The photos below are in memory of Joyce Evans and her monograph, Only One Kilometre: Balcombe Estuary Reserve, Mt Martha, Mornington Peninsula. (Melbourne 2003). The monograph is now out of print.

Each time I visit Melbourne in recent years I walk along the Balcombe Creek from The Briars on the Nepean Highway to the Balcombe Estuary Reserve at Mt Martha on Port Phillip Bay. This is a 3.5 kilometre walk but I only walk one kilometre at a time with a handheld digital camera and one prime lens.

This is what Joyce Evans did when she was recovering from a broken knee and leg in 2000. As she was unable to carry her medium format Hasselblad as she walked on crutches and only walked one kilometre at a time with her primitive digital camera (a Fujica). It is an intimate landscape that demands local knowledge and close study.

It was a deliberate strategy to slow down time and observe the scrubby, untidy, ecosystem of this urban trail closely. Evans said that the subject matter was light and colour, whilst the compositional form of the photos was the layered, interwoven foliage of this intricate paperbark riverine ecosystem. The monograph consisted of selected photos and various short essays and poems by friends and acquaintances.

Sadly, her photography — documentary and landscape — is not widely appreciated. This project raises interesting issues.