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“The country’s just a giant bloody cattle station or a mine,” Ferguson told me. “Cattle have totally transformed the landscape.” His photographs have their own powers of transformation. Towers of almonds, covered haphazardly with plastic sheeting and held down by car tires, become a misty valley; a rainbow ends not in a pot of gold but at an opal-mine junk yard. Kids at the top of the stairs on a playground slide call to mind brushtail possums caught in the beam of a flashlight. A man lies face down on his horse, and a hat has fallen to the ground—it is the horse, not the man, who seems likeliest to have lost it. In another portrait, Dwayne John, the wingman to a commercial kangaroo shooter, cradles a massive male big red; plum-colored blood coats its ear and snout. John, Ferguson told me, was partway through a night he would spend quietly and methodically shooting dozens of the creatures; enough, in the course of about two weeks, to fill a refrigerated semi-trailer with meat. The night ended with John and his boss, Tony, driving to a claypan, where they broke the animals’ joints, gutted them, and cut off their legs, tails, paws, and heads, leaving the limbs on the compacted, hard surface of the pan for feral cats and birds of prey.
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