This weeks Mutika is at sunset on the way down to Birdsville on the romantic sounding Diamantina Developmental Road.

Some years you find yourself going back to the same place over and over , places that suddenly call you saying “ but wait…there’s more “.

and more

and more,

Birdsville is one of those places for me when after visiting once in 30 years as a child , I then made 5 trips in one year .

The unexpected pictures you get on the road to a destination can sometimes be more satisfying that the work you do when you get there, but on the road to Birdsville and the town it’s self is all something special.
Once a customs and excise depot between the colonies of Queensland and South Australia, a place with 3 pubs and a sometimes over flowing gaol, now a town that’s a by-word for the remote Australian Outback.
While being flown over the sand hills surrounding Eyre Creek by the Mayor, Publican, Service Station Owner and local organic beef purveyor David Brook, I saw some ruins nestled in the sand hills and while we flew David told me the story of Annandale Station.
Taken up late in the 19th century with the plan of running sheep in the Eyre Creek flood plains, then taken over by Sidney Kidman and Co and finally became part of David’s property Adria Downs.
What David didn’t tell me was that Annandale had a darker more somber story than being just another abandoned station in the Simpson Desert.

I took this picture on my next trip in the winter after the waters had receded and the land had dried out enough to support a vehicle and that’s when I found out about a secret tragedy that lead to the ruin of Annandale…To be continued.

When I’m in a town on assignment and I haven’t got anything scheduled for first thing in the morning I usually walk the streets looking for that Drysdale-esque moment that symbolises country town Australia for me – hard light, long shadows and dash of loneliness.

Usually the pubs

And the cenotaphs

The track – This has to be one of the most isolated cenotaphs in Australia, hidden in the trees a few meters off the Stuart Highway at the Southern end of Elliott, a town that was built on the remnants of the7th Personnel Staging camp established by Lieutenant ‘Snow’ Elliott in 1942 , providing a half days rest for the convoy drivers ferrying war materiel and men up the Track to Darwin and then on to the Pacific war.
There is no one to tend to it, no one to play the last post in memory of the thousands of Australian and American soldiers who passed this way from 1942 to 1945.

From Alan Smiths “ Convoys Up The Track”
“The American drivers of No 1 battalion 48th Regiment had only one speed “flat out” , The road was just a bulldozed track through the scrub,”The dust just poured in. It was so difficult to see ahead that the drivers would standout on the running board and steer the truck through the open window”
For safety’s sake the Australian drivers got off the road as soon as they heard the Yanks coming, they didn’t give way for anyone.

“ Male troops in transit often used to urinate on the tyres of the convoy vehicles. This annoyed the drivers ,who took pride in their vehicles.Fitter Gordan Morgan rigged up coils to give electric shocks when they did. When the next troop-in-transit cocked his leg against a truck at Cabbage Tree Bore,1700 volts hit his wife’s best friend and the victim jumped back 5 feet.The driver told him that it was normal for this time of year , because after electrical storms the trucks get charged up.”

But I passed though Elliott in February this year to find that the digger’s statue had fallen victim to this act of bastardry ,that in Australia is equivalent to pissing on the Popes leg.

“Vandals who smashed the top off the statue of a soldier alongside the Stuart Highway in a remote Northern Territory town should be dragged back there to repair it.
“And if I had my way, they’d then be taken out the back and given a good old fashioned belting,” says Mr Mansell, the president of the Darwin RSL.
“But that wouldn’t be politically correct and the culprits have so far got away with it,” He adds.

But the story of the convoys that ferried the supplies that made the war possible is not one often told , and it’s my sympathies and connection to the long haul drivers , negotiating single bed trucks from Alice Springs to Larrimah on a 12 day round trip make me pull up at their staging posts and rest stops where the fuel drums rust in the bush and the only sound is of road trains and caravans on the new North-South Road carrying across the Barkly.

