I was on my way to Canberra. It was early in the morning and I was  driving through the Murraylands  heading towards  Wellington  to catch the ferry  across the River Murray. The days journey was  to go to Talem Bend, travel  the Mallee Highway, and have an overnight stop at Hay in NSW. I was  hoping to take some photos of the exposed roots of the redgums along the Murrumbidgee for the Edgelands project. 

I was travelling alongside  Lake Alexandrina and it was the light and the colours that caught my eye.  So I  made a cliched 'on the road' photo with my decades old one lens/one camera. It is photography with a rangefinder camera. A spontaneous snapshot with its  trace of the real.  

Whilst making the photo I realised that the Leica rangefinder film camera is basically a relic  in a world of automation and algorithms; in a world where photography is now produced through a mathematical set of rules that work autonomously, without human interference and which are self-correcting. You press the button and the program takes over to produce a data set cheaply and easily.  Perfection.

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This picture was made whilst I was travelling along  the Sturt Highway  from Adelaide to Canberra  for a photo shoot along the Cotter River:

I'd stopped to take some photos of a silo just past Wagga Wagga in NSW with  the 5x7 Cambo monorail. I then wandered around the site and I saw this history of times past  in rural Australia. 

The silos for the storage of grain  prior to rail transport to markets  closed down at the start of the 21st century.  The Kywong  branch line   of the Main Southern Railway line in NSW, which services Wagga Wagga,  closed down in 1975. The closure of the branch lines --eg., the Tocumwal branch line which closed around 1988-- is an indication of the emptying out of rural Australia. 

It's a sad history of broken dreams and landscape and place in the form of place attachment that is concerned with the symbolic meaning in early settler Australia.  Place attachment is the “emotional bonds that form between people and their physical surroundings. These are powerful aspects of human life that inform a  sense of identity, create meaning in the  lives of human beings,  facilitate community and influence action.  

Photography has the  ability to aid and create place attachments. Photography  is also  valuable for  interpreting the erosion of Aboriginal culture form the Australian landscape. The  19th century image-makers document the land as the British  immigrants settled it, thereby   helping create meaning for the settlers and establishes the land as virgin by not effectively including Aboriginals in their narratives.

Photography helped represent  the land as empty and by extension created a culture of ownership, plenitude and expanse   for white settlement and so covered up the destruction of Aboriginal place attachments for the place creation and subsequent attachment of thew white British  settlers.