“The way country battlers toiled and lived fascinated me … in a favoured country like Australia there seemed no reason for the harshness and poverty of their lives. I like to think my images not only prick our social conscience while celebrating the working class, but evoke pride in a way of life that is sadly passing.” - Jeff Carter
Jeff Carter - Inland Heart
Jeff Carter and Wedgetail Eagle
For six decades, from the 1950s to his death in 2010, Jeff Carter tirelessly honoured battlers, itinerant bush workers, fruit pickers, fishermen and mill hands, capturing the mood of the country’s working class.
In July 2010, director Catherine Hunter and cameraman Bruce Inglis joined Carter on a road trip to western New South Wales. Carter was keen to renew acquaintances with people he’d first photographed back in the fifties. It was to be his last photographic journey. On October 25, Carter died aged 82 years, just prior to the opening of a major retrospective of his work, curated by Sandra Byron, for the State Library of New South Wales.
He left behind one of Australia’s most remarkable and historically significant photographic archives — in all, more than 150,000 images of Australian life. This documentary, incorporating his final interviews, draws together the themes and passions of a lifetime of photographic enquiry.
Jeff Carter, The Drover’s Wife, 1956 © The Estate of Jeff Carter
He left behind one of Australia’s most remarkable and historically significant photographic archives — in all, more than 150,000 images of Australian life. This documentary, incorporating his final interviews, draws together the themes and passions of a lifetime of photographic enquiry.
Director & Writer/Catherine Hunter, Cinematographer Bruce Inglis, Editor/Paolo Febbo. Financed with the assistance of the State Library of New South Wales. © 2010 Catherine Hunter Productions
Jeff Carter, Tobacco Road, 1956 © The Estate of Jeff Carter
Jeff Carter - Inland Heart first screened on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Landline program in August 2012.
REVIEW| Graeme Blundell, Critic’s Choice, The Australian, August 14, 2012
A Lifetime of Passion Beautifully filmed”
This is a wonderfully elegiac, entertaining and thoughtful documentary celebrating the work of great Australian photographer Jeff Carter who might have stepped from the pages of an Ion Idriess novel, that great recorder of our outback.
For more than 60 years the adventurer and writer traversed this country in search of stories for the magazines of his time, including People and Pix. He never travelled without a camera.
When he died in late 2010, he left behind one of our most remarkable and historically significant photographic archives that included more than 50,000 images of Australian life. From shark hunters, whalers, charcoal cutters, kangaroo shooters, dog trappers and drovers, he recorded a life that no longer exists.
His heroes Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, he was an old socialist capturing the lives of Australia's outback workers, never thinking that one day history would see him as a great artist.
In July 2010, director Catherine Hunter and cameraman Bruce Inglis joined Carter on a road trip to western NSW, his last. The film is beautifully and respectfully filmed and also captures the love story of Carter and his talented wife Mare, the Yankee girl from Pasadena who spent years on the road with him. It's a privilege to make his acquaintance in this superb film.
© Catherine Hunter Productions 2024