I did not plan to photograph Rigby Falls. I did not really plan to be there at all.
Flooding had cut me off from the east coast and left me stuck in Mount Isa for eight days. After a few days of waiting around, I decided the better option was to stop treating the delay as dead time and go looking.
Finding Rigby Falls
We followed a slow, rough 4WD track into western Queensland and eventually reached Rigby Falls. I remember being surprised by the scale of it.
Recent rain had transformed the whole system. Water was moving through seven tiers of falls stretching for hundreds of metres. It was the kind of place that was almost too large to photograph in one frame without reducing it to a distant overview.
Looking for one photograph inside a huge landscape
When a landscape is enormous, I usually stop trying to show all of it. A wide view can explain where you are, but it does not always explain what it felt like to be there.
So I climbed through the falls section by section, looking for a smaller arrangement that could carry the character of the whole place.
Eventually I found a white gum rising through the frame toward the water, surrounded by the deep red rock of western Queensland. That contrast was the photograph. The pale trunk, moving water and red stone gave the scene a simple structure inside a much more complicated landscape.
Why the image became Reach
The shape of the tree made the title obvious to me. It felt as though it was stretching toward the waterfall, surviving in a place that can shift from dry and severe to completely alive after rain.
That is one of the things I like most about photographing inland Australia. The landscape can change dramatically, and sometimes the best work comes from circumstances you would never have planned for.
A photograph that came from being delayed
If the road east had been open, I probably would not have made this image. What looked like an interruption became the reason I found the location.
Reach is now part of my fine art collection, but for me it still carries the memory of that unplanned week: floodwater, a long track out of Mount Isa and one tree reaching through a waterfall in the middle of western Queensland.