It looks like this old caravan has no purpose, doesn’t it? The funny thing is, when I looked inside it, it was still somewhat functional. Oh, it was dusty and rusty and full of cobwebs, but once it had a decent clean, it could have been used. So what is its purpose now?
I found this caravan in a little town near the Victorian/South Australian border – Meringur. It lives at a Pioneer Village. I’m not entirely sure that the pioneers would have used a caravan like it, but here it is nonetheless. Once I wandered around the village, I noticed that there was this side-section, where it looked like old stuff had simply been dumped. Perhaps it has, but I found a great amount of beauty in that dumped stuff. There was a shack that leaned further than the tower in Pisa, a series of AGAs that had rusted out years ago, fridges that had definitely seen colder days, bicycles, and amongst it all, this caravan.
Its purpose originally was obviously to house people on travels. It appears to be mostly purposeless now, and sits in the dust. I felt that for me, it had a great purpose – it contained a lot of that derelict beauty that I seek. I found it to be a thing of the best broken-down aesthetics. It’s round, it’s dirty, it’s been stripped of its original skin, it still contained a bed with linen and curtains on the inside – a sign of abandoned life. It felt as though the owner just couldn’t keep going with it, and so left it to be attacked by the elements.
It’s exactly what I look for in my photography – the forgotten things.
Like an opera singer past her prime, this van is clutching to its dignity, no matter how raddled it is.
I like that way of seeing it… It had a lot of dignity, in fact