Heart of the Nation: Elliston 5670
See that cave in the cliff? The photographer made a macabre discovery – even by South Australian standards – in there.
Elliston 5670: It takes a special kind of mettle to feel at ease when you’re all alone, bobbing about in a wetsuit 200m off a remote coastline in some of the darkest, sharkiest waters in Australia. Hayden “Rich” Richards has it in spades.
He’ll spend three hours photographing the fleeting sculptural shapes thrown up by the ocean off the Eyre Peninsula – like this rear view of a breaking wave – before the 14ºC summer water chills him to the bone. He’ll then swim ashore (he doesn’t own a boat, and sold his jet-ski to pay the school fees) and climb those cliffs to get out. See that cave above the cliffline, dead centre? He made a macabre discovery – even by South Australian standards – in there after he’d shot this picture.
Richards, a father of four who farms chooks and runs Elliston Caravan Park, a pit stop for grey nomads, first picked up a camera in 2012. He knew he’d found his calling. There’s a brilliant ominous quality to this shot, which won third prize in the Nikon Surf Photo awards; you can almost hear the Jaws theme. Not that Richards, 40, is gung-ho about sharks – growing up in Port Lincoln, he lost two friends to them.
He found human remains in that cave: a load of very old bones, bleached and half-buried. Beside them was a glass jar labelled “Sample A”. Richards alerted the state museum but never heard back. He wonders if they’re relics of a rumoured massacre of Aborigines by early settlers.
Talking of relics, he has fixed ladders and ropes all over these cliffs, linking ledges “like a giant game of snakes and ladders”. It’s how he gets in and out. Few people come here – it’s a two-hour hike from town – but he likes to think that in the far future someone will stumble upon a rusting ladder on a cliff face. “They’ll scratch their heads,” he laughs.
For more of Richards’ work, see @sa_rips and sarips.com
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