Solitude

Rows of cereal stubble converge on a solitary eucalypt standing mid-paddock, its trunk splitting a pale, haze-softened sky from the gold of the harvested field below. Two smaller trees flank it in the middle distance. Atmospheric mist flattens the distant tree line and dissolves the hills beyond, until the horizon ends up the same colour as the sky.

Brett photographed this on the afternoon of 2 January 2020, on the Nikon D850 with a 70-200mm lens, in the cropping country of the New South Wales Central West between Parkes and Bogan Gate. The Landscapes collection covers his wider travel photography across Australia and Japan rather than the abandoned-places work the Lost Collective is built on, and no history attaches to this paddock. The scale of an open agricultural plain only becomes legible against something rooted in it, and here the whole composition turns on one tree. The stubble rows do the leading and the haze removes everything past the middle distance, which leaves the eucalypt carrying the frame on its own. The title names the effect rather than the place.