Coast, Mountains, Outback - Photo Stories by Laurie McArthur

The website of Laurie McArthur, a dedicated adventurer, camper, traveler, photographer and story teller.

Join the ride or walk around isolated places reached by motorbike and on foot, camping on site for the best light. Digital images and photo stories of the coast and coastal fringe, the Monaro and Snowy Mountains and the Australian outback.

Wilderness Outback - Australian Landscape Photography

Perception of the Wilderness Landscape

Taking many forms including urban, coastal, horticultural, industrial, rural, wilderness and pristine, landscape photography is a widely diverse pursuit.

This adventure and photography website contains a fairly limited photographic style centring around digital images as well as medium format film images.

Most of the work could broadly be called rural and wilderness photography; images of the natural environment from around my home district and further afield.

The Australian outback figures highly among the images.

Rural Landscape

My rural landscapes have a touch of wilderness photography about them in that there is seldom any sign of human involvement, while my view of the wild country is of an environment that is uninhabitable, alienating, hostile, unforgiving, remote.

Remote Landscape

Creating landscape images often involves walking with a heavy pack in inhospitable terrain.

Many is the time when I've sat on a log for a spell and asked myself what I would do if something went wrong. The best answer seems to be to ignore the question.

That's how this wilderness landscape photographer finds it out there in the wild, capturing photos of Australia.

Travel in the Wilderness Environment

In the South Australian outback, the country gets far too rough for the car and the distance is too vast for walking so I have an ATV (four wheel motorbike) set up to carry my photography gear and camp.

Camping on site is advantageous, whether at the coast, in the mountains or in the outback.

On the site there is information about the bike, outback travel and camping and photo stories of my various photography trips.

Travelling on foot along the coastal inlets can be arduous with the lake edges often lined with impenetrable teatree and other scrub. The banks can be steep and rough and often meander among swamps and gullies.

For years I had an eight foot boat with four horse power motor, but alas, it deteriorated to the point of being dangerous and had to go.

Rugged Country

None of my images of Australia's natural environment are of nice places.

For most of my life I've been an outdoor worker and outdoor adventurer. I've suffered considerable UV damage to my skin and carry the ongoing pain of numerous physical injuries; the result of a prolonged encounter with the natural environment.

I don't see beautiful scenes of tranquillity out there; I see a harsh environment that will kill you just for being there if you don't look out. I see rough, hard, sharp, abrasive, crumbling, random, hot, cold, wet, dry, soggy, windy, steep, loose, slippery, rotten, smelly, biting, burning, glaring, stark, ugly, barren ...... and so it goes on.

That's the landscape that demands my attention and which I fondle in my imagination. It's in my heart; it's how the wilderness is for me.

So a strange anomaly pervades: I derive great pleasure from photographing an environment that grates on me so harshly.

Wilderness Outback - Landscape Photography Australia

It's in the context of the diverse landscape of natural coast, mountain and outback country that I photograph images of Australia.