Churchills Head 1942

Churchills head 2010

Rufino Alves Coreia was a “Criado”, a helper and guide, who as a young man fought with the Australian Army in the guerilla war against the Japanese during World War 2, I had the honour of photographing him in 2006 to accompany a story on these forgotten heroes whose sacrifice in the service of Australian Troops has never been forgotten by the soldiers who fought with them.

Rufino, then 89 was one of “Natures Last Gentlemen”, who turned a simple environmental portrait into a picture that was something just that little bit more , by giving the salute, totally unexpectedly, the moment,and the look in his eyes were absolutely unrepeatable.

At the time of his funeral yesterday Rufino and his fellow Criados are yet to receive Official recognition from the Australian Government.

The thing about the Territory is distance, a majority of the work I do is in and around Aboriginal communities , and that means a lot of driving. The last big trip was down to Ampilatwatja where the locals walked out of their community in protest against raw sewerage flowing through their yards, substandard housing and a justified sense of marginalisation since the government intervention 2 1/2 years ago.
Banjo Morton Petyarr walked out of the community nearly a year ago with his wife and family and set up his protest camp at Honeymoon Bore and has been there ever since.
On assignment from the Age I had to first drive down “The Track” to Tennant Creek ,1080 K’s , over night and then take the back roads, another 500 or so K’s, to Honeymoon Bore , find a bloke called Richard , and then he will take me to meet and interview Banjo.

The second hardest thing about this sort of job is the nagging feeling that I have after 2 days of driving , where I have plenty of time to think about all the ways this could go pear shaped!
The hardest is trying to find some sort of common ground with the old man, so we could have a halfway decent chance of making a picture. Banjo has that upright , bow legged gait of a life spent on horseback and had worked on Stations his whole life before comming home to live in his own country.
There is no light to speak of but no time to wait it out another day and I’m praying that the sun will peek through at the end of the day, like it so often does on cloudy Red Center days, in the meantime I’ve got to keep this old man interested and engaged enough to want to do this portrait, So we talk about Station life and the common threads we have through the place names we both know, Lake Nash ,Atula , Manners Creek, Urandangie and Dajarra all names that are familiar through my recent and distant past but talking with Banjo brings them to life in ways I never envisaged, talking about driving cattle down the Barkly thorough Lake Nash down to the rail head at Dajarra, not far from my home town, I start remembering rodeos’ and race meetings with tall, straight black men in Akubras , Santa Fe Cuban heeled boots and rubbing smokes of Log Cabin tobacco in their palms , we just talk and scratch in the dirt describing turn offs to such and such a bore or creek and 2 hours have passed, the sun breaks through the clouds for 5 minutes and Banjo looks up and says ” We better get that picture now!”
The shoot went something like this over a period of about 10 minutes.
My Favorite!

Getting serious!

And the Age used this one , 6 columns on top of the fold on the front of Saturdays edition, can’t complain about that run.

Capture Magazine run their peer voted “Australias Top Photographers” competition every year, a while back I came 10th in the photojournalism category , I don’t know if that’s too much to crow about but this year I got the nod in the Landscape category along with my newest favorite photographer Murray Fredericks who was doing the hard yards on the bed of Lake Eyre while I was circling around shooting said lake in a light plane.


We were based out of William Creek and going up every day flying around in a cessna 172 and I can let you know how bloody wrong it feels to push open a jump door at 4000 feet….really, really sphincter tighteningly wrong! We were doing so many hours that our pilot had to bring along an apprentice, as his weekly allowable flight hours were used up about halfway through the second day, So we are on auto pilot just cruising along snapping out the window occasionally to get to the lakes feeder channels and turn around to the light behind us for the homeward journey and the real shooting, when I asked our pilot to bank to the right a bit for a shot and get no answer….The guys asleep!

I’m amused , not too concerned so I turn around to the spare pilot ” hey take a look at this”…he’s asleep as well!
So here we are 1 photographer , 1 plane and 2 sleeping pilots!
Need less to say I woke him gently!
Heres some of the pics from my landscape portfolio and more here if your interested!