The Future of Brightness 2: After the Unthinkable
The Future of Brightness 2 - “Brightness isn’t naïve—sometimes it’s what we reach for after the unthinkable…” Ralph Kerle
I’m still trying to make sense of what happened in Bondi Beach, Sydney this week. I’m probably as confused as everyone.
I can’t get my head around how a father and son — regardless of colour, creed, or religion — could join together in something so brutal that it destroys not only the lives of the people they killed or maimed, but also their own lives and the lives of their families. This simply doesn’t feel like Australia.
Signing the condolence book in Manly, I felt a familiar national reflex: the instinct to stand together, to look after our own — and, honestly, the blunt desire many of us feel right now to ban guns completely. Not as a slogan, but as a protective impulse. A collective “never again”.
Then, this afternoon, something genuinely strange — almost serendipitous — happened.
While I was searching for a new work to release this week, an image I hadn’t looked at since the bushfire horrors of 2020 suddenly popped back up: The Future of Brightness. Not planned. Not searched for. It simply reappeared in the archive at a moment when the country feels unsettled and bruised yet again.
Back then I named it The Future of Brightness because it seemed to hold two realities at once: the harshness and shock of fire… and also a stubborn, glowing sense of the land — ancient Australia, the wide country, girt by sea — still there, still bigger than us, still carrying on.
When I returned to look at the series as a whole, the next image surfaced beside it — a work I’ve now released as The Future of Brightness 2. It carries elements that are hard for me to ignore. There’s an epicness in it — awe, scale, and a kind of luminous heat — and beneath that, something that feels deeply Australian: togetherness, mateship, resilience, and a clear-eyed optimism that refuses to vanish, even when we’re shaken.
I also can’t look at this work without acknowledging Tim Storrier’s influence on me — not in imitation, but in spirit. Storrier’s love of the Australian landscape, his insistence on its authority and its emotional weight, has always resonated. The land in his work is never just backdrop; it’s witness, pressure, endurance. That way of holding the landscape as something vast and morally present has stayed with me, and it’s part of how I understand what my own images are doing when they arrive at moments like this.
Maybe that’s part of the old story we carry — the sunburnt country, the myth of Gallipoli — not as nostalgia, but as a reminder of who we can be when things go wrong.
I’m offering The Future of Brightness 2 as a meditation: on our harsh and beautiful land, on our human tragedies, and on the light we try to protect — together — as we find a way forward.
