BEING AT THE heart of some of the world’s most fertile grain-growing land, Victoria’s Wimmera is a prosperous place. In 2022 plentiful rainfall and soaring commodity prices brought local farming families a particularly generous bounty – a once-in-a-generation boom. But even as this story of plenty plays out, there’s another of decline unfolding behind the scenes. Demographic changes mean many small towns that once dotted the Wimmera are fading. Some, such as tiny Antwerp, Kiata and Gymbowen, are close to disappearing. Others, including Nhill, Warracknabeal and Minyip, have suffered large population declines since their 1950s and ’60s heydays.
To capture the Wimmera’s declining towns and the people who live in and around them before it’s too late, I recently worked with a team of documentary photographers to produce . We found the people and places that feature in the book by following a 1950s railway map, created when Victoria’s railway network was
