I liked travelling with Simon. He didn’t feel the need to fill the silence with words. He watched the landscape, camera ready, sometimes asking me to stop for a view across the flat, red plain, or a family group of kangaroos. He photographed emus running alongside the van in their girlish, knock-kneed gait, and a flock of white galahs, their gaudy yellow crests a splash of colour against the grey of the bush. We also liked gimlet trees, bronze-tinted with the sun glancing off their leaves. They were shaped like champagne flutes. We stopped to photograph clumps of them as they gleamed in the heat.
We drove through the small township of Southern Cross, named after the stars that guided its earliest explorers. It is on the outer edge of the wheat belt, and the earth is red-dust Mallee. It ha
