I flew to Sydney for the launch of CARTE BLANCHE on Saturday, 20 July. After the launch at Mothership Studios, Marrickville, I had the chance to drive back from Sydney to Adelaide: a two-day, 1,375 kilometre (855 mile) journey by car, through the Great Dividing Range, and across the plains of New South Wales’ Riverina region and the Mallee districts of Victoria and South Australia.

Much of the journey I knew only from imprecise childhood memories (the Dog on the Tuckerbox, 5 or 9 miles from Gundagai – depending on whether you reference the poem ‘Bullocky Bill’, the later Jack Moses poem, or the Jack O’Hagan song), or through particular contemporary poems. I think of Geoff Page’s poem ‘Hay to Balranald’: ‘Heading west all afternoon the curvatures can still surprise you. / You might as well be out at sea; the skyline is a perfect circle. […] All afternoon forgetting physics / you drive into the sky.’

Or there’s Mike Ladd’s poem ‘Out of Balranald, just on dusk’: ‘Now the last light catches old fridges on their plain of resurrection – / a voice says ‘I AM’ from a burning roly-poly bush […] Kenworths and Macks in their prides / roaring down the gears through the drowse of distant towns.’ It’s an experience of a distinctively Australian Sublime – horizontal and understated, rather than vertical and imposing – as alluded to in On the Hay Plain, a radio episode about the ‘big sky country’ surrounding Hay, written and produced by Ladd.

I took photos regularly during the portions of the trip when I wasn’t driving. None has any artistic intent: they were captured only as aide-mémoires. They document something of the journey and the incremental changes in the landscape: green hills, grasslands, riverine plains, dry creeks, brown rivers, river red gums, woodlands of black box and grey box, dry lake beds, sheep, cattle, roadkill kangaroos, saltbush, grain crops, a crop fire, silos, siding towns, salt flats, mallee roadsides, and semi-trailers – and kilometre after kilometre of white-lined bitumen, varying in colour from dark grey to soft grey to ochre.

Of course, ‘experiencing’ a landscape while driving through it at 110 kilometres per hour is little better than watching it on TV. In both cases we sit in a comfortable chair, watching images flash past on a (wind)screen. Nonetheless.

Mascot, Sydney, NSW.

Hume Highway, Oakdale, NSW.

Federal Highway, Lake George, NSW.

The Nation’s Capital, ACT.

Barton Highway, Jeir, NSW.

Hume Highway, Coolac, NSW.

Hume Highway, Tumblong, NSW.

Hume Highway, Mount Adrah, NSW.

Morning fog, Murrumbidgee River, Wagga Wagga, NSW.

Sturt Highway, Sandigo, NSW.

Sturt Highway, Sandigo, NSW.

Crop fire, Sturt Highway, Maude, NSW.

Sturt Highway, Keri Keri, NSW.

Sturt Highway, Yanga, NSW.

Sturt Highway, Yanga, NSW.

Balranald Tooleybuc Road, Balranald, NSW.

Bridge over the Murray River, Tooleybuc, NSW/VIC.

Mallee Highway, Manangatang, VIC.

Mallee Highway, Ouyen, VIC.

Mallee Highway, Parrakie, SA.