Chris Round, Fallen Tree, Koonya, Tasmania (LANDSCAPE & ENVIRONMENT 2025)

Taken on medium format film amongst the ancient forests in Koonya, on the Tasman Peninsula, this woodland looms as a living vestige to a land shaped over millennia. The morning light, with dispersing fog, the fallen timber calls to mind early settler paintings – austere and reverent, loaded with both awe and melancholy. But this is a landscape haunted by a complex past. The environment is loaded with the memory of violent displacement of Indigenous peoples and the harsh legacy of nearby penal colonies – histories of suffering that shadow the frontier gaze. The image lingers with this tension between ecological endurance and human scars, between timeless wild and the darkness it has witnessed.

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