Tumbarumba Rodeo, New Year's Day 2024

Tumbarumba sits in the Snowy Valleys of New South Wales, in the foothills between the Hume and the mountains, and on New Year's Day the rodeo is how the town starts its year. The utes are nosed up to the fence from mid-morning, the hill above the arena fills with hats, and by the time the first chute swings open the whole valley seems to be in the one paddock.

I drove up on New Year's Eve and stayed through the day. What I wanted was not the eight seconds. There are better photographers of the eight seconds than me, and they sit on the fence with long lenses and get the horse at full stretch every time. I wanted the rest of it: two women in white hats on the top rail, heads together, waiting for their event; the bulls in the pens with their horns wrapped, looking out from under the green shade cloth; the kids who climbed the sponsor banner for a better view; a young bull rider with a mullet and a hockey helmet, pulling his vest on behind the chutes with his mind already somewhere else. The barrel racer leaning so far into the turn that her hat is the highest point on the horse.

And then the eight seconds anyway, because the light at the chutes in the late afternoon was too good to leave: a saddle bronc coming out of the gate with the rope flying, a bull rider in mid-air with the Union Hotel sign behind him, the pick-up man walking his horse back to the rails when the ride was done. Half the town's businesses are on the arena fence, the butcher and the IGA and the forestry contractors, which tells you who the rodeo is for.

Rodeo here is not a show put on for the town, it is the town. The committee is volunteers. The announcer is somebody's uncle. The bloke on the pick-up horse works a property up the road and is back on it the next morning. Four years earlier the Dunns Road fire had come through this valley, and you could still see black trunks on the ridges from the car park. People mention it and then do not, which is its own way of talking about it.

The frames are made the way I make everything: available light, primes, standing where the action comes to me rather than chasing it. The arena at midday is a hard place for a camera, a brown ring under a high sun, and most of the pictures that work were made at the edges, in the shade of the stock trucks, at the chutes where the riders wait with their ropes, in the crowd on the hill where the real faces are. A rodeo is about the people who drive four hours to sit in the heat and watch their neighbours fall off animals, and that is what I have tried to hold.

Tumbarumba, New South Wales, 1 January 2024. Shot on my own account.