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Audio description
1 minute 41 seconds
Jon (Jon Muir) by Ian Darling, created in 2008. An inkjet print on paper measuring 100 cm high and 125 cm wide with a simple fine wooden frame.
A colour photograph capturing adventurer Jon Muir from the waist up, dishevelled, looking straight at us, as if turning to look at the camera while hiking across an empty, dry salt-lake.
The background is divided into horizontal halves, the sky, an ethereal blue and the earth, a warm tanned beige dappled and dusted in white.
Jon, middle aged and weathered, stands in the centre. He has long brown unkempt hair, tied loosely and low, behind his head. His eyes are wide open with powder blue zinc smeared unevenly across his cheeks, nose and around his eyes approximating the shape of goggles. He has a thick moustache, his mouth partially open.
Spilling out from beneath his long bushy beard is a collection of leather-thonged necklaces from which hang bones, an animal’s tooth, a blue stone and a compass.
He is wearing a tan, long sleeved, collared shirt, unbuttoned at the top and a black and purple backpack on his back.
Audio description written by Marina Neilson and voiced by Krysia Kitch
The Gallery’s Acknowledgement of Country, and information on culturally sensitive and restricted content and the use of historic language in the collection can be found here.
inkjet print on paper (frame: 120.2 cm x 143.3 cmdepth 4.5 cm, image: 100.0 cm x 125.0 cm)
Jon Muir OAM (b. 1961) is an adventurer and sustainability advocate. He has gained pioneering solo records in climbing the south side of Mount Everest and traversing the Kedarnarth Peaks, and travelled alone to the South and North Poles without huskies or mechanised vehicles. In 2001 he and his dog Seraphine began a journey from Port Augusta in South Australia to Burketown on the Queensland north coast. Dragging a sled, taking 128 days on foot and covering 2500 kilometres, Muir became the first person to complete a solo and unassisted walk across the Australian continent. Close to starvation when he arrived, he recorded his experiences of the walk – including the death of Seraphine – in a video diary. The footage was made into the documentary Alone Across Australia (2003), directed by Muir and Ian Darling AO.
In 2008 Muir and Darling walked from Kings Canyon to Uluru. As Darling recalls: 'One evening after a 20km walk, Jon suggested we continue and cross Lake Amadeus in the light of the moon … His face reflects a sense of pure excitement and raw energy after another magical day in the wilderness. Jon is at one with the environment; his face still covered with zinc cream accumulated over the week's walk.'
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