In conjunction with the filming of a mythic film, Matthew Thorne spent six months with the community in the South Australian Opal mining town, Andamooka.
"The South Australian desert is a mystical place - millennia ago it was an ocean, and opalised aquatic dinosaur fossils are still found in the dirt there today. It is home to an arid land, and deep, old magic. A land of endless sweeping salt flats, and undulating flat red earth.
This is where the frontier is, and the last of the great Australian frontiersmen call it home.
All deserts have stories..."
Matthew's work is focused around the relationship between people, land, mortality and spirituality. He feels "there is some interplay between self, place, life and time in that act. That the capturing of something, the storing of it, the documenting of it is inherently kind of some form of magic. That we can freeze the world as it was. And that in doing that not only see this moment, but see one particular view of it" and if he didn't take photos he would "probably be a cab driver - just for the stories and the people".