When you drive through Alice Springs and head further north on the Stuart Highway, the landscape changes not long after leaving town. You see termite mounds on the side of the road, often dressed up in bras, hats, and high-visbility fluorescent vests – something of a cheeky tradition in the Northern Territory. Other things change too – the red rocks, boulder formations, and rough-hewn ranges that are such an iconic part of the Australian outback give way to flatter landscapes dotted with grasses and tall trees that grow in tropical zones. Also, dusty old towns spending their slow days sinking into the red soil.
Out the back of the Larrimah Hotel – Nikon Z5 and Nikkor 40mm F2 lens
If you require toilet facilities or a beer, you might stop at the tiny town of Larrimah. You might also make a photo of the giant fibreglass Pink Panther that stands out like a hot pink beacon off the highway. The garish statue seems to be the theme of the only pub in town – the Larrimah Hotel. It has been the local watering hole for years, and the cartoonish mascot seems to stand in stark contrast to the darkness that overshadowed the town in 2018.
That year, Paddy Moriarty and his dog went missing. The subsequent police investigation shed light on a possible local murder thread after an exhaustive search, but to this day, no one has been charged. The whereabouts of Paddy and his dog remain a mystery.
Best pies in town – Nikon Z5 with Viltrox 20mm lens
There seems to have been some argument about selling pies to tourists. If the photo of Paddy’s old place above is anything to go by, he seemed hellbent on making a name for himself as a pie seller in competition with another town-dweller. Who knows? It’s a strange story. One TV documentary on the murder in Larrimah identifies multiple possible motivations, none of which have ended in answers.
One of the interviewees in the documentary said something that struck me – small outback towns like Larrimah can be filled with jealousies and petty arguments, twisted into something bigger by the slowness of time in remote places. In those distant places, where social life for a dozen inhabitants revolves around a beer at the only pub in town, I’d guess that ideas about right and wrong also change shape in tune with the long days melting into one another.
My interest in rust is, as you might imagine, slightly more than that of the average person down the road. I don’t have data to back this up, but I’m not convinced that the idea of making photos of rusty things is of primary importance to many people as an activity. What I’m quite certain of is that people are definitely interested in the answers to big questions: Why am I here? Are we alone in the universe? Is death the end? What does the future hold?
In the middle of nowhere that used to be somewhere – Nikon Z5
Rust and ruin are symbols of decay and time passing. Some people are terrified by this idea, perhaps hoping that science will one day discover the answer to immortality. Others believe they have the answers to the big questions already. For them, perhaps, ruin holds fewer terrors. I wrote about this in a previous post if you want to have a read. I even included one of my favourite poems.
In shadow and broken steel – Nikon Z5 with Nikkor 40mm F2
Sidestepping terror to make life easy
I started this post like most others. Truthfully, I didn’t really have much direction, other than the desire to explore rust and ruins as universal symbols that remind us of our mortality in the vastness of the river of time’s relentless passing. But lately, I find myself thinking more and more about the impact that I and others have on the world. For example, my use of shaving cartridges, with all the plastic they include, isn’t just annoyingly expensive, but also destructive. All of that plastic ends up in landfill, contributing nothing to the environment but toxicity.
It’s perfectly understandable that people prefer to have easy lives where everything is mapped out and makes sense. An easy to understand narrative provides us with answers to many, if not all, of the big questions we have. It’s easier to come to terms with the idea of toxic human waste, selfish governments, and genocides when it’s part of a cosmic plan ~ the evil will get their punishment and the good will find peace. Unfortunately, human history is nothing if not a struggle between the powerful and the powerless.
