Often the chase begins before sunrise. Or when the wind howls and the sea runs flecked with white. That is when Richard Bennett captures most eloquently the drama and the stress of yachts racing south through the roaring 40s to Hobart.
Every year since 1974, he has leaned from the open door of a fixed-wing aircraft, shooting his multi-award-winning aerial images of competitors in the Sydney-Hobart race. He also stalks the Melbourne-Hobart race boats making their way down Tasmania’s exposed and treacherous west coast; and the fleet racing from Launceston in northern Tasmania down the east coast. The fleets converge around Hobart’s Constitution Dock in culmination of the southern hemisphere’s great ocean sailing trifecta.
The rougher the weather, the better the photographs. Bennett is not fixated on sporting drama for its own sake even though he began yacht racing in early boyhood aboard the family’s modified Derwent-class keelboat. The 69-year-old native of southern Tasmania has always reached for a larger narrative. It derives from his life-long experience of bush and mountains and the vastness of the sea.
Some of Bennett’s ocean images may be com-pared with the best work of much-heralded Tasmanian landscape photographers who have portrayed that other remarkable domain of wilderness – the mountains, rivers and ancient forests. Bennett’s images are only partly about the boats.
Aboard the racers, below his aircraft, crews cluster at their deck stations or line the gunwales as human counterweights to the wind and waves. They absorb themselves in the tactical disciplines of monitoring the weather, navigating, steering, trimming and changing sails. They experience wet and cold, windburn, fatigue, illness and exhilaration. Many swear “never again” to subject themselves to the discomfort and occasional fear – at least until next year when they will have signed on once more. Each boat is its own pod, each crew a band of circumstantial intimates, everyone looking out to a near horizon.
Only later, having regained the land, can sailors see what Richard Bennett sees: the boats and beyond to the distant curvature of the Earth, the distinctive grandeur of Tasmania’s coastal cliffs, the wide sweep of wind and wave, and the ever-shifting patterns of light and shade. His is the ageless preoccupation with wilderness and human incursion. It has brought him international recognition says Bennett, “I want to explain the sea state, to show how the design of the boat copes with it, how the crew deals with it. We have beautiful light down here, being at 43º south, and I want to show the quality of the light. We have the most dramatic seascapes and dolerite cliffs and columns in the world. I want to use those for a backdrop.”
Speaking from the family’s home on Bruny Island, overlooking the cold and beautiful waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, the master photo-grapher – and enthusiastic cook – reflects on his philosophy and style. The camera, he observes, is like an oven – a dumb instrument. “You’ve got to put together all of your life’s experience to compose the image, and capture the atmosphere and the story, in an instant. The shot is only there for maybe half a second.”
Ever since his early teenage years, living on an apple orchard in the Huon Valley, Richard Bennett has used the lens to relate his experience of wildness. In the early 1960s, he said, Huon Valley locals were somewhat dismissive of the nearby Hartz Mountains (about 85 kilometres south-west of Hobart) because they were no good for cultivating crops or running cattle.
One day, when about 15 years of age, the boy saw the Hartz up close and his life’s perspective changed irrevocably. He could not believe how exciting were these mountains, shaped brutally by ancient glaciers, and which eventually became part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Young Bennett began bushwalking, attended mountaineering school in New Zealand and eventually joined Australia’s first overseas mountaineering expedition, to the Andes. In Peru, the group did 23 ascents on 18 mountains up to about 6,000 metres, 13 of which were first ascents.
From discovery there was a story to tell, so Bennett took up a camera and resolved to work as a photographer, not a farmer. Ever since, his visual sensibility has continued to grow from the fusion of his craft with lived experience. Even the decision to acquire a pilot’s licence was, substantially, in service of the photographic quest – to understand aircraft and their dynamics so that he could more effectively orchestrate his coverage of small boats at sea.
The 1984 Sydney-Hobart race provided another turning point. That year, of 151 starters, only 46 boats finished the race after their encounter with severe weather conditions in and around Bass Strait. As usual Bennett had taken to the air planning to rendezvous with the boats as they approached southern Tasmania. But the arrivals were sparse and the sky leaden. In the end, Bennett fulfilled a newspaper assignment by taking a shot of Constitution Dock, noteworthy for its emptiness. That year he learned not to assume that the fleet would even turn up.
“I realised I had missed an opportunity,” he says. “There had been a storm and I had been here [in the south] waiting for the boats. I should have been up there shooting the storm. From then onwards I went hunting for storms.” He would do so for 14 years before finding the next big one.
