Art-making memoir 1
Photographing the High Country
My real work as a photographer began in 1982 with a twelve-month commission from the Australian Conservation Foundation to prepare a booklet arguing the case for a region-wide Victorian Alpine National Park. The outcome, Victoria’s Alps: An Australian Endangered Heritage jointly published by the ACF and William Collins in 1983, aided what was ultimately a successful campaign. That modest exercise grew into a five-year writing, photography, and publishing venture culminating in the plush hardcover volume, Range Upon Range: The Australian Alps. Enamoured by the high country on both sides of the state border, I had decided the best way to both earn a living and defend the region was through publishing my photographs. That the book happened at all was miraculous.
In the warm seasons, my backpack with camera, camping gear, food and fuel exceeded 20kg, but in winter with skis, the load was closer to 30kg. I was reasonably fit but if I carried a pack any distance my feet and ankles would soon erupt in intense pain. Sheer willpower dragged me on. It was only after the project was completed that flat feet with severe pronation were diagnosed: orthotics helped but years of accumulated injury required surgical reconstruction. Early in the project, my ancient, cranky EJ Holden station wagon made road trips to the mountains adventures in their own right. The more reliable Volkswagen Kombi van that replaced it was promptly drowned crossing a ford in southern NSW; let it be known a stalled Kombi bouncing downstream in waist-high floodwaters can be steered!
To photograph in the field at short notice, when conditions allowed, I had swapped the search for full-time professional work for the flexibility of casual employment as a shop assistant with an outdoor equipment retailer. The price of this freedom was that I couldn’t afford to drive to the mountains more than twice or buy and process more than a couple of dozen sheets of 5×4 inch format colour transparency film, a month. I was lucky to be in a cheap rental, skipped meals and mended and remended fraying garments so I could afford petrol, film and film processing. Every field trip, and every exposure, was precious.
In the autumn of 1986, graphic artist Rus Littleson helped me put together a hardcover design. We fabricated a 108-page facsimile of hand-printed Cibachrome colour prints stuck with double sided tape to a book of white art paper. I touted it to every book and magazine retailer, conservation group and bushwalking club in Victoria, the ACT and NSW that I could get to by train, tram, bus or car. I phoned those I couldn’t see in person. The response was heartening. The value of orders soon exceeded expected publication costs. One national book retail chain even chose to make it next Christmas’s featured gift and signed for a thousand. With a meagre income and few worldly possessions, I naively assumed the confirmed orders would constitute the security necessary for the loan needed to fund the printing. I confidently presented my bulging order book to one bank after another but none would accept signed dispositions as collateral. With an in-tray of unpaid invoices and thousands of dollars’ worth of paper already on its way, I began to fear I would replicate my father’s humiliation and penury, when he went bankrupt. I was hospitalized with stroke-high blood pressure. Entrepreneur I was not.
In desperation, I asked an old acquaintance, outdoor recreation writer and publisher John Brownlie for advice. I talked the book up as celebratory but John, older and wiser than I, had a longer view. He confided that regardless of the risk, it would be a fitting finale to his long publishing career, a permanent record of a region he loved as it had once been for future generations to ponder. In exchange for sharing the imprint and being the lender of first call, he mortgaged his own house to raise the necessary eighty-one thousand dollars. Unfortunately, John’s enthusiasm wasn’t shared by his new family. Renowned Supreme Court judge and high country devotee Hal Wootten had written a rollicking, politically charged introductory essay, but John’s wife refused to let us publish it. John and I spent weeks trying to negotiate a compromise edit, but the result was so anodyne neither Hal nor we could sign off on it. Running out of time, we cut our losses and asked a mutual friend, the writer Arnold Zable, to script an essay to replace Hal Wootten’s. Arnold’s heartfelt words introduced the images perfectly.
The book was launched in the foyer of Ross House in Melbourne by Greens Senator Bob Brown on Tuesday 24 November 1987. The volume received extensive media coverage and sold out quickly. With John’s mortgage repaid and my own debts cleared, the profits funded an eleven-month backpacking photography mission to the Himalayas, East Africa and the Middle East. I vowed never to self-publish again.