…I supposed he’d meet some interesting characters in his line of work. He agreed, “I’ve had a gun pointed at me a few times! One time I even came away three grand better off”…

With a lifelong passion for both the birds and the bees, dating all the way back to his childhood growing up at Clontarf Boys’ Town, apiarist Wally Kerkoff is well respected in bird and conservation circles. He has spent over 30 years designing and constructing artificial logs for placement in the Carnaby’s Black Cockatoo breeding areas of Moora and Mogumber in WA. With the shortage of suitable natural nesting trees, this work has been essential in building numbers of the endangered Carnaby’s.⠀⠀⠀⠀

Most of the characters I’ve photographed along the way have been discovered after we’ve arrived somewhere. Lazy Les was someone we’d heard about over the years and we had our fingers crossed that he’d be around when we visited gold prospecting friends of ours near Leonora.

While we were hanging out with Spags, we also met Bryan. Spags seems not to have a care in the world. His mate Bryan though has the weight of the world on his shoulders right now after losing everything in a fire a month ago. Bryan had been living in his caravan inside a big shed at Spags’ place. He was working out bush when he got a call from a mate to say the shed had burnt to the ground. “It was April Fool’s Day”, Bryan said “I thought they were pulling my leg.”

We called into the CRC as soon as we reached The Junction, to see if they could suggest a great local character to perhaps photograph. “Spags! Go over the bridge, you can’t miss his house…it’s got a boat on the roof”…

We set off on our meander through WA with no set time frame and no planned route. There was however a couple of places we knew we wanted to go which gave us a rough skeleton of a plan when we left home on the south coast of WA. Wooleen Station was one of those places. We’ve visited Wooleen a few times before, in fact we photographed Frances and David’s wedding a couple of years ago…