The pictures below are from the archives. I have only just re-discovered them.
The first one is from the early 1990s whilst I was on a road trip in a VW Kombi along the River Murray through the Riverland area of South Australia. Prior to buying the Kombi I only knew Adelaide from walking around the city. The Kombi enabled me to go on roadtrips to get to know the rural country.
The location of the photo is near Moorook on the Sturt Highway. I was driving by and stopped to make the photo with a Cambo 5x7 (S3) monorail:
The location is near the Moorook Game Reserve and the Wachtels Lagoon. A game reserve means that waterfowl and duck hunting is permitted on open days at certain times of the year (March to June).
At this stage I had no sense of there being a tradition series of road trips by art photographers in Australia. For instance, I knew nothing about Wes Stacey's landscapes that he made on his trip along the River Murray in the 1980s that resulted in his From The Mountains To The Sea or even his Signing the land photobook.That awareness of various roadtrips came much latter. My understanding today is that there has been very little in the way of a body of critical writing about the various photographic roadtrips in Australia.
The picture below is from a road trip in the 1990s to Overland Corner on the Goyder Highway that is adjacent to the River Murray. It was made with an old SuperCambo 8x10 monorail:
T. S. Eliot in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent" essay held that a 'tradition' can be understood in terms of past works of art forming an order or “tradition” and that order is always being altered by a new work which modifies the “tradition” to make room for itself. the past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. The reciprocal nature of influence is one of the earliest attempts to formulate what would come to be called “intertextuality”—the notion that to write (or photograph) is always to echo other writing (or photographs). Eliot's essay is a frontal attack on the central poetics of Romanticismwhich holds that art is the product of the artist's inspiration an expression of the artist' emotions.
Houghton qualifies her absence of a tradition of road photography claim by saying that though the above two bodies of work --Stacey's The Road and Parke's Minutes to Midnight, -- demonstrated that there is an established tradition of road photography in Australia, this has lain dormant for periods of time. On this account the 1980s and 1990s represent the dormant period. What was notably missing in her thesis was a discussion or an assessment of the critical writing about road trip photography in Australia. This raises a question:'is there any such photographic criticism or writing?' If there is, it appears to be very thin.
I gather that photographic roadtrips did happen during the 30 years between Stacey's The Road and Parke's Minutes to Midnight, but these bodies of work need to be uncovered by researchers, made public, and then critically assessed or evaluated in relation to context and situation.