Now that Suzanne has arrived back from her trip to Europe I've made arrangements to return to Queenstown, Tasmania to rephotograph the Mt Lyell Open Cut mine with my 5x4 Linhof. I wasn't able to do that on the March trip because of lack of access to the mine. I only had time for a quick look using a digital camera.

The classic work in this kind of industrial landscapes is that Edward Burtynsky's Australian Minescapes; a series structured around the aesthetics of the industrial sublime.

Australian Minescapes, was commissioned by FotoFreo, with the support of BHP Billiton Iron Ore and the FotoFreo Angels. It was done in 2007 and exhibited at the Western Australian Museum - Maritime for FotoFreo in 2008. The series includes 27 large scale framed chromogenic photographs and 1 triptych taken at various minesite locations in Kalgoorlie, Dampier and Lake Lefroy in Western Australia. This collection were subsequently gifted to the Western Australian Museum by Edward Burtynsky.

Burtynsky photographed these minescapes from a high viewpoint – sometimes from the air, in a helicopter. What we see is often unrecognisable as landscape at all because of the sheer size and brutality of the human intervention by the Big Mining multinationals.

My work to represent the degraded nature of the Queenstown environment will be far more modest---I'll be working with a tripod on the ground in selected spots that have been selected for their safety by a guide.