The MA was something best forgotten. I'd failed. I was embarrassed by the failure.  I realized that  it had became normal  for  people to do MFA's,  complete them, and then  teach/lecture/research photography in a university,  such as RMIT. My old b+w photos just reminded me of my shame over my failure. I was now happy just making new photos like most other photographers.   

One day, when I was bored,  I started going through my old black and white archives.  I saw a body of work sitting there, asked a few friends  to look at it, and then  to help me quickly draft up a dummy photobook. I  showed the dummy  to a few people, then put it into the background. The dummy photobook was a bunch of photos of Bowden. However, that didn't really make sense of the old MA, since the text was missing, and it was the text that I had struggled with so long ago.   

I became interested in revisiting the MA.  Could I rework the archived photos + text  now? If so, then  the original fragmentary text and photos would need to be overlaid with memory and history,  since Australia is now a post-industrial society and my photos and text referred to a world that was now forgotten history.  Could this reworked MA become a photobook project?

I hunted around the studio at Encounter Bay and eventually came across some bits of text from the MA. I  read them quickly, started  to remember the books that I had been reading at the time and realised that these were still in my library. I flicked  through them.  I went back to my negatives and started going through those  from the 1980s that related to the MA and started to scan them.  They looked okay. I tentatively started to  re-read other books on the internet, became aware that a lot more material photography had been published.   I rejoined two university library's to gain access to books,  then  began to  rework the fragmentary text. 

 I  started a blog in 2016, less because of a desire for recognition, and more to help work through the photos and textual material.  I  quickly discovered that  the  UniSA library  held no aesthetics whilst  the Flinders Uni Library had no new material since when I taught at the uni.   I slowly came to realize that there was enough open access material on the internet to help me along the way.   Times had changed.  The internet had replaced inter-library loans. 

It has taken 5 years  for me to remember and  then slowly recover  what I'd been trying to do with the MA.  As I re worked the MA  in the blog  I remembered more and more,   and I came across more and more material that was relevant.     

Then in early 2021 with the Covid-19 border closures and the Mallee Routes project on hold  I created the Bowden Archives and Industrial Modernity website with  its 4 sections. Going public like this  forced me to seriously work on the text and galleries for each of the sections.  It started to feel like being back  in PhD mode: -- sitting in front of a computer reading and writing day in and day out until  I had a draft to work on.  

So this is a  photographic journey of 40 years,  and it still has a way to go until the book's pdf  is sent to a printer. So it is not a tipped- in photobook, or a unique and luxurious object.  The website is the public face of the reworked MA--the old desire for recognition?--  whilst I work behind the screen to  shape and edit the material for a book.