There is something of a ghost story in Gumsucker. Deserted places, bodies that seem to wait, a nature that is no longer entirely wild but not yet fully domesticated. Rory King’s book, published in late 2025 by Charcoal Press, inhabits this uneasy zone, where landscapes still bear the marks of a world in the process of disappearing.
Based in Canberra, Rory King conceived Gumsucker as a slow passage through Australian territories shaped by abandonment, isolation, and the irreversible transformation of the land. The title itself refers to an old history: “Gumsucker was an archaic term used to describe Australians born of European settlers,” King recalls, also invoking The Gumsucker’s Dirge, a 19th-century poem that already lamented “the gradual erasure of wilderness as the frontier advanced.”
The images in the book were made over several years, across rural, forested, and mining regions. Precarious dwellings, immobile caravans, abandoned machinery appear alongside faces—often young—caught in a form of silent withdrawal. Nothing is spectacular. Everything feels restrained, almost fragile. Rory King speaks of a body of work born from a sense of loss: “Gumsucker mourns the disappearance of an untamed Australian nature, gnawed away by civilisation, which domesticates both the land and the mind.”
This disappearance is not limited to landscapes alone. It also affects bodies and lives. The human figures emerge as solitary presences, often vulnerable, above all through their gaze. King never presents them as symbols, but as individuals rooted in a specific territory, at a particular moment. “These are solitary photographs,” he says, “but with warmth and a form of connection at their edges.”
The book is built in fragments: a dense forest, a bare torso leaning toward the camera, a woman seated on an unmade bed, a rocky landscape scored with scars. Each image seems to speak to the next without ever imposing a linear narrative. Rory King embraces this patient approach: “Through a slow gaze, I try to hold together strangers, loved ones, and raw nature in a fragile kind of embrace.”
If Gumsucker evokes the end of a myth—that of a pristine, untouched Australia—the book is never entirely despairing. A discreet, almost intimate form of resistance runs through it. “There is a struggle here, a resilience in the face of modern disillusionment,” the photographer explains, referring to places where gestures, bonds, and attachments still endure.
This tension between disappearance and persistence runs through all of Rory King’s work. A former fellow of the National Gallery of Australia, he has developed a practice attentive to territories and to those who inhabit them. His previous book, Plumwood (2022), already explored forms of withdrawal and relationships to landscape.
Published in a carefully produced edition of 1,000 copies, the landscapes photographed by Rory King do not appear solely Australian. They become witnesses to a broader relationship to a world in crisis. Yet the book never turns into a manifesto. It remains grounded in human scale, faithful to what the photographer describes as a desire for connection: “A search for deep connection, despite isolation.”
Gumsucker, by Rory King, is published by Charcoal Press and available for $75.
