Before photography became my full-time work, I spent close to a decade working in Queensland coal mining. For a long time those years felt separate from the life I have now. The longer I photograph remote Australia, the less separate they seem.
Mining put distance, heat, weather, long roads and regional towns into my normal idea of Australia. Photography gave me a completely different reason to keep moving through those same kinds of places.
Remote Australia was never just scenery to me
When people talk about the outback, it can easily become a visual idea: red dirt, long roads, big skies and isolation. Working in mining made it feel less abstract.
Remote places are working places. People live there, raise families there, drive enormous distances for ordinary things and organise their lives around weather, access and logistics. That background still affects how I approach photographing inland Australia now. I am interested in the landscape, but I am also aware that it is not empty.
Distance changes the way you prepare
One of the biggest lessons remote work gives you is that small mistakes become bigger when the nearest solution is hours away.
Photography in remote country works the same way. I think more carefully about fuel, water, access, weather, timing, equipment and what happens if a road changes or a plan falls apart. Good preparation gives you more freedom once you are actually there.
Weather is part of the job, not decoration
Some of my favourite photographs have come from weather changing the plan completely. Flooding once left me stuck in Mount Isa and eventually led me to Rigby Falls and the photograph that became Reach.
That experience is a good example of how I think about remote work now. Conditions are not something sitting around the edges of the photograph. They decide where you can go, how long you can stay and sometimes whether the picture exists at all.
Repetition teaches you to notice smaller differences
Mining is repetitive by nature. Photography can be too if you let it become a checklist of famous locations.
The useful part of repetition is that it sharpens your attention. If you return to the same kind of landscape enough times, you start noticing smaller changes: the direction of wind, how colour sits in the dust after rain, how quickly light drops in open country or the difference one cloud can make to an otherwise flat scene.
Leaving mining changed what I wanted from work
I did not leave the mines because I suddenly stopped understanding that world. I left because I realised I had spent too long treating photography as something that had to fit around the edges of my life.
Now, when I am driving through western Queensland, the Northern Territory or another remote part of Australia with a camera beside me, I am often moving through landscapes that feel familiar for reasons that existed long before photography became my career.
That history is part of the work whether it appears in the photograph or not.