Just another day at Cable Beach

It’s Broome’s famous stretch of sand - but not as you know it. What’s the story behind this funny, Jeffrey Smart-like photograph?

Cable Beach, Broome. Picture: Christian Fletcher

Christian Fletcher makes a living selling a ­particular type of photograph to a particular type of customer. His stock-in-trade is landscape ­images taken around his home town of Dunsborough in WA’s southwest – photographs of gorgeous beaches and rocky headlands with aquamarine waters, deep blue skies, fluffy white clouds. He sells them through his gallery in town, to holidaymakers from Perth. “People who want something as a memento of their time down here,” he says.

Then there are the photographs he likes to shoot for ­himself: images that tickle his creative brain. Take this one, which he shot while walking down Broome’s Cable Beach on a holiday with his wife Jenny. Doesn’t it playfully subvert the usual stereotypes – sunset camel trains, and all that – of this place? Some readers may note, also, the spare composition, pastel colours and flat perspective, and think, “Hmmm, it’s a bit like a Jeffrey Smart painting.” This tickles him too. “I love Jeffrey Smart’s stuff,” he says.

Fletcher, 59, happily admits to being “a bit of a no-hoper” in his younger days, a surf bum who did the bare minimum to get by. But that all changed 23 years ago when Jenny walked into the picture-framing shop where he was working. “Love at first sight – for me, at least,” he says. The ­couple, who have two children, jointly run the gallery in Dunsborough: he’s the creative and she’s the business brains, the canny commercial operator. Without Jenny he wouldn’t have had anything like the career he’s had, he says.

The Cable Beach foreshore redevelopment was in full swing when they visited last year. Walking down the beach, the sight of people sunbaking beside a digger that was ­noisily going about its work struck him as funny. “They could have sat anywhere,” he says. Being a landscape ­photographer, he’s unaccustomed to shooting images with people in them, let alone people in bikinis. “It felt a bit sketchy being the old bloke on the beach with a camera,” he laughs. “I said to Jen, ‘Stay close, you can be my smoke screen!’”