The hour the river forgets the sea. A long sand flat, four kilometres of mirror, and the wading birds sorting last night's wreckage. Photographs made at f/64, exposures of forty seconds.
SlackPlate 117 · Bellinger mouth, no current, 11:02.
State 02
Slack· stillness
Twenty minutes a day the system holds its breath. The plates that survived the survey are almost all of this hour. The water becomes a flat black lake; the sky comes down to meet it.
FloodPlate 188 · Manning estuary, last light, 18:44.
State 03
Flood· return
The sea remembers the river. By the time the channel is full again the light has gone, and the last sheet is exposed by the meter, the wind, and the count under the breath.
TidelineHastingsBellingerManningMacleayCamden
TidelineHastingsBellingerManningMacleayCamden
02 — A slow archive
Six plates from a long winter.
The negatives are stored in a flat file in Newcastle, three blocks from the harbour they were made on. These are the six the editor and I argued the longest about — and the six we agreed, in the end, carry the survey.
Plate 042Hastings River · 14 June 2023
Plate 089Bellinger · 2 August 2024
Plate 117Manning · 19 September 2024
Plate 142Macleay · 8 July 2025
Plate 188Camden Haven · 30 August 2025
Plate 214Manning · 11 February 2026
03 — A standing place
Where the survey was made from.
Five layers of weather, redrawn from a notebook page. Move the cursor across the frame; the layers separate as they did, an hour before sunrise, on a sand-bar four kilometres from the road.
01SkyDrift, 8 px
02CloudDrift, 14 px
03RidgeDrift, 22 px
04WaterDrift, 30 px
05ReedsDrift, 40 px
04 — Correspondence
A letter once a season.
The next plates will be sent by post, in spring. There is no list, no tracker, no platform — only an envelope, four times a year, with a print and a page of notes folded around it.