Every 10 Kms: After the Fires
A Book About A Book
Fragments, journeys and the reconstruction of place
Jon Riethmuller · 2026
A practice-led photographic research project. Memory / Place / Loss / Regeneration / The Landscapes of the Interior.
Background
Summer 2006–2007
On 1 December 2006, lightning strikes across north-eastern Victoria and Gippsland ignited numerous fires in the forests of the Great Dividing Range. Over the following weeks the fires expanded and merged, becoming known as the Great Divide Complex.
For sixty-nine days fire moved through mountainous forest, farmland and small communities. More than a million hectares were burned. Roads were closed, properties destroyed, livestock lost and communities waited for approaching fire fronts.
Around Mansfield, The Age documented firefighters working among burned forest and defending houses at Tolmie. At Toongabbie, one resident described a neighbouring paddock as “just roaring” and the experience as feeling “like a war zone.”
When the fires were finally contained in February 2007, the emergency was ending. Its traces remained—in burned forest, altered roadsides, damaged properties and communities beginning the process of recovery.
On 4 March 2007, I left Brunswick East and drove into this landscape.
At every ten kilometres along the road, I made a photograph.
“It felt like a war zone.” Kate Smith, Toongabbie, December 2006 reported in The Age / Sydney Morning Herald
Introduction
Revisiting Every 10 Kms: After the Fires
I came back to this project by accident.
While searching my image archive for photographs to use in another project, I discovered that the original digital files for Every 10 Kms: After the Fires had quietly disappeared. The work itself was not lost. Copies of the artist's book were held in three library collections. Yet the disappearance of the files produced an unexpected sense of absence.
Nearly twenty years had passed since the original journey. What had begun as a response to a recently altered landscape had itself become historical.
My enquiry led me to the State Library of Victoria, which agreed to digitise its copy of the artist's book. Through that process, I encountered the work again—not through the original image files, but through photographs of the physical book. That distinction became important. It offered the possibility of approaching the project again, from the perspective of the artist I am now rather than attempting to reconstruct the artist I was then.
Yet within those photographs another image appears in fragments, accumulating across the sequence. Documentary observation is therefore interrupted by something less certain: an image forming in the mind.
We never encounter an image—or a landscape—without bringing something of ourselves to it. Experience, culture and memory overlay what we see. They can help us understand, but they can also prevent us from seeing differently. Returning to this work after almost twenty years makes that particularly apparent. We can look back and see forward at the same time.
The form of the original work was influenced by a Pilgrim's Map I had encountered at the State Library of Victoria. It was not simply a geographic map. It pictured a journey and the stopping places along the way. Looking back, the journey I made with my friend Timothy Winter, who drove that day, also seems to have had something of the character of a pilgrimage. We travelled into a landscape recently transformed by fire without knowing precisely what we would encounter.
As we travelled, we talked about the fires, our affection for this country and our concern for the recovery of its communities and landscape. We talked about fire in Australia: climate, increasingly dry and hot summers, the management of undergrowth, and the complicated relationship between fire and the Australian environment. These conversations accompanied the photographs and became part of the experience from which the original work emerged.
This new artist's book does not attempt to recreate or replace Every 10 Kms: After the Fires. Nor is it a facsimile.
It is a book about a book.
The images reproduced here are photographs of the original artist's book. They retain evidence of its paper, folds, construction and material presence. I am looking at an object made nearly twenty years ago and asking what it means to encounter that object again from another point in a life and a practice.
The landscape has changed. The communities have changed. I have changed.
The original book remains.
And now I am looking at it again.
The Journey
A photograph was made at each ten-kilometre interval along the road.
The Original Book
The Photographic Sequence
A photograph was made at every ten-kilometre interval along the journey. Within each image appears a fragment of another photograph, as though reflected in the car window. Across the sequence, these fragments gradually assemble the final image.
Memory
"Objects remind us of our embodied being in time, place and space."
Margaret Gibson Objects of the Dead, "Photographs", p. 82
Looking
A photograph does not hold memory still. What we encounter within it changes as time changes the person who is looking.
After Margaret Gibson Objects of the Dead, "Photographs", p. 86
Fragments
Recording does not overcome forgetting. What survives are fragments, separated from the continuum from which they came.
After Margaret Gibson Objects of the Dead, "Photographs", p. 86
Presence/Absence
The photograph holds presence and absence together. What appears before us is also evidence of something no longer available to us in the same way.
After Margaret Gibson Objects of the Dead, "Photographs", pp. 88-89
The Object
The photograph is not only an image. It is also an object that survives: something held, kept, encountered and returned to through time.
After Margaret Gibson Objects of the Dead, "Photographs", pp. 90-91
Remembering
The photograph does not give the past back intact. It provides a place from which remembering can begin.
After Margaret Gibson Objects of the Dead, "Photographs", pp. 92-93
What Remains
When what was photographed has disappeared or changed, the photograph remains—not as the past itself, but as an object through which absence can be encountered.
