Fenceline

A wire fence and its timber posts split the frame cleanly down the middle, separating a diagonal run of green crop rows on the left from freshly turned reddish-brown furrows on the right. The line runs straight to the horizon. A solitary stand of trees marks the far edge of the tilled paddock, small against a wide sky of scattered cloud.

Brett photographed this near Mount Clear on the southern edge of Ballarat on 20 September 2012, on the Nikon D7000. The Landscapes collection covers his wider travel photography across Australia and Japan rather than the abandoned-places work the Lost Collective is built on. Both sides of this line belong to the same farming cycle at different points: one paddock already planted and up, the other just worked over and waiting. The picture is the boundary and the contrast it draws, a single run of posts holding two states of the same ground apart. Nothing else competes with it except the stand of trees on the horizon, which is there to give the scale of the open country behind.