Returning to Perth after a year living in the dense urban jungle of New York City was the impetus for my interest in the wheatbelt town of York. Being home didn’t feel like home for a long while. My American partner being half a world away from me compounded the distance and loneliness I felt. Perth happens to be the farthest city from New York (some 18,700 kilometres). It is also the most isolated metropolis in what is the second largest state in the world (2,527,013 square kilometres). There is disconnect, too, in that a sense of national identity has always eluded me — I had never considered it relevant to my sense of self until living in a foreign country. I was suddenly aware of that gap in my character and how unpatriotic I really was. How could I possibly take pride in an identity that is predicated on themass dispossession, incarceration and murder of First Nations people? Having returned to the rural fringe of Perth, I found York to be an embodiment of my sentiment towards my nationhood — the distant and isolating landscape and its colonial legacy are at the forefront of my mind when I am in this place. There is a kind of morbid curiosity and pervasive loneliness that has affected these images which engage with a buried history of violence as well as my own emotional state at the time.