Hunted

 "Hunted 1": a vandal's safari

 The base image for "Hunted 2" and "Hunted 3"

 "Hunted 2": like a monochrome infrared ... the birds flying

past were in the perfect place

"Hunted 3"

The two elephants outside the now closed Raj Mahal retail centre in Woolgoolga on the northern NSW coast are quite the tourist attraction — so-much-so that a local made it very clear he wouldn’t cheapen himself to photograph them like the average tourist.

Locals, it seems, prefer to vandalise the statues. The elephants were already trunk-less and covered in aqua-blue graffiti when we visited in April, and a month later one had a basketball-sized hole in its shoulder and scorch marks from a fire lit between its front legs.

Anyway, jibes about tourists didn’t stop me whipping my camera out. I love the tragedy the nets add to the sculptures, and the photomontage and infrared effects I got from playing with layer effects in Photoshop.

You’d simply never guess these images were taken in Australia.