Elize Strydom’s Small Town Girl is a project close to her heart

These three best friends playing among junk in remote NSW are not as isolated as they look.

TWAM 9 May 2015

Elize Strydom longed to be somewhere else when she was growing up in the ’90s. Somewhere more exciting, at least, than the family farm near Grafton in northern NSW.

Triple J, the ABC’s national youth radio station, was her “window on the world” in those days, she says, and she had her nose pressed up against the glass, imagining a future in Sydney or Melbourne filled with gigs, festivals and clubbing, a great social banquet. “I thought, ‘I’ll get to the city, and that’s when I’ll start living my life.’”

Heart of the nation

Strydom’s formative years inspired her photo project Small Town Girl, exhibiting this month in the Head On festival. This shot from the series shows three besties from Broken Hill. Strydom spent a week with them, amazed at how the internet and smartphones shaped their experience of adolescence: these small town girls bought clothes online from the US, and were connected to all the latest music, fashions, gossip. “I was struck by their knowledge of the world, their savvy cool,” Strydom says. “It was completely different to my experience.”

You think they’re looking at an iPad on that car, don’t you? In fact, they’d driven to Silverton, an old mining settlement whose 35 residents often rub shoulders with filmmaking crews — and in a prop storage area they’re peering into an old wreck, wondering, was it perhaps used in Mad Max II, or Wake in Fright? (Actually, the truth is less exotic: it starred in a TV ad for Olympic Tyres. Those water tanks in the background, however, had a cameo in Mission Impossible II, says Derek Wyness, who owns the place.) This was the only time their “savvy cool” guard dropped, replaced by a childlike curiosity, says Strydom, 31.

Incidentally, she finally moved to Sydney five years ago. As well as being a photographer, she works in radio. You might have heard her. She does the hourly news bulletins on Triple J.