Lilli Boisselet, Conversations By The Creek with Alfie. (PEOPLE 2021)

You are coming apart at the seams. Bursting threads with anguish and pain and loneliness in learning this rotten truth. You feel sweat slipping an intricate trail under your breasts as you lay in the tent each night, a stickiness you remember from Madagascar; an uncomfortable heat of privilege and naivety that can’t be washed away in the coolness of the creeks. Some nights you cry, inconsolable. For hours, a sliding tide of grief and guilt; compunction that will not abate. You knew nothing; in fact, less than nothing. What you knew was swamped in falsity and historical context generated by ruthless victors; a slimy dark liquid sloshing undetected through a nation’s veins. You smell eucalyptus each morning in the calm breeze; it’s a cleanse, a baptism of the anguish to push forward in sharing stories and positivity for the future. But you are uncomfortable; itching mosquito bites and sunburn and a sore back from sleeping on the ground for weeks and photographing sixteen hour days. But more than this, you are mentally uncomfortable. For the first time you are sitting opposite Elders, enjoying their hospitality, looking in their eyes reflecting the darkness and fire as they tell you their ancestors stories. The vile paradox you feel, that you have, just here, just now, ‘arrived on their land’. A seeding of understanding in your bones of this countries’ honest history; and a cumbersome acknowledgment of how little you made the time to listen before. And if it’s true, that some people toss you so far from who you are, that you will spend the rest of your life clawing your way back to neutral, then, Alfie has tossed you, in such a tender way, into blinding sunlight. Cape York, Australia.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.