Rusting in the shadow of trees – Olympus E1
I think this makes it too easy to sidestep the feeling of terror gnawing at the mind in times of quiet. What does the future hold when we know all too well that the capacity for destruction lies in the same bed as the capacity for art within every human being? I strongly suspect that we may turn quickly and desperately to solutions as a species once it’s too late. The powerful will have squeezed every last drop of value from us and we’ll have been too busy buying fast-fashion clothing from giant toxic factories where people are grossly underpaid and overworked for the benefit of the few. Where do those unsustainable fast-fashion items end up, do you think? What good do they serve, other than to appease vanity?
Living with less
One kind of response I’ve often heard from people when speaking of this topic goes something like this: “But what about the economy and jobs? If we follow environmental policies, we’ll lose jobs. And how do we keep the lights on? Maybe we should think about nuclear power?“
My blunt rebuttal these days is usually along these lines: “The environment isn’t interested in your comfort. We may all need to accept the idea that we must live very differently with a lot less.”
The idea that we must not stall our economy and standard of living as we explore ways of doing less destruction to the planet is not only absurd, it is also dangerous. All this does is serve the lives of people who have vested interests in making money and living comfortably. They don’t want their lives altered and would rather continue driving big vehicles that spray minute particles of rubber into crucial waterways. Yet, nature is change. Nothing remains the same. Living a life with less money, less oil, less waste, less electricity, less gas, less cars, and less fast-fashion is not only wise, it’s likely the only path to take.
The empty house near the empty hotel – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2
One warm night on the ourskirts of Darwin, we pulled the car to the side of a busy road. The marina had caught our eyes. I grabbed my camera bag in a hurry, threw open the car door, looked both ways, and made a dash to the other side. I could see the water more easily from there, but there was no wide walkway offering protection from the speeding cars, so I was stuck close to the concrete siding that formed the road’s crash barrier. The driver, beating even my swift movements, carried his drone and launched it with some excitement.
A calm night near Darwin – Nikon Z5
I’m not one for a tripod even though I have one. My photos tend to be opportunistic and made in short timeframes. It’s the sort of thing you do when you travel with other people who might not have the patience to wait for just the right kind of light. Given the situation, the Nikon’s 35mm digital sensor and sensitivity to low light proved fortuitous ~ I didn’t need to push ISO beyond 6400 and I could use slow but usable shutter speeds if I held the camera still enough and held my breath momentarily. Just as well that the Z5 also has inbuilt image stabilisation to help out in these situations!
There I was, busy making photos of the boats and the water reflections and the hazy orange-hued moon. My friend was busy controlling his drone remotely and flying it further out over the marina and the moored boats. Out of the dark, we heard someone shouting gruffly at us: “What the F*** are you doing? Are you F****** spying on us?”. I’ve encountered this kind of thing before and I’ve no doubt that the audible buzz of the little drone really grabbed the attention of the marina locals. As another stranger once said in relation to my mate’s little flying friend: “Every moron has a drone!”
A lank-haired young man on a scooter, chest puffed out and eyes wide, flanked by his eager buddy, rode up to the edge of the road about 20 metres distant. Luckily, I’d finished, and my friend had just landed his drone only moments before the gruff accusations. The young scooter-using macho-man attempted to impress his surfer-type colleague, who’d now perched himself lazily over the crash barrier to observe: “If you don’t put that F***** thing away, I’m gonna F****** shoot it down!”.
In these situations, I can get a little fired up, especially if I think I’m not doing anything wrong. We were on a public road near a publicly accessible marina. In this heavily surveiled world of security cameras and manufactured fear, people sometimes overreact. And a drone flying overhead may provide the paranoid with an excuse to resort to threats and violence, especially if they have something to hide. Of course, we all know that only morons have drones, so it’s no surprise that someone would take offence!
We started back to the car under the watchful eyes of the two young aggressors, offering them jaded jibes on the way: “What are you gonna shoot it down with? Go ahead and try it, mate!” These are the kinds of words that older men say to younger men sometimes, having undergone the trials of similar testosterone surges once upon a time. But nowadays, we pack our cameras and drones and wonder at the world…
In my last post, I discussed the idea of the Indieweband the state of the World Wide Web. If you have any interest, I urge you to read Olia Lialina’s fantastic essay on the transition from the idea of My to Me on the web. It’s lengthy but contains a wealth of information about how the web has changed and how the web user has changed. It coalesces many of the thoughts I’ve been having for some years now.
