Very Bloody Australian, Mate

Ever since Mad Max, a burned-out landscape under a blue sky, with a two-way blacktop highway running through it has been a symbol of Australia. Up the country, roads can be so quiet you can stretch out on the white line to get really low shots without any danger. In 2021 I photographed a number of locations way north of Adelaide, but due to a hard drive crash I lost my 2021 pictures—there were many lamentations, as you would imagine. On April 3^rd, 2023, that particular expedition was recreated—going back to the same spots and recapturing lost frames. For good measure, here are two from that day. It’s a highway juncture about 300kms north of Adelaide, up beyond Burra and Tarlee, where the land is wide and flat and, by April, burned as dry as it’ll ever be. Here some bright spark named the road “Worlds End Highway," which feels like it belongs in a Mad Max movie to start with. Those ridges in the background? The “Hallelujah Hills,” and that fits the picture too, along with the ruins of settler homesteads and the abandoned towns up there. It’s an interesting place to visit, for sure! No photographic cleverness here, it was all about the place. Minor adjustments to colour, contrast and sharpness in Irfanview; Fuji FinePix S5600. Image by Mike.

A Wild Land

At first glance a jumble of colours and shapes—this is the view over central Australia looking down from the starboard side of an airliner on its way to Singapore, on the first leg of my flight to the UK, on October 31^st, 2010. There are clouds and their shadows, over a dun-ochre landscape—it could almost be Mars, right?—which, one can see from altitude, seems, incongruously, to have been shaped by flowing water. Incongruous, because it’s bone dry most of the year, and subject to flash floods at wide intervals, which, nevertheless, mould the landscape in ways quite distinct from above. I have vivid memories of this flight as we passed by Uluru, and the Captain announced that they had been given permission to deviate slightly from flightpath so as to pass almost over the Rock. Passengers on my side of the plane saw it as we went by. My photos are not very distinct, there seemed much haze on the day, and the window was far from clean. This image, taken some way south of Uluru, probably in the far north of South Australia, has been enhanced a fair bit, gamma value was reduced a long way to compensate for the haze, contrast and colour were intensified, and the whole was sharpened just a little. Fuji FinePix S5600, automatic. Image by Mike.