Snowy Mountains Windmill

The word "Southern" is still legible on the tail fin of a weathered windpump near Cooma in the Monaro, though the fan blades are long gone, leaving only the lattice tower and a bare hub. Dry golden-brown grass runs to a fence line in the middle ground. A dense belt of eucalypts closes off the horizon beneath a heavy overcast sky. The machine is stripped back to its skeleton, and the most legible thing left on it is the maker's name on the vane.

It is a Southern Cross, the long-running Australian windpump brand made by Griffiths Brothers, later Southern Cross Machinery, at Toowoomba in Queensland. Southern Cross windmills pumped stock and bore water across inland Australia for more than a century, and this is one of them, disused and reduced to tower and hub. Brett photographed it on the afternoon of 26 December 2016, on the Nikon D810 with an 80-400mm lens. The Landscapes collection covers his wider travel photography across Australia and Japan rather than the abandoned-places work the Lost Collective is built on. The title names the Snowy Mountains, but the subject is plain Monaro grazing country and a marker of pastoral water rather than anything alpine.