Jeff Carter (1928-2010) was Australia’s great photographer of ‘ordinary’ Australians at work and leisure. When ‘asked to leave’ Melbourne Boys High School in his final year, 1946, he took to the road with a typewriter and camera, finding work in the high country with cattle, the subject of his first photo-story. In Rockhampton he met his first wife, a Norwegian sideshow motorcyclist; they had two children, Karen and Thor. He made a living from diverse jobs including tent boxing and trawling while producing stories and photographs for People, Pix, Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day; in due course he became editor of Outdoors and Fishing. In 1955, he took up with a new partner, Mare Thompson-Read-Young, who was henceforth his collaborator and the mother of his children Goth and Vandal. In 1962 they moved to Foxground, near Kiama, where he lived for the rest of his life, and died. Together they brought forth hundreds of stories, books and the television series Wild Country, while their property, Glenrock, became a haven for endangered and injured native animals. Carter’s photographs are held by most major Australian galleries and there are more than 700 of his images in the collection of the National Library. A major retrospective of his works was held at the State Library of New South Wales in 2011.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2017
© Robert McFarlane/Copyright Agency, 2021
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