Lialina references a late 90s quote from Tim Berners-Lee – the man often called the inventor of the World Wide Web – where he talks about personal home pages:
“With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it’s a public billboard that people work on to say what they’re interested in. That’s not as interesting to me as people using it in their private lives. It’s exhibitionism, if you like. Or self-expression. It’s openness, and it’s great in a way, it’s people letting the community into their homes. But it’s not really their home. They may call it a home page, but it’s more like the gnome in somebody’s front yard than the home itself.”
Lialina calls out the arrogance in this statement – the idea that regular people using the web, and enthusiastically learning HTML so they can create a personal home page, are amateurs creating nothing more than quaint gnomes in the garden. A clear divide is inserted between the web professional and the web amateur – between the skilled technologist and the average person on the street.
Dress me up any way you want – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2
The personal home page as rebellion
There have always been people looking to make lifelong careers and profits out of the web. The idea that the web would be a gigantic repository of information available to everyone equally is very much a 90s ideal. Alongside developments in technology, and in service to these professionals and technocrats, the web has changed from something a person logs into occasionally to check email and exercise an alter-ego, to an always-on connection where the idea that you’d even have a home page, rather than a simple Instagram bio, seems odd to many young web users.
When Tim Berners-Lee said that the web isn’t a home for the average web user, he may not have envisioned just how defining that statement would become. Today, giant corporations lay claim to sections of the web and tell us how we should interact with it. Too bad if you want to upload your own hand-made HTML to their platforms, because they won’t allow it. You can’t be trusted to engage in good design as defined by them. And you certainly can’t be allowed to disengage with their data collection because then you’d be worthless to them as a method of making money.
Corporations and technologists making their income from the monetisation of the web aren’t interested in anyone owning any part of it. They want you to stay in their curated walled gardens so they can sell your data, sell your profile, and make you believe you’re getting something useful in return when you spend time filling their platforms with content for free. Need to stay in touch with friends and family? Yeah, lucky thing we have a social media platform for that! Of course, we always had a thing called email where we could stay in touch, too.
Whilst the retro-web revival highlighted by places like Neocities is reminiscent of 90s home pages, and is populated by well-meaning people who want to return to a supposed web golden age, there’s still a pervasive attitude of reworking the ugly design of those original 90s websites so that modern design principles aren’t insulted. The 90s aesthetic is catalogued and examined by the current crop of professisonals. Thus, it becomes another social movement defined by what technologies one had access to, and is assigned space beneath the umbrella of Web 1.0 – itself just another label designed to make conversations about the past easier to grasp.
Of course, we’ve learned so much about web accessibility and our tools have improved to the point where we can now make easy-to-read websites that don’t feature dancing baby GIFs. There’s certainly admission in some quarters that web users in the 90s used the tools they had to make the best websites possible – an admission that the personal home page aesthetic was perhaps not completely a result of people with bad design tastes. But there are also people now who’d like to revive the 90s aesthetic with modern tools like the latest CSS and other scripting that didn’t exist back then, whilst adhering to accessibility and good design principles because, of course, we must do that since it’s bestdesign practice – best practice only in terms of appeal, standardisation, and monolithic design that has, of course, nothing to do with the admirable and simple personal goal of just having a digital home. Not adhering to good design principles would make a site anti-corporate, anti-design, and anti-social, according to arrogant web technologists.
The idea that we should adhere to standards and monolithic design principles seems based on the idea of appealing to the greatest number of people, attracting the most attention, making the most money, and going viral – all of which are core concepts of capitalism that certainly didn’t define personal home page design in the 90s. During the time of the slow web, you’d get excited if a single person emailed you once a month and said how awesome they thought your personal home page was and how you had things in common – and it was a genuinely exciting moment of connection because you weren’t bombarded with likes and followers and subscribers and junk emails every single day. One connection felt real and important because it was uncommon.
This place being something of a journal, I make no promises that the posts will always be about photos or photography. Truthfully, I’ve never been great at organising my interests into neat online siloes. I’m worse still at expanding them into areas where people might actually connect to them. Mostly, I just post into the digital void. I’m guessing that’s a common experience online.
Sometimes, I reflect on the way the web has changed over the years. I began my online journey sometime in the mid-80s when I connected to a local BBS called Nexus, hosted at a nearby library. It was exciting to hear the dial-tone and plop the phone onto the kludged-together modem that someone in the Amstrad Computer Club had made. The idea that you could send an electronic message and receive one in return seemed magical.
Struts and pipes and bars – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2
There was a sense of geekish community in those early days. I was never especially tech-savvy in the sense that I could write code or talk about Unix systems, but I was certainly an interested party. I count at least part of the 90s as fledgling internet days, as people colonised online forums, used IRC, and built the content of the web eagerly via personal home-pages and niche interest groups. Back then, it seemed as though anyone could build a web-site by learning just a little HTML. Nowadays, it’s an exclusive activity and you need a degree…
Where are we now?
Despite big parts of the Unix-driven early web still underlying the modern web of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and slick social media platforms, the web of today is mostly a mundane junk-show of companies selling personal data, in your face advertising, enshittification, AI-powered bullshit, and venture capitalists looking for the next big thing so they can swindle more people. I understand that some are looking to rebuild the personal home-page boom of the 90s, but that time is now gone. That culture was fleeting, and no amount of modern CSS fudging can remake the joyous time that so many people felt when they built their first home-page back then.
Get more shit done – Nikon D7100 with Nikkor 50mm 1.8
Honestly, I don’t feel like I quite fit into this new modern web. There’s too much shouting and too much corporatism. There are too many people trying desperately to market their shit to whomever will listen, without offering any genuine communication in return. And social media platforms and communities are only considered successful if they feature tens of millions of users talking endlessly about themselves. Here’s a tip: those billionaire platform owners are only interested in profit, influence, and selling your data.
What happened to those small online communities? What happened to the tiny online discussion forums where the same small bunch of socially awkward nerds gathered weekly? An online community is now only considered successful if the user-base blows out into the millions and I think that’s sad. It’s as though the capitalist idea of growth at any cost has infected us so deeply that our online communities must reflect it, otherwise they’re unprofitable failures.
The web of today is definitely not representative of the exciting web experience I remember. The early web was constructed from more noble intentions to connect people and spread information globally. Back then, people were happy to have special and weird online usernames. Going online in the 90s wasn’t like being offline but with Subscribers and Followers, it was like entering a different world where you could be anonymous and exercise your strange alter-ego and talk about shit you liked without expecting Likes and Follows. Self-centred billionaires have a lot more trouble selling your weird username to advertisers than your real name and personal data! Why else do you think Google waged the nymwars?
Finding the old tribe
Even though we can’t go back to earlier times, there are still people out there dedicated to the idea of the small web. Some of them, like omg.lol, offer simple hosting and other services. Places like tilde.club even open up the Unix-based structure of the web to offer personal home-pages. And if you want to deep-dive into resisting the corporate web and the march of AI into every aspect of our lives, you can find more info at Indieweb.
I’ve also started curating a list of links to small web and indieweb resources. You’ll find sweet little search engines, free static site hosting, minimal and little-known blog platforms, and more!
In my previous post, I touched on the idea that not every photo needs to be epic and impactful. Not every moment needs to be recorded. We must always remember that seeing and feeling are at the heart of photographic practice. In cultivating the eye and heeding the pull of emotion, we enable synchronicity with the environment, and in this momentary state the camera records our imaginative trajectory through the world.
