The photographs explore the psychological drama of rural Australian life

When photographer Brad Rimmer was a boy growing up in Wyalkatem in WA’s central Wheatbelt, he had a pet crow.

“He didn’t sit in the cage; he used to sit on the wheels of my bike or follow me around and fly around when I was trying to play football, things like that,” Rimmer said.

“He was very popular.

“But I also developed this kind of weird thing where I understood certain sounds that he would make and I could make those sounds for the ravens and they would respond.

“We used to joke that I could talk to crows.”

Years later, and already established as one of Australia’s leading photographers, Rimmer was out in the Wheatbelt photographing when he met an old man and told him about a crow, and the man named him ‘nature boy’.

Local life has become big

Nature Boy was the subject of one of his books and works from this series are still hanging at the Walyalup Fremantle Arts Center (WFAC), in a major exhibition of Rimmer’s work for the Perth Festival.

Called Loom of the Land, the full exhibition fills the galleries and has included curator Abigail Moncrief blocking windows and installing special lighting to effectively display the work.

It consists of a three-part series of photographic works created in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia, where Rimmer grew up.

He moved to the city to start his career after graduation, returning only to visit family and take photographs.

Rimmer has gone on to produce numerous series and books shot in the Wheatbelt, focusing on the beauty but also the harsh isolation of the people who live there.

When he first became a photographer, this was not the subject he expected to focus on.

He says: “It is the place that I wanted to withdraw from when I left.

“When I first arrived in Perth, I felt so stupid and almost ashamed of this kind of country.

“And as I was traveling back and forth with my family out there, I started to realize things that I didn’t think about much, because you take them for granted.

Difficult choices for young people are written

Another series, Silence, was shot in the early 2000s and tackled a serious problem facing young people growing up in rural towns around Australia: whether to leave family and friends to move to the cities for greater opportunities, or stay, amid limited job opportunities and a declining population.

The Art Gallery of Western Australia has acquired 31 works, and combines the images of young people in the Wheatbelt with the beautiful, but often lonely, places they live.

“It started, probably, because I was able to find my two nieces who were teenagers at the time,” he says.

“I was close to them and saw the strength and things that were happening in their lives.

“At the time I was talking about that time in my teenage years when I had to make the decision to leave.

After photographing his nieces and nephews, Rimmer continued the series by “just driving around until I find someone and take a picture of them”.

“When it’s a big exhibition like this, you realize that it’s 20 years of work, 20 years of photographing people and their lives have changed, places have changed,” he says.

“It’s nice to be able to put that together. I think it’s important because suddenly there’s a record of all this.

“The people I photographed 20 years ago for silence, there was no real documentary going on in most of Australia’s rural areas at that time.”

These days, when he goes back to the Wheat Belt, he doesn’t see many young people, and he has realized that, although he didn’t plan it that way, the silence has become a record of history.

“That change happened quickly,” he says.

“Because of the decline in population and what has happened to these small towns and farming communities in general, there are very few. [teenagers].”

The local halls are quiet

That decline and despair is also strongly reflected in Rimmer’s book Nowhere Near, which includes a series of photographs of community halls across the Wheatbelt, from Geraldton to Esperance.

Photographed from the front, they show places that were once the center of public life, some in danger of being demolished due to decay.

“Melancholy is a very emotional thing. I think you don’t have to be there to get that,” Rimmer says.

“The town halls were a good example of that; it’s a public space that suddenly isn’t being used for something anymore. It can be very emotional.”

In another photo, the hall in North Baandee is still decorated from a birthday party that was held five years before the photo was taken.

Census data shows the tiny community had just 33 private homes in 2021.

In one hall, the Broomehill Agricultural hall, there are exercise mats and the hall is still in use. There is great stability in these cities as well.

Moncrief also commissioned two new pieces for the show that included Rimmer’s collaboration, for the first time in his career, with two other artists – composer Mark Holdsworth and songwriter Emily Barker – to produce two video pieces.

Set in two galleries that he photographed, each wrote and created pieces that respond to his work, accompanied by videos shot by Rimmer in two-channel footage.

“It’s a wonderful moment where Mark Holdsworth and Emily Barker talked to Brad and collaborated with his work and felt the mental and emotional and mental state of what he was doing,” Moncrief says.

“Emily’s work is fun and educational, and treats the hall as a living organism with a mind that holds memory and experience within its walls.

“Mark Holdsworth’s work is very different and expresses a difficult and complex state of mind that is perhaps best matched by the accompanying video that Brad Rimmer shot.

“It’s a very beautiful and complex collaboration and exchange between three experts.”

For Rimmer it proved a welcome change to working alone.

“[Working] “One person can be very emotional and time-consuming and stressful in a way, but there is more responsibility when you start collaborating,” he says.

“To interact with the right people was really amazing. To have people who really responded to something that you did in such a profound way was a very special and special thing that I would like to do more of.”

Decades of work

Twenty years of work for Loom of the Land, which takes its title from a Nick Cave song and talks about the potential of a place in one’s life.

“I kept thinking, it’s such a great title, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I borrowed it,” says Rimmer.

“Because it’s also about something that’s a little bit uncomfortable with space.”

To have such a large vision included in the Perth Festival, taking over the gallery space in Fremantle, the area that is now his home, is a big deal.

He says: “I’m still coming to terms with it in a way.

“It’s an incredible privilege to be in this position, to be given this opportunity and an amazing team to do this.”