Adam Ferguson began photographing Australia’s interior in 2013, determined to complicate the sentimental and obsolete stories that cling to the word “Outback”—a terrain that has long stood near the center of how modern Australia imagines itself. The work gathered in Big Sky, published by GOST Books in 2024, is the record of a decade spent testing those stories against what is actually there: traditional events in decline, towns thinning out, Aboriginal ties to Country, the pressures of globalization, and a climate that is steadily altering the terms of life in the interior.
Across 88 pages, Ferguson treats the landscape as a social fact rather than a backdrop. The sequence moves between the residues of an older rural economy and the improvised arrangements of the present, letting each frame qualify the next.
The photographs are Ferguson’s, and the credit is complete; the book is his survey from first image to last. GOST’s hardback edition, ISBN 9781915423443, makes the sequence available as a considered whole rather than as a portfolio of detached pictures. It treats national myth as a subject to be tested at ground level, and it rewards the kind of sustained looking a reader brings to work whose subject is the slow, uneven transformation of a place.
For readers attentive to contemporary documentary practice, Big Sky offers a decade’s labor in a compact, deliberate form. It is not a book of scenic grandeur but a patient reckoning with what the interior has become, and it will sit usefully alongside other long-term surveys of land, community, and change.