Time ticks slowly into the hours in a corner of country Victoria, as photographer Georgie Mann holds her position. She fends off an army of flies as she waits for the light over the landscape to become perfect: warm enough to make the wings of the galahs glow as they roar overhead, but soft enough to translate the magic she feels into digital form. “I’ve always thought that inland Australia is where the heart and soul of Australia lies,” Georgie says, “the toughness, the fragility, the deep authenticity - I feel them all here.”

It’s been almost 40 years since Ingrid Hatton first cast eyes on Dareen, a homestead 54 kilometres along a mostly dirt road from Eidsvold, in the North Burnett region of Central Queensland. She was a city teenager dating country boy Paul, and he’d brought her home to the family property for the first time. “It was really rundown, but I always felt I belonged,” Ingrid recalls. “It sounds stupid, but when I came here, I felt like I was home.”

Dad stood by the rusted front gate hands on hips, head tilted towards the dark clouds. He watched the sky as a storm circled our boundary, then drifted away. Inside, everyone was opening presents, but the mood was restrained. It was Christmas Day 2019 and it hadn’t rained properly at home for four years. Four dry seasons of dead and dying grass, stock offloaded and a dire shortage of the one thing that kept the whole show running: water.