Andrew Peters on ‘Road Between Greens’

Andrew Peters doesn’t need much of an introduction, especially if you’re reading this you are probably more than aware of him and his work. 

He’s worked for Monster Children pretty much from the beginning and to steal Naz’s words from the 20 year issue, he has defined the photographic style of Monster Children. He is a huge part of this publication and a huge part of why it looks the way it does and I think everyone is grateful for that.   

In August, Coopers sent him and Cam Avery of Pond and Tame Impala, on the road trip of a lifetime, driving across Australia along the Nullarbor Plain, from Ceduna in South Australia to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, playing golf the entire way. The region is home to the world’s longest golf course, The Nullarbor Links, which stretches 1,365 kilometres and sits alongside the Eyre Highway with a hole at each truck stop along the way.

Andrew brought along with him a few of his favourite film cameras and shot the trip, highlighting the vast nothingness that is the Australian outback. He has compiled his favourite photos together into a book, aptly titled, Road Between Greens which is set to be released in the coming weeks. To commemorate the release of the project, I had a chat with him about Road Between Greens and the greens of the Nullarbor, or lack thereof. 

‘The Beers & Bogeys Nullarbor Tour’ is brought to you by Coopers. You can read Cam’s amazing piece about the trip we published last week here and watch the episodes of the three-part video series on all Coopers social channels.

How was the trip?

It was awesome. I’ve been playing a fair bit of golf over the past few years and have been getting quite into it. So, when they hit us up and were like ‘Do you want to drive across the Nullarbor and play this course?’ I was stoked; I had no idea what we were doing until we were basically already there. It was news to me, and I think it was news to everyone that it even existed.

Yeah, someone told me about it earlier in the year and I was shocked, a golf course across the whole highway. How does it work?  

Each town has a hole. It is just one hole and generally is completely fucked, you’re hitting off pads and into dirt, then there is an AstroTurf green that is usually really lumpy. You can’t play it seriously, but it is a lot of fun. It was cool, and it’s more about driving across the country and getting to see everything. I’ve always wanted to drive across, but I feel like it is something that Australians pretty rarely get to do.

Yeah, I only know a few people who’ve done it.

Yeah, it was a unique opportunity. My dad has done it, but not the Nullarbor, he did it across the middle of Australia. People who have done that drive are usually like, you just drive for hundreds of kilometres and nothing changes. I expected that going across the Nullarbor but that was not the case. The landscape changes so much, it is very different all the way along. You see it evolving all the way in front of your eyes while you’re on the road, which is cool.

That is cool. Are there many towns?

Yeah, there are big stretches in between where there are no towns but there are little towns associated with all the truck stops. The Nullarbor holds the longest straight road in the country, so there are stints where you really don’t see much for two or three hours. It ends in Kalgoorlie which was super interesting because that is super old-world Australia. I believe Kalgoorlie has been there for as long as Perth has but as a mining town, it was one of the first gold rush destinations. It is super cool looking; it looks so old Australia. I wish we had more time there; we were only there for twelve hours before we had to fly out.

It’s crazy, it seems like it is one of those places you can’t even grasp what it is like until you’re there.

Yeah, even the approach to shooting photos on the trip, I had no idea what I was trying to shoot, I just knew I wanted to shoot. I bought a bunch of cameras and film and was like I’ll shoot whatever seems interesting to me and figure it out on the way. Then work out what to do with the photos once I got back home. I wasn’t on the trip to shoot so I didn’t have any obligations which was really nice. I didn’t bring a digital camera on the trip; I just wanted to shoot film for a personal project.

Did you know you wanted to make a book out of the photos from the trip before you went on the trip?

In the back of my head, I was like I’m going to make something out of this. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a photobook, a zine or a book of portraits. I thought I’d shoot a lot more portraits along the way, but it ended up being a lot less portraits and a lot more photos out the window than I would’ve preempted. When I came home and got everything together, I was like there’s a book in this. I’m going to do a small run just to say I did it [laughs].

What were you shooting on?

