I spent 4 days camped at the Ouyen caravan park with Gilbert Roe so that I could photograph some of the grain silos in and around Ouyen on the Mallee Highway with my large format cameras. I managed to photography 5 silos--those from Ouyen to Linga--using a 5x7 monorail (for colour) and an 8x10 monorail (for black and white).
The next stage in the silo project is to camp at Murrayville so that I can photograph the silos in and around that hamlet. I prefer overcast conditions for this kind of photograph the silos, which makes life difficult, as such days are few and far between in the Mallee. It's normally bright, sunny and cloudless.
I also took the opportunity to start to explore with my digital camera the countryside of the Victorian Mallee, which is still economically based around dryland farming and large cereal farms. Even in late autumn the northern Mallee was dry, hot and dusty with dust storms. The agricultural landscapes look as if it has extended periods of dryness that cannot simply be put down to intermittent drought. That dryness causes hardship to the local communities, the unravelling of the social fabric, and the steady decline of the population in the towns and hamlets with their derelict houses and abandoned tennis courts.