Panoramas Down Under

Australian Landscapes in Panorama

A quick intro into the Australian landscape, the role of panoramas and my technical and simplistic approach to the compositions. Part of a wider story about Australia expressed through the commonplace and ordinary. Things like farm gates which frame the social and physical landscape of the rural environment. Or Australia's ever present pre-occupation with fences to create divisions of ecology, management and access . . . indeed it is the availability of three small things that have changed the face of Australia . . . Wood, Wire and Tar have been the making of modern rural Australia.

A Thousand Photographs . . . Just 5% of Australia

These galleries contain over a thouand photographs taken over two months in 2009. They begin in the Gold Coast hinterland village of Mount Tamborine and wander down through the South East of Queensland - featuring both national parks and your bog-standard Aussie farming land. trip detail

The photographic journey proceeds through the beautiful granite country of New England, across to Broken Hill via the back-of-Burke, Cobar, Willcania and onto South Australia. The Flinders Ranges were rainy and gloomy so we deviated to Adelaide via the wine country of the Clare and Barossa Valleys. Then the city of churches and culture and down through the South East of SA - Robe, Coonawarra (yes wine again: there is a pattern) and to Mount Gambier.

The Grampians are a lesser known tourist region but one well worth a visit and into central Victoria via the irrigation areas of Shepparton and onto the Alpine regions of Mount Beauty and Bright. And thence to Canberra. It's a great little toy city, stuck in the middle of nowhere to solve some turn of 20th Century Federation political impasse . . . but full of culture and sophistication . . . and museums and galleries with really marvelous collections.

A quick run up the Hume Highway to Sydney. And back to Mount Tamborine via the Hunter Valley, Barrington Tops, Armidale, Dorrigo, Casino and Byron Bay.

Look, when I tell you its a 5,000 kilometer journey and my good friends at Google Maps say it takes three solid days of driving (that is 24 hours x 3 or 72 hours behind the wheel at 100 KPM), well I'm impressed with the scale of the journey we undertook on the spur of the moment. We saw some great country routed - as we were - via New England Hwy, Gwydir Hwy, Kamilaroi Hwy, Princes Hwy, Western Hwy, McIvor Hwy, Hume Fwy, Great Alpine Rd, Tawonga Gap Rd, Hume Hwy, Jerrabomberra Ave, Moore Park Rd, Thunderbolts Way, Armidale Rd, Mount Linsday Highway and the Pacific Highway.

A long way I hear you say . . . but look at the maps attached. It is just a tiny fraction of NSW, SA and Victoria, let alone the rest of Australia. There are more journeys to make and many photos to take before we even get a real taste of this country . . . insert lyrical phrases from your favourite nationalistic poets about the glorious Australian landscapes (click here for links).

The Australian Story

Here we add a little about the social and political history of Australia to give some sense to what the viewers will see. Notions of the huge importance of the highly variable weather . . . the settlement by waves of convicts, gold-diggers and the middle-class idealists. And of Australia's national self-confidence, which ebbs and flows across the decades - mainly driven by the arts communities strangly enough - and our national obsession with denial of the role we have played and are playing in the slow grinding down of the aboriginies of this nation.

A true white man's burden which many can see the truth of, but which seems intractable and probably impossible to resolve fairly to all.

The Author/Photographer

Pete Raymond Smith grew up in a small country town in South Australia and couldn't wait to leave. He studied an eclectic mix of subjects at university - physics, math, geology, fine arts, psychology, drama and film making. Got bored. After a stint of wandering about the place, working as a jackaroo, rigger, cheese-maker and farm laborer, he knuckled down for a couple of years at the Australian Broadcasting Commission as a trainee cameraman.

Finding out that cameramen didn't actually make movies - they just did as they were told to do by other people - he decided to move up the movie industry food chain. Initially this meant getting out of TV and into shooting commercials and documentaries and the odd drama series in Adelaide, Sydney and New Zealand. Then writing, directing and producing children's TV, documentary and drama programs and finally - taking a huge swerve - into corporate communications: heading up the film propaganda department for the Australian Government and working as a media troubadour, celebrating the glories of capitalism in words, pictures and music for most of Australia's major companies; particularly in the pharamceutical, property, finance and technology areas.

After boredom set in again, he began inventing software for controlling PC-based multimedia systems. . . which has since occupied most of his professional career - working mainly overseas in the US, UK, Africa and lately in Asia. Now bored again, he is back to his roots as a creative artist - writing, photographing and sculpting - and developing various websites with his long term partner, the artist and ceramicist Frances Smith.