LEFT BEHIND

Displacement often remains invisible, yet in the Australian outback it lies raw and exposed along the roadside.⁣

In this series I photographed car wrecks, set on fire and abandoned in the red earth. Once symbols of progress and mobility, they now stand motionless and out of place — displaced into a landscape where they don’t belong.⁣

But these wrecks are more than fragments of twisted metal. They echo a history of forced displacement that shaped the land they rest on. When the British colonised Australia, Aboriginal people were driven off their ancestral land as it was cleared for settlements, farms and mining. Dispossessed of the land that had sustained them for millennia, communities became dependent on rations of white food and clothing. Alcohol, deliberately used as a means of trade and control, further fractured traditional social and family structures. What followed was not only the loss of place, but a deep, enduring rupture of identity and autonomy.⁣⁣

The burning and abandonment of cars can be read within this layered history. In many remote communities, vehicles are often acquired second-hand, used until they break down — and left behind when the cost of repair or towing exceeds their value. But the act of burning is not only practical; it can also carry a quiet defiance. Setting a car on fire removes its remaining worth, stripping away any claim by others — an assertion of agency in a landscape where power has long been contested. What remains is a skeletal monument, blackened steel against red soil, a silent witness to centuries of imposed displacement.⁣

These images explore multiple displacements: of the object itself, removed from its intended purpose; of people, displaced from their land and ways of living; and of meaning, as symbols of modernity are reduced to ash. Left Behind speaks of what is abandoned, but also of who has been left behind — both the cars and the people, entangled in the long shadow of colonial history.