Night escape to Lake Campion, WA

Will Vrbasso has a strange nocturnal habit.

"Alone" nightscape, Lake Campion, WA. Picture: Will Vrbasso

Will Vrbasso calls it “a beautiful loneliness”. That feeling he gets in the wee hours when the world’s tucked up in bed and he’s out under the vast skies of Western Australia taking nightscape photographs. Once a month, when the moon’s a slim crescent — just enough to bathe the landscape in an “ethereal glow” during a long exposure — Vrbasso will kiss his family goodnight and drive a few hours from their suburban Perth home into the Wheatbelt, where the sky’s so dark the Milky Way casts faint shadows. Working out there under millions of stars, he says, “it feels like the world is new and unexplored; all signs of civilisation are hidden. You feel truly alone.”

It’s a fleeting escape. Come the morning Vrbasso must be back in the city for dad duties with his four kids (his wife Gabriela “tolerates” these nocturnal sojourns, he says carefully), his job and his studies. The 43-year-old engineer builds automated control systems for Rio Tinto, enabling stockpiles of iron ore to be managed with the push of a button, but he’s also studying part-time to become a high school teacher. That’s in preparation for the family’s new life in the southern town of Denmark, where they’ll move next year. His salary will be halved, but the pay-off? A slower pace of life and more family time.

This image, a finalist in the David Malin Awards, is titled Alone but in fact that figure in the foreground is Vrbasso’s brother Richard, who’d joined him for the trip to Lake Campion, a salt pan in the Wheatbelt. (This area has an odd claim to fame: it was the setting for the “Great Emu War” of 1932, when soldiers machine-gunned hordes of the flightless birds to protect local crops.) The pair, separated by several hundred metres, had to communicate with torch signals to create the image, a mosaic of 21 individual exposures “stitched” together. It was a pleasure to introduce his brother to this “artistic, peaceful, meditative” endeavour, Vrbasso says. “And a few hours later, when you’re in an office tapping at a keyboard, you remember it like it was a dream.”