finesse settings shot-by-shot using the telemetry in the viewfinder. According to the app we have about 40 minutes before the light bleeds completely from the Pilbara landscape.
I think of photography as the language of light and line, the way light and shadow articulate form, how light leads the eye into an image, how catchlights emphasise texture and darkness sculpts depth. In painting it's called chiaroscuro and this is what I hope to capture this evening. As the sun accelerates towards the western horizon the shadows lengthen, the iron-rich colours deepen and the spinifex stipples the scene like a pointillist painting. It's exhilarating to watch the world spin beneath us as Owen banks steeply above a mesa. He manoeuvres smoothly between the dramatic landforms, maintaining altitude between 500 and 1500ft and happily responding to every request with a lazy “aahhhhhyep”. I keep snapping until the last rays cast the landscape in chalky pastels and there's nothing left to do but stow the camera and enjoy the experience.
Here are just four of the 200 or so shots from the flight…
3) Diabolical Geology: Dimalurru (Tunnel Creek)
I reckon #geologyrocks. The fact that no two rocks are the same, and that some strata are simply mind-blowing in their sheer weirdness, might not appeal to the average viewer, but I defy anyone’s gob not to be comprehensively smacked at the unique spectacle that is Dimalurru (Tunnel Creek) in Western Australia’s Kimberley region. On Bunuba Country, the 750 metre long “tunnel” is actually Western Australia’s oldest cave system and forms part of the 350 million year old Devonian Reef that includes nearby Bandilngan (Windjana Gorge) and Danggu (Geike Gorge). Not surprisingly, it’s culturally significant to the Bunuba. This isn’t the place to expand on his story, but a quick search of Tjandamurra (Jandamarra) reveals the rebel Bunuba warrior was hunted down and killed here in April 1897.
I’d heard about Dimalurru but nothing prepared me for a diabolical geology that almost defies description. To say some surfaces look as though they’ve been created by kindergarten kids rolling up multi-coloured plasticines doesn’t capture the impact of the rocks you clamber over at the entrance; I can’t begin to imagine the forces that actually forged them. At the far end, rainwater pouring over millennia through a cleft high in the roof has brought with it a crazy rainbow of mineral deposits, producing the impression an insane artist has gone rogue with a million cans of house paint. Knowing I’d be wading thigh deep at times I left the tripod in the car and travelled light into the gathering gloom. The resulting images are all hand held, a bit soft and noisy for being shot with an old camera in very dim conditions and I was so busy gawping I’m quietly surprised any of them worked. But work many of them did – here are just four to whet the appetite.
4) Down The Duncan
The Duncan Road begins in the Northern Territory about fifty kilometres east of Kununurra in Western Australia’s remote Kimberley Region. It weaves in and out of the NT and WA on its way down the eastern side of Lake Argyle and Purnululu National Park, eventually coming out at Halls Creek. It passes through a dry, remote and lonely landscape, the sort of country you’d head for if you needed to disappear. One minute it’s red dirt and spinifex, the next it’s shoulder high savannah grass, low scrub and deep gorges. Communications are only available at Mistake Creek, the rest is silence. Mistake Creek, which is in the NT, is one of three Mistake Creeks in Australia, each the site of a massacre of indigenous Australians; here, sixty “prisoners” were murdered and their bodies incinerated. This was no "mistake".
You need to know where you’re going if you go down the Duncan. Fortunately, we’re with someone who not only knows where he’s going, but knows how to go where few other people ever get to go. We learn just a little bit about “reading” country; where to find the tiny native bees and extract honey using a spine of spinny, where and how to find amethyst, how to recognise ancient sites where the first people worked stone into weapons and tools – unless you know what you’re looking for you’d pass these sites right by, but once you see the litter of chippings you can’t unsee them. We mount an expedition to the source of one of the many rivers here, where warm water bubbles up from the earth through coarse sands, occasionally bringing with it flecks of gold. This is an ancient land of ancient souls singing ancient stories.