After Margaret Gibson Objects of the Dead, "Photographs", pp. 98-101
Against Oblivion
Photographs and other recording technologies express a desire to hold something against disappearance—to have a trace where forgetting might otherwise prevail.
After Margaret Gibson Objects of the Dead, "Photographs", p. 102
Looking Again
Nearly twenty years separate the making of Every 10 Kms: After the Fires from my encounter with it now. Looking again is not simply an act of recollection. Time has altered the work because it has altered the person looking at it. What once seemed primarily a record of a journey through a fire-affected landscape now also speaks to me about memory, survival, objects and the ways in which meaning accumulates.
I think here of Margaret Olley and of her repeated return to familiar rooms and objects. The things she painted were rarely remarkable in themselves: flowers, tables, vessels, fruit, books, the accumulated contents of a lived-in room. Their significance came partly through duration—through living with them, returning to them and looking again. I recognise something of that process in my relationship with this book. The object has remained substantially unchanged, while my way of seeing it has not.
There is also something of Joseph Cornell in the way I now understand the work. Cornell collected fragments and placed them into new relationships: photographs, maps, printed matter and ordinary found things transformed through selection and arrangement. Returning to Every 10 Kms, I find myself undertaking a related act. I am no longer simply looking at the photographs. I am looking at fragments within photographs, photographs within pages, pages within a concertina, and the concertina within its box.
Two kinds of fragments now inhabit this book.
In the original work, fragments of another photograph appear as apparent reflections in the car window. They belong to the present tense of the journey. As the landscape passes outside the window, another image gradually forms within it: a simulacrum of the mind thinking about the fires and attempting to imagine what had happened to this landscape. Across the sequence these reflections accumulate until they materialise as the fully formed photograph of the fire-affected area around the bridge.
The fragments introduced into this new book belong to another time. Nearly twenty years later, they emerge from my encounter with the surviving artist's book. They are less like reflections than fading memories: partial images that seem familiar but resist complete recovery. Removed from their photographs and surrounded by empty space, they enact the attempt to bring something indistinct back into focus—to resolve an image in the mind.
One sequence moves towards the formation of an image. The other attempts to recover an image that is disappearing.
This distinction brings me to Margaret Gibson's writing about photographs, objects, memory and absence in Objects of the Dead. Gibson's writing questions the idea that photographs simply preserve the past intact. Photographs participate in memory, but memory is neither fixed nor complete. Photographs remain as material traces through which the absent can be encountered again, even as the distance between the present and the photographed moment continues to grow.
This has particular resonance for Every 10 Kms. The original digital photographs have disappeared from my archive, yet the artist's book survived. Copies entered library collections and remained there when my own files did not. When the State Library of Victoria digitised its copy, the work returned to me not as the original digital images but as photographs of an object that had endured.
The distinction is important. The folds, edges, paper, joins and imperfections visible in these reproductions are not obstacles between the reader and the original photographs. They are evidence of the life of the book itself. The book has acquired a history independent of the moment in which I made it. What began as a container for photographs has itself become a photographic object— and, through its survival, a bearer of memory.
The original digital files might once have seemed to constitute the primary archive and the book their material expression. Their disappearance unsettles that hierarchy. The surviving book is no longer simply a reproduction of photographs stored elsewhere. It has become the material object through which those photographs can now be encountered.
This is where Gibson's thinking becomes especially significant for me. The photograph does not return an event to us. Nor does an object preserve memory unchanged. Instead, what survives provides a point from which remembering can begin again.
The new fragments operate in this uncertain space. They do not reconstruct the original photographs faithfully, nor are they intended to. Like fading memories, they offer pieces: colour, texture, bark, road, sky, railing, fire-scarred vegetation—details that seem to promise recognition without ever returning the past in its entirety. Their incompleteness is therefore not a deficiency. It is the condition through which remembering takes place.
Perhaps this is what looking again ultimately means.
We do not recover the past intact. We encounter what has survived of it and construct relationships between those remains.
The landscape photographed in 2007 has continued to change. The communities through which Timothy and I travelled have continued their lives. Forest has burned, regenerated and been altered again. And I have continued to make photographs, objects and books.
The original journey cannot be repeated.
The original files cannot presently be recovered.
But the book remains.
And through it, fragments of that journey continue to return.
Colophon
All photographs were made using a Canon 5D Mark II and a Hasselblad 500 C/M Film Camera
Driver: Timothy Winter
This publication forms part of The Living Archive Publications, an ongoing series exploring photography, memory, identity and the emotional architecture of everyday life.
First Edition, 2026
Copyright
Every 10 Kms: A Book About A Book. Text © Jon Riethmuller 2026. All photographs © Jon Riethmuller.
No part of this publication may be reproduced without written permission of the artist except for the purposes of review or scholarly research.
Published by The Living Archive Publications, Cairns, Queensland, Australia.