Yet, sometimes the photos are small and quiet. They’re not loud or imposing at all. These are the quiet corners and the scenes forgotten in a rush. They’re just as important and they’re the details we often miss.
Empty bottles in the sun at a second-hand shop in the country – Sony RX100
In a world where we often clamour for attention, hoping for some notoriety or virality, for some interaction on social media, for the epic amplification of our voice, being loud seems to have become the default mode for many. The intense desire to be heard above the digital cacophany may signify the ongoing trend to further isolation, loneliness, and insularity but the small and quiet photo, bereft of loud intentions and sweeping announcements, is a momentary escape. This is where we connect the eye, the heart, and the imaginationto the world.
Two sunsets in my previous post, and now two photos of rusty stuff for this post! Can you detect a theme here?
This old rust-bucket – Tennant Creek, NT – Nikon Z5with Viltrox 20mm lens
Tennant Creek – Jurnkkurakurr to the Warumungu people who have lived in the area for many thousands of years – is located 1000 kilometres from Darwin. In other words, it’s a long way from any big city! The town features a history of gold mining and some of that equipment and the story of that time can be found in a local museum.
I daresay that many travellers pass through Tennant Creek as quickly as possible, mindful of the stories they’ve heard regarding the residents and crime. Whilst it’s true that a recent history of such social turmoil exists, it’s wise to remember that the land speaks of much older stories and times long before colonialism. As ever, visceral reactions to news stories and statistics obscures the lived experience of local people and ultimately, the real drivers behind social problems.
Another old rust-bucket – Tennant Creek NT – Nikon Z5
Making photos isolates a moment in time. Photos often lack context and tell a story that the photographer wants to tell. The idea that a viewer would have an emotional reaction to a photo drives the work of many photographers. Indeed, street photography is littered with such raw moments and reactions.
Such thoughts enter my mind as I carry the camera and stop at a street corner in Tennant Creek. Rather than lift the viewfinder to my eye, better to think on the people who have lived here for thousands of years and face the cultural whiplash of colonialism and bleak over-representation in the justice system – a system that usually protects the rich and powerful and punishes those who can least endure it.
The Urban Dictionary defines an Opacarophile as someone who loves sunsets. It would be fair to say that many people find beauty in sunsets. Certainly, at the end of a day out on the road, our thoughts turn to whether we’ll find a suitable spot to witness the sunset and make a good photo. There’s always some resigned grumbling when heavy clouds obscure the sun!
The importance of the setting sun
The setting sun signals the end of the day and the turning of the earth. One might ponder our long line of ancestors, staring at the shifting hues and watching the sun retreat below the horizon. Such an event reminds us of our smallness and our place in the world.
Evolutionary science suggests that when we experience the beauty of sunsets, we tap into our evolved aesthetic faculties – brain wiring that allow us to see the rightness or harmony of something in order to judge its value and health. A healthy mate is vital to produce healthy offspring and continue the species, so beauty in this context represents a healthy mate and potential long-term survivability. A beautiful sunset stimulates the same aesthetic faculties that allow us to determine the health of a potential mate and the rightness and harmony of things.
Perhaps that theory is a long-bow to draw for many! My favourite is the Biophilia Hypothesis, which I’ve mentioned in a previous post. The idea that humans are drawn to natural areas because we have a deep-rooted connection to them, having lived in such areas for most of our history, is a compelling one.
Two sunsets, two interpretations
Sunset, Meningie SA – Nikon Z5
Having spent much of the day driving around the Cooring, Meningie provided us with the most wonderful of sunsets. A variety of colours, shifting from moment to moment, reflected in calm water. This single sunset made up for all of the sunsets we missed. Can you spot the lone duck in the above photo?
