When photographer Brad Rimmer was a boy, growing up in Wyalkatchem in WA’s central Wheatbelt, he had a pet crow.
“He didn’t live in a cage; he used to just sit on the handlebars of my dragster bike or follow me and fly around when I was trying to play football, things like that,” Rimmer says.
“He was very well known.
“But also I developed this kind of weird thing where I understood certain sounds that he would make and I could actually make those sounds to wild crows and they would react.
“We often joked that I could talk to the crows.”
Crows nests feature in Brad Rimmer’s Nature Boy photography series. (Supplied: Brad Rimmer)
Years later, and already established as one of Australia’s leading contemporary photographers, Rimmer was out in the Wheatbelt taking photographs when he met an old man and told him about the crow, and the man dubbed him ‘nature boy’.
Regional life looms large
Nature Boy became the title of one of his books and works from the series are now hanging at Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre (WFAC), in a major retrospective of Rimmer’s work for the Perth Festival.
Titled Loom of the Land, the full exhibition fills the galleries and has involved curator Abigail Moncrief blocking off windows and installing particular lighting to show the work to best effect.
Brad Rimmer’s works depict life in rural WA, and reflect the joys and challenges of the experience. (Supplied: Perth Festival/Albertina Ncube)
It consists of three major series of documentary photography works made in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt, where Rimmer grew up.
He moved to the city to begin his career after he finished school, only going back to visit family and take photographs.
Rimmer has gone on to produce multiple major series and books shot in the Wheatbelt, focusing on the beauty but also the harsh isolation experienced by people who live there.
When he first set out to be photographer, this wasn’t the subject he expected to focus on.
“It’s a place when I left that I almost wanted to distance myself from,” he says.
“When I first arrived in Perth, I felt slightly kind of very naive and almost a little embarrassed about this kind of country-ness.
“And then travelling and returning whilst I still had family out there, I started to recognise things that I hadn’t really thought about that much, because you take them for granted.
“There’s nothing like what’s right in front of you.”Tough choices for teens documented
One series, Silence, was shot in the early 2000s and wrestles with the stark dilemma that faces young people who grow up in small country towns around Australia: whether to leave family and friends to move to the cities for greater opportunities, or stay, amid more limited job prospects and a declining population.
The Art Gallery of Western Australia acquired 31 of the works, and they juxtapose images of young people of the Wheatbelt with the beautiful, but often lonely, landscapes they live in.
Sharon, one of the young people photographed for Silence, in Kellerberrin in 2009. (Supplied: Brad Rimmer)
“It started, probably, because I had access to my sister’s two boys who were teenagers at the time,” he says.
“I was around them witnessing the dynamics and things that were taking place in their lives.
“I was then referring back to my own time around that period in my late teens when I had to make that decision about leaving.
“I just decided, well, it would be really nice to focus on that age group, because there is that dilemma, which is something which country kids really have to face, which is a really difficult thing to deal with.”
After photographing his nephews, Rimmer continued the series by “just driving around until I found somebody and then photographed them”.
“When it’s a big exhibition like this you realise it’s 20 years’ worth of work, 20 years of photographing people and their lives have changed, places have changed,” he says.
“It’s fantastic to be able to put that together. I think it’s important because suddenly there is the record of all this.
“Those people that I photographed 20 years ago for Silence, there was no real documentation taking place in many places in Australia of rural communities at that time.”
Dowerin, Autumn 2005, photographed for Silence. Census data shows fewer than 500 people lived in the town in 2021. (Supplied: Brad Rimmer)
These days, when he returns to the Wheatbelt to visit, he doesn’t see many teenagers and has since realised that, while he didn’t intend it that way, Silence, has become a historical record.
“That shift happened quite quickly,” he says.
“Just with depopulations and what’s taken place in these small towns and farming communities in general, there’s just less and less of them [teenagers].”
Local halls go quiet
That depopulation and melancholy is also powerfully evident in Rimmer’s documentary Nowhere Near, which includes a series of pictures of community halls right across the Wheatbelt, from Geraldton to Esperance.
Harrismith hall, in the Shire of Wickepin, photographed in 2021. (Supplied: Brad Rimmer)
Photographed front on, they show places that were once the centre of community life deserted, some under threat of demolition due to decay.
“Melancholy is something that is a really powerful emotion. I think that you don’t have to be from there to get that,” Rimmer says.
“The town halls portrayed that really well; it’s a communal space that’s suddenly not used for something any more. It can be a very emotional trigger.”
In one picture, the hall at North Baandee is still decorated from a birthday party held five years before the photo was taken.
Census data shows the tiny community had just 33 private dwellings in 2021.
In another, the Broomehill Agricultural Hall, there are exercise mats set up and the hall is still in use. There is a great deal of resilience in these communities too.
North Baandee hall, photographed by Rimmer in Spring 2021. The decorations are from a party held five years earlier. (Supplied: Brad Rimmer)
Moncrief also commissioned two new pieces for the exhibition which involved Rimmer collaborating, for the first time in his career, with two other artists — composer Mark Holdsworth and singer songwriter Emily Barker — to produce two video pieces.
Set in two of the halls he photographed, they have have each written and performed pieces that respond to his work, accompanied by videos shot by Rimmer in a two-channel piece.
“It’s a beautiful moment where Mark Holdsworth and Emily Barker talked with Brad and collaborated with his work and felt the emotional sensibility and register and psychological landscape of what he was doing,” Moncrief says.
“Emily’s work is elegiac and instructional and treats the hall as a sentient living thing that holds memory and experience within its walls.
“Mark Holdsworth’s work is quite different and describes a much more jagged and complex psychological landscape that is perhaps matched by the video that Brad Rimmer shot that accompanies that.
“It’s a really beautiful and complex interplay of collaboration and exchange between three artists.”
One of the town halls in Nowhere Near on display at WFAC. (Supplied: Perth Festival/Albertina Ncube)
For Rimmer it proved a welcome change from working alone.
“[Working] solo can be really emotional and time consuming and quite stressful in a way, but then there’s another responsibility when you start collaborating,” he says.
“Collaborating with the right people was really an incredible thing. Having people who actually were responding to something you’d done in such a serious way was something that was very unique and special that I’d love to do more of.”
Decades of work
Two decades of work form Loom of the Land, which takes its title from a Nick Cave song and refers to the ability of a place to loom over one’s life.
“I kept thinking, it’s such a beautiful title, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I borrowed it,” Rimmer says.
“Because it also talks about that thing about almost like being slightly uncomfortable about place.”
Loom of the Land features 20 years of work, across three series, as well as two newly commissioned pieces. (Supplied: Albertina Ncube)
To have such a big retrospective incorporated in the Perth Festival, taking over a gallery in Fremantle, the place that’s now his home, is a big deal.
“I’m still coming to terms with it in a way,” he says.
“It’s an incredible privilege to be in this position, that I’ve been given this opportunity with such an incredible team to do this.”