This was made whilst I was on a Mallee Routes phototrip in  the Lower Darling region of NSW in 2019. The text on the Wentworth road sign  says,  "How many times have you been cooked out this month"? 

The picture references the traditional Leica aesthetic: quick glimpses of lived life taken with a small, discrete camera.  That 35mm aesthetic of the non-metered all mechanical M  is about simplicity and ease of use with its emphasis on functionality, ergonomics and  the feel in the hand.  This aesthetic was  at a time --the early 1970s--when rangefinder technology was seen by both professional and amateur as an antiquated throw-back with numerous disadvantages. Photographers  had started  to shift to  the Nikon SLR F system with  its excellent but affordable optics. 

I was driving back to the camp at Wentworth after I'd been  photographing the dry river bed of  the Great Darling Anabranch. There was no water in the river.  There is a long term drought in this region,  and most of the water in the river had been extracted by the upstream cotton irrigators. There is little water for the  towns  and properties along the Anabranch and the Lower Darling rivers.   

This is NSW National Party country and the NSW Nationals are  a party that wants to tear up the Murray Basin Plan and  to  block all environmental flows. They have no desire to save the lower Darling river system: their policy  is to prevent any limit being placed on the ability of irrigators to take water from the Barwon-Darling  River when it is extremely low.  

Unlike Rolleiflex  Leica  survived  the  digital turn. The company was able to evolve  and change through  adopting the digitalization of the photographic process and the changing world of the internet based photography.  I continue to use yesterday’s  primitive M camera with its obsolete characteristics because it  requires me to think and feel about the  photo in contrast to an expensive,   high end,  computerized  digital  camera that shields me  from the basics of the craft.