This low key website (blog and galleries) has been designed by Gary Sauer-Thompson to construct and publicly share a  project based around his journeys primarily to, within and  from,  northern South Australia. The assumption  was that I would  be  making more than one long  journey  to the north after the initial trip to the Northern Territory, and that these journeys would primarily be to northern South Australia.

Initially ‘journeys’ meant roadtrips — to and from a location eg., to Lajamanu.    Journey’s  also means walking the country in northern South Australia. Walking refers to walking the country with camels, the ARPA bushwalkers and ourselves.

The first walk with camels was a 12 day walk  in the Northern Flinders Ranges in 2018 from Umberatana to Mt Hopeless.  The second camel trek  was  in 2021 from Blinman to Lake Frome. The first walk in 2021 with the ARPA bushwalkers was in  the Vulkathunha-Gammon Ranges National Park  with a  base at Balcanoona. We did a second walk there in 2022 ourselves from our base at Nudlamutana Hut.

The central reference for the project’s title —The Long  Road to the North — is to  the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, who  went on a journey in 1689 that would form the basis of his most famous work: Oku no Hosomichi or The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

This  haibun  – a combination of prose and haiku – is one of the greats of classical Japanese literature.  The  text tells the story of Basho’s wandering from Edo (now Tokyo) into the country’s interior (the Tohoku region located in the northeast part of Honshu) and the hardships he faced there.

The  project’s title,  The  Long Road to the North, is also a reference to Richard Flanagan’s 2014 novel,  The Narrow Road to the Deep North,   which takes its title  from Basho’s The Narrow  Road to the North.

The emphasis of The Long  Road to the North is on photography (film and digital) as opposed to prose and haiku.

The project is an evolving one as the journeys to northern South Australia are difficult because of the geographic distances and the semi-arid terrain. After the initial roadtrip to Lajamanu in 2016, it became centred on photography and walking between 2018-2022. In 2023 there was a shift back to roadtrips starting with one to the Eyre Peninsula.