To the colonising settlers, Tasmania’s ancient landscape was mysterious and haunting; alluring, yet alien and unsettling. A terrain terrible in its indifference, it was the antithesis of the English pastoral ideal.

Deliberately disturbing any notion of rational space and perspective, these photographs signify an anxious psychological response to the Tasmanian landscape.

By discarding conventional approaches to landscape photography, I have endeavoured to portray the troubling effects of unrestrained wildness on the settler psyche – the profound loneliness of an impenetrable terrain, uneasy feelings of disorientation and dislocation, the paralysing fear of becoming lost in an unfamiliar and isolated landscape…

All effects created in-camera.

All images ⓒ SWS