I’m glad I had my Nikon Z5 with me for this. I’d attached the excellent Nikkor 24-70mm F4 S lens after deciding that my usual lens, the Nikkor 40mm f2, needed a break. I know that many photographers prefer a tripod for such scenes, perhaps combined with Neutral Density filters, but our day-trips are about chance and hope, best represented by hand-holding the camera and moving to the next potential aesthetic wonder.
Sunset, Meningie SA – Nikon Z5
What a difference a moment makes to the colours of a sunset! I’m being a bit cheeky, as the colour in the photo above is actually a momentary interpretation of the automatic white balance in the Z5. Once I saw what white balance it had chosen, I decided to stick with it. The first photo is much more like the original sunset we saw. I simply exaggerated the blues and pinks by setting a Tungsten white balance during editing. It’s one thing I’ve noticed in my Z5: the automatic white balance is sometimes over-eager. Still, I find it’s best to grasp these chance moments and chance settings!
Sometimes, on those long and lonely roads through outback Australia, you come across things you don’t expect to see. Burned out cars flipped on the roadside are commonplace. So too are the broken bottles, campfire ashes, and plastic rubbish that litter desolate truck stops. What you don’t expect to see is an old campground and motel that lies in ruins, featuring an alien and UFO theme. This is Wycliffe Well – once known as Australia’s UFO sighting capital.
Attention Campers – Nikon Z5
In this ruined complex of dormitories, recreation rooms, and offices, we found the remains of glory days, when the site was home to a thriving community looking for their first UFO sighting. The signs are everywhere, including alien murals and painted UFO landings, as well as enigmatic depictions of Karlu Karlu (otherwise known as Devil’s Marbles), providing the geological majesty that perhaps fired the imaginations of UFO spotters who saw lights in the sky around here decades ago.
Welcome – Nikon Z5
The story of the site is a familiar one from a business perspective. It was owned for a long time by one family and managed by an ambitious man who drew upon the UFO mystery to market the facilities effectively to tourists. There were glory days, as the bar and large on-site restaurant provided rollicking evenings of food and music to guests. Finally, they decided to sell up and less enthusiastic owners took the reins whilst promising to repair and maintain the place. It now lies in ruins after flood waters ravaged the site. And there’s little doubt that tourism dried up in the wake of the Covid pandemic.
House 1 – Nikon Z5
It’s an eerie place to explore on the way to somewhere else. Though vandals have long since taken plenty of souvenirs, the site remains a strange and melancholy tribute to outback Australia’s tourist economy and the challenges of surviving in remote locations. Sadly, it’s now at risk of further damage, as huge uncontrolled bush-fires are currently sweeping through the area.
I mentioned the town of Coober Pedy in a previous post. Going through my file folders tonight, I found some more ruins and the remains of dreams from this famous outback town. I often wonder how these places and things come to be abandoned and decaying.
No driver – Nikon D7100 with 35mm AFS Nikkor 1.8
Who once drove the bus? How did it get there? At some point, I imagine it will be nothing more than a pile of rusted metal, merging with the earth, gears and pistons embedded in thick soil. Perhaps a few blue paint flecks will provide some clue to a future explorer?
Decolonise – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2
Old walls become a canvas for political statements, the remains of a broken window framing the tension painted in bright pink. Thinking of photography as a voyeuristic pursuit, as Susan Sontag once wrote, such images can lend themselves to such consideration. Is there some voyeurism at work when photographing places like this? Perhaps. I certainly feel some drive to frame the political statement and focus on the socio-cultural tensions. Do I engage with it by recording it or do I step away from it by framing it as artfully as I can?
Homes not Tails – Olympus OMD EM5 Mark 2
Photography can only frame the world for others to view. Once out in the world, the audience applies their own values and beliefs. By providing the framing, the photographer must step aside for a moment to engage in the act of viewing rather than participating. But in the framing is the delightful devil – a story told by the photographer in cutting out a single view from the whole. What lies beyond the single frame and does it matter?
The Rusty Ruin Journal 