Heart of the Nation: Coolangatta 4225

Ray Collins earns his living as a coal miner. But when he emerges from underground, he chases moments of aquatic beauty.

TWAM-20150411 EMBARGO FOR TWAM 11 April 2015 NO REUSE WITHOUT PERMISSION Coolangatta Pic : Ray Collins

Ray Collins earns his living in a pitch-black tunnel.

Three times a week he shuffles into a cage that plummets 560m into the Earth, to the coal seams that stretch under the Illawarra south of Sydney. Even after 11 years as a miner Collins still finds his work environment surreal: it’s 35ºC and 95 per cent humidity down there, a world of dust and darkness and deafening noise. He operates a machine bristling with metal teeth that chews into the coal face, advancing a metre at a time before stopping to pin the roof of the tunnel with bolts to prevent it collapsing. At the end of a 12-hour shift, he says with a wry laugh, “I’m covered in a film of sweaty sludge, and all you can see of my face is my eyes and teeth.”

The rest of the week he spends in the pursuit of bright, scintillating beauty. Photographing waves is his obsession. Not surfers’ waves, but wondrous sculptural forms thrown up by the sea and captured at 1000th of a second: the mountain-like little peaks in choppy water, say, or the mercurial barrel of a wave breaking over his head, seen in this shot from a holiday with his wife Amber.

It’s an obsession that “gets me out of bed each day”, the 32-year-old says. He’s often in the water before dawn, swimming to a favourite break a kilometre offshore, pushing sharky thoughts out of his mind, just to be in the right spot for the sunrise and that first five minutes of sideways, heavenly light. All that effort is paying off: his new book, Found at Sea, has a gushing foreword by Kelly Slater, no less.

So will he give up mining? Actually, no. That mucky, hard yakka is the perfect foil for his artistic life, he explains. Also, there’s the money. “I like the certainty of knowing I’ll get paid X amount each week … I’ve got bills to pay.”