One boat that survived the 1984 storm, Shogun, did come into Bennett’s view at a place and a time that enabled him to create one of his most memorable images. Late in the evening, Shogun carried her red, yellow and blue spinnaker while running towards Tasman Island. The saturnine tones of cloud and cliff and sea in the Tasman Passage looked wintry and forbidding. Bennett’s aircraft circled for 20 minutes waiting for Shogun to pass the spectacular view through the passage while hoping that the quality of light would hold. It did and his image won the Ilford trophy as the highest-scoring in the Australian Professional Photography Awards.
When Bennett found his big storm, during the 1998 Sydney-Hobart, it was rather more than he had anticipated. Over two days of Force 10 winds and more (at times about 160 kilometres per hour), along with towering waves, six sailors died and 55 were rescued from disabled boats or life rafts. Bennett took shots of boats in the fearsome conditions before his aircraft diverted to join some 40 others in Australia’s biggest-ever sea rescue exercise.
What must it be like, down there, in that maelstrom? How could he chase storms and not know? Bennett pondered the truism that the great images come from putting all of life’s experience and intuition into the viewfinder and that momentary snap of the shutter. In that respect, although his beard and mane had whitened with advancing middle age, he still lacked experience of the tempest.
Two years after the deadly Bass Strait storm, the photographer joined the late Dr Joe Cannon and John Wedd aboard Avalon of Tasman, sailing from Cape Town to Fremantle. The retired medical practitioner, then aged 77, was completing a global circumnavigation aboard the 35-foot ketch. On May 12, 2001, they set out to cross the southern Indian Ocean, which scientific research has found to be the most consistently windy and rough ocean region in the world.
By the mid-point of what became a 63-day voyage, Avalon of Tasman had weathered several storms in which the wind had exceeded 50 knots. During one, she sailed for 72 hours carrying only a small storm jib. In another, Joe Cannon hove-to in extreme conditions, watching as the barometric pressure fell alarmingly. Bennett recalled that he could see nothing but tumbling white water around the ketch.
Then, on June 11, out of this already tor-tured seascape tumbled a white-water giant. It dumped upon the ketch, destroying the cockpit dodger and other gear, and breaking two of Joe Cannon’s ribs as he was smashed against the steering wheel pedestal. Avalon of Tasman capsized, and Cannon cracked more ribs when thrown back against a winch. His life vest inflated and, with safety harness still connected, pushed him up to the capsized cockpit floor.
Down below, Bennett catapulted from his bunk into a bulkhead. All about him seemed silent after days of deafening storm conditions. He became disoriented and looked around but could not find anything. He was getting wet as Avalon rolled beneath the wave and seawater sloshed into the cabin. After moments of slow motion perception, Bennett realised that he had landed on the cabin roof.
Just as Joe Cannon thought he could hold his breath no longer, the yacht began to right herself with masts horizontal to the sea. Suddenly she flicked upright and he found himself up-ended in the cockpit. Despite considerable damage, including the loss of radio communications and an almighty mess down below, Avalon’s rig remained intact and she could struggle on to Fremantle. But, for days following the capsize, the wind strength reached an estimated 70 knots and the seas more than 15 metres.
As Bennett said later to Joe Cannon, for almost 10 days they had experienced conditions akin to those that ravaged the Sydney-Hobart fleet in 1998 – ferocious, shrieking wind and monstrous waves.
Cannon recorded that, immediately following the capsize, Richard Bennett began to photograph the shambles despite having sustained a badly bruised and abraded right arm. As the storm chaser observed drolly, when speaking with me on Bruny Island: “I got to know the ocean quite well.”
Geoff Heriot is an independent consultant to media organisations internationally, and a former ABC senior executive and foreign correspondent, who moved to Hobart a decade ago with his wife Rosemary Darragh (who photographed Richard Bennett for this feature). Forty South published Geoff’s critically well-reviewed book, In the South: Tales of Sail & Yearning. Otherwise he researches and writes on media and international politics. Geoff also chairs the board of Tasmania’s literary magazine, Island.
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Each Christmas to New Year since 1974, Richard has taken dramatic aerial photographs of yachts competing in the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. The result is an extensive body of work – one man’s creative view, but also a magnificent visual compendium of the history of one of the world’s most famous yacht races. Richard’s latest book Across Five Decades presents the story of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race over the past five decades, through the eyes of a master photographer. Learn more at www.richardbennett.com.au and Richard Bennett Photography.