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My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Sunday, October 17, 2010 | 4 photos

I'm eighteen and have grown up in the Tweed Shire, Northern NSW. It’s an area that can’t make up its mind; we are halfway between the Gold Coast and Byron Bay, I am 10 minutes from the beach and 10 minutes from the country. I go to school in Queensland, half an hour away, yet all my peers believe that NSW is a different planet. The Gold Coast kids have grown up in suburbia; the Northern Rivers kids have been raised in hardworking rural farms. But the kids around here are the half-hearted bucolic, raised by typical hobby farmers who own enough land so that they don’t know what to do with it and too little to make a livelihood off of. We don’t know how to farm but we have a respect for the land that is lost amongst the most of yuppies of Southern Queensland. The nearest town doesn’t have a cinema, or a mall. Most kids get away from the farms and spend their afternoons at the beach or hanging around car parks. Recent floods and changes in tidal drift mean the beaches are mostly closed and the farming industry has suffered damage. In my photographs I am trying to display how, as adolescents, we are caught in the crossfire of a rural and metropolitan mindset. I included only one photo with actual teenagers from the area because I feel this represents the response of our shire to the deterioration its condition. 'Adults' never talk about them, but the sun rises to fresh coats of graffiti and broken glass, evidencing the degeneration of a place which is struggling to adapt to a new generation who can’t quite relate to the places in its immediate backdrop. This scholarship would make a staggering change to my photography technique as I know have a lot to develop but I believe my thirst for adventure, passion about important global issues and general love of photography make me an ideal candidate.