I shot a bunch of medium format with my Hasselblad, and a bunch of 35mm with my Nikon F6 and an Olympus point and shoot. I shot a lot of the real Australiana signage, so I made sure I always had at least my point and shoot on me for if we were going into a pub and there were funny, quirky signs. I also bought my large format camera; I really had the ambition to shoot a bunch of polaroid portraits along the way. I thought that I would find someone to shoot a large format polaroid at each stop but the reality of pulling that camera out is so rough. It is a huge process to just set the thing up. It is really time consuming, and we were moving pretty quick, there weren’t many opportunities to bring the camera out. I did shoot a few photos with it at least, so they exist.

 It’s cool you got to document the trip so well, it’s one of those once in a lifetime trips.

Yeah, for sure. I am writing the introduction for the book now, and that’s one of the things that I mentioned. I always thought I would drive across Australia at some point, but I had no idea when, why or what would take me there. It is really random that it came up in this capacity, where we just got to play golf and drink beer, also having someone take you was amazing, I didn’t even have to think about it, I was just there.

When was the trip?

It was from the third to the eleventh of August.

Woah, that wasn’t long ago at all. How long did it take you to put the book together?

Once I got through a couple of edits of photos and had them in different folders for pictures, I laid out most of the book in one night. I had a night to myself, set up margins on an InDesign file and started dragging and dropping stuff. I made a pretty conscious and deliberate decision to have the images cropped a certain way and really consistently all the way throughout. I stuck to the margins of the document I set up and worked to those guidelines in a more coherent way. Giving myself those restrictions helped me hurry up the editing process because it helped me just pick the photos that worked within those guidelines, rather than being this all over the place thing with collages and grids, which often I tend to do with my layouts. This just felt really straightforward.

I am making it like a paperback novel, it will look and feel like a novel. It will flick through with a bunch of images and an index of all the locations, rather than captioning every photo. I wanted it to be more of a thing you have lying around on your coffee table and have the photos give you an overall feeling of where you were rather than making the design and whatnot be the interesting part. I wanted to leave it to the pictures.

What made you want to crop the photos?

I wanted it to be really consistent and because I shot a few different formats and I thought if it stays within these guidelines, it will be a happy medium between the square photos and the 35mm, so they all sat together. You can tell with some of the photos which were shot 35mm and medium format but at least the dimensions are all the same. It takes away from thinking about what camera it was shot with and you just think about the image that is in front of you.

What did you crop them to?

7x8. They’re all pretty square. The spreads are a more cinematic style frame rather than a 35mm frame.  

Cool, it keeps it coherent making them all the same size.

Yeah, exactly I wanted it to be all the way through with the margins that stay the same.

 When are you taking it to the printer?

Tomorrow. I’m getting all the covers screen printed. The book is getting printed with a blank cover for now and my friends at Lucca Mart are going to screen print the covers. I’ve gotten the cover designed and it looks like an Australian fiction novel, which was the idea. It’s a two-tone thing so that it’s an easy screen.

Damn, that’s cool. It will look so nice like that. Do you have a favourite story from the trip?

My favourite encounter along the trip was with Deborah and Poggie who have the farm stay in Coorabie. They were just such Australian legends, the best hospitality, they cooked us an epic stew, we sat around the fire, sang camp songs, and drank beers, then later on cracked into the wine cellar. It was the most epic Australian experience of the trip. We really got to enjoy the afternoon there and weren’t in a massive rush to leave in the morning, it felt like everything slowed down for a second because other than that we really hit the road hard to get through it all. Those guys were so rad, I would love to go back to visit them.

Do you have anything else you want to say to wrap this up?

Thanks to Rob and Jacinta for making it all work out, to Jack Fardell and Glenn Walker for thinking about us to be on the trip and to my road dog Cam Avery, thanks for the good times and keeping us alive, he did most of the driving, so shoutout to Cam.

**If you’re in Sydney tomorrow night, join us for The Coopers ‘Beers and Bogeys Nullarbor Tour’ exhibition, featuring photos by Andrew Peters @ The Monster Children Gallery in Sydney. For more information go here.