The pans

The journal is built around four places. None of them is a route to drive — they are ways of reading the landscape, so the photographs make sense.

The salt pan. A white, flat floor that punishes the eye at noon. The value is at its margins and in the tracks crossing it, which record the night better than any camera.

The fossil riverbed. Dry for longer than anyone remembers, yet green along its line because water sits just below the surface. Grazers gather here, and so do the animals that hunt them.

The red dunes. Long parallel ridges of iron-coloured sand held down by grass. Small mammals in the cool morning, birds of prey working the thermals in the afternoon.

The waterhole. By late dry season, the one place every animal must come to. Downwind, still, and patient is the whole method.