Rory King's Gumsucker Captures Australia's Wounded Wilderness

Australian photographer Rory King's new book Gumsucker, published by Charcoal Press, explores abandoned landscapes and intimate portraits to depict a wounded Australia where civilization encroaches on the wild. The title references an archaic term for European-born colonists and a 19th-century poem lamenting the loss of pristine nature. King's images balance solitude with warmth, melancholy without despair, using a subtractive approach that avoids forced aesthetics or heroism. The photographs testify to a deep connection with what remains of the wild, showing nature's resilience despite devastation. Gumsucker tells of an Australia trapped between modernity and atavistic solitude, filled with a tactile humanity, belonging and uprootedness, identity and collective ghosts.