Galah Regional Photography Prize: Country Classics
The Galah Regional Photography Prize shines a light on some incredible aspects of regional Australia. Have a look at these finalists.
Fashions On The Field, Jundah
Adam Ferguson
The highlight of the social calendar in Jundah, a town of 131 people in Queensland’s Channel Country, is the spring race weekend. Organised by Jundah Race Club (est. 1903), it draws in crowds from across remote Barcoo Shire and beyond. There’s thoroughbred racing on the red sand track, plus barrel races and quarter horse sprints with a prize purse of $15,000 each. And then there’s Fashions On The Field, which raises money for breast cancer research. Here, the junior boys winner accepts his award while the girls await their turn on stage. “We have only this one race event a year, so it’s a massive social thing for the town,” says club president Dan Pitman.
Thirst
Mike Gillam
“I was literally in a cloud of birds,” says Mike Gillam of photographing 100,000-plus budgies on the edge of the Simpson Desert. “They were whirring around my head like fans, trying to get a drink in the dam while falcons were swooping on them.” The budgies, which had bred in huge numbers in response to a glut of native grass seed, had concentrated at the dam as the ephemeral watercourses nearby dried up. “There’s an incredible energy to these murmurations,” says Gillam, who has ventured into the Outback for 30 years to photograph them. “It’s euphoric.”
Be Home For Dinner
Natalie Grono
“When I was growing up on NSW’s Central Coast, things hadn’t moved on much from Puberty Blues – men ruled the beach, and the water,” says Natalie Grono. Happily, things have changed. At Lennox Head on the north coast, where she now lives, there’s a thriving scene of young female surfers. She photographed sisters Poppy and Josie (her family friends) on the hard-packed sand of Seven Mile Beach, cycling home after a session. “It’s welcoming in the water for girls these days,” says Grono, who has two young daughters. “It’s great that they now have similar freedom to boys.”
Boyca After Hunting
Cassandra Scott-Finn
On a three-week visit to Ramingining in the Northern Territory, Cassandra Scott-Finn – a sculptor from Byron Bay – struck up a beautiful friendship with Boyca, an
11-year-old Yolngu boy. “He was shy but fearless, and a brilliant hunter,” she says. On this day she’d joined a dozen locals on a trip to catch barramundi and mudcrabs in the mangroves. At a croc-infested waterhole on the way back, she asked if she could quickly take Boyca’s picture. “He just stared straight down the barrel of the lens, and that was the shot,” she says. “A moment of beautiful intensity.”
The Bogan’s Ballet
Melanie Sinclair
On her way to meet a friend for breakfast near Ipswich in Queensland, Melanie Sinclair hit a kangaroo. “It was on a fast stretch of road out the back of RAAF Base Amberley,” she says. “My car was undriveable, so I had to call for a tow-truck.” While waiting, she noticed these swirling rubber trails on a nearby intersection, the work of hoons doing burnouts. “There was a strange energy to it – they’d left their mark there in the middle of the night, but now it was all quiet and atmospheric in the early morning fog,” Sinclair says. “So this was a photographic opportunity that arose out of misfortune!” She coined the brilliant title, too.
Together We Stand
Peter Rossi
This portrait of four siblings from the Cape York community of Lockhart River who are now living in Cairns (Ben, in his late teens, holds Kayla Rose; beside them are Andre and Haydan) was staged by photographer Peter Rossi, and inspired by his own childhood in Aloomba, near Cairns, in the ’60s. “I was the oldest of five boys, and our parents were cane farmers,” he says. “It was really rural back then – we rarely wore shoes, and spent all our spare time fishing. I wanted to picture these kids in a way that’s universal, timeless – fishing, playing in the ocean, with their bare feet in the sand.”
Untitled
Narelle Autio
It’s a fleeting moment that fascinates Narelle Autio, a fine-art photographer from beachside Semaphore in South Australia – the second or so when the human form, plunging into water, is “shrouded in bubbles, like effervescence”, she says. “There’s an alchemy to it – you can never predict what you’ll get.” On hot summer days when crowds flock to the beach, she’ll be under the jetty for hours with a mask and camera, capturing moments like this. It’s part of a 25-year series, all shot on film. “I’m old-school,” she says. “I love the saturated colours you get with film, and the dreamlike quality of it.”
Galah is an independent magazine documenting regional Australia. Its photo prize, with a prize pool of $27,500, is exhibiting in Murwillumbah, NSW. galahpress.com
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