Over their weekly conversation in an inner-city café, photographer Michael Wee persuaded his friend, painter and writer Tom Carment, to embark on some walks into “wild” Australia.
Inexperienced long-distance bushwalkers, Michael and Tom learned en route as they traversed hot, rainy, snow-covered and bushfire-blackened terrain. Alongside Michael’s haunting, dramatic photographs, and Tom’s delicately observed watercolours and drawings are stories of each walk – from Cradle Mountain in Tasmania to Capes Leeuwin and Naturaliste in Western Australia, the Heysen Trail in South Australia to Wilsons Promontory in Victoria – interweaving history with anecdote, humour with observation. Seven Walks is the companion book to their adventures and captures the feeling of heading out on foot along a narrow track, into a beautiful landscape.
Tom Carment, born in Sydney in 1954, is a painter of landscapes and portraits and a writer. His pictures have been shown, since the 1970s, in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his stories and essays have been published nationally. He was the winner of the 2014 NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize and the 2008 Gallipoli Prize. Tom’s portraits have been hung nine times in the Archibold Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW. Seven Walks is his third book.
Michael Wee, born in Malaysia, came to Australia in his teens. Always involved in the arts, he took up photography professionally in the 1990s and is a regular contributor to Australia’s leading lifestyle and interiors magazines. Michael is happiest roaming the countryside with his camera and music.
