Tobacco Road

When he left school in 1946, Melbourne-born Jeff Carter chose the path of an itinerant worker, writer and photographer. He travelled widely throughout Australia, documenting the fascinating characters and the everyday hardships and pleasures of outback life. As he said, ‘The way country battlers toiled and lived fascinated me’.1 He sold his stories and photographs to national and international magazines, including Picture Post, LIFE and National Geographic. He also published nearly twenty books on Australian life, and during the early 1970s he filmed and produced the award-winning documentary series, Wild Country.

In 1956 Carter visited the Ovens Valley in Victoria, where many Italian migrants had settled to work on tobacco farms. There he came across the scene captured in this, his most famous, photograph, in which two women and a young boy are trying to push a car stuck on a muddy back road. It is an amusing image, yet it epitomises much about rural existence – the strength of spirit and resilience in the face of adversity.

Julie Robinson, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs