Trent Parke recounts his feeling, even before setting out, that Australia is a deeply dark and mysterious country where something is wrong: wild animals, racial tension between white and Black Australians, alcohol and drug abuse, the harsh treatment of women, droughts, violent storms and poverty. Alongside a certain freedom there is a persistent feeling of suffocation; country people live by norms that city people will never understand, norms that have allowed them to survive for so long, instinctive rather than malicious, simply a way of being. He senses that the country has reached the end of an era: the countryside may still be intact, but innocence has gone.