The landscape below us was afire with glittering light.  “Pretty, isn’t it?” asked my companion, Richard Green, an eccentric Englishman who has flown all over Australia using his personal helicopter as most people would a campervan.  Pretty? I’d lived in Australia for 30 years and never been so floored by a scene. Velvet mountains, rolling and fluid as poetry. Valleys and peaks, glinting with jewelled forests. The rhythm of a black, lazy river between them, sluicing back and forth between banks with gentle, metronomic precision. And all of it was just a 20-minute flight from Sydney.  Green tilted the helicopter and a rolling sea of forestry loomed large through the windowpane. “This is called Back Bimlow Walls,” he offered, gesturing at a particularly photogenic outcrop that ended abruptly in a sheer cliff. “Not many people come here.”  Green, I learned quickly, is a man of understatements. Back Bimlow Walls – part of the world heritage-listed Blue Mountains region – is not just less travelled. It’s strictly off limits to the general public, located in the kind of wild, mercurial terrain that has, in the past, nearly swallowed more than one brave visitor. No roads venture here; no footpaths, either. For decades, it’s remained an untouched sanctuary of ancient indigenous artworks, prolific wildlife and several endangered plant species; accessible only by chartering a helicopter. Or having one at your house.  Over the last 20 years, Green and his wife, Carol, have flown to some of the wildest, most remote reaches of Australia’s last frontiers, stopping wherever they like in their customised chopper – essentially a flying campervan, complete with a tent and a fridge. This particularly unique mode of transport – the pair often “park” atop mountains or inside craters – has resulted both in some remarkable experiences (“once we stopped to have lunch in a valley filled with wildflowers, and it was as though we had entered a far off secret garden,” Green recalled.) and also in an extensive library of photographs, the likes of which includes places that possibly no other human has ever set eyes on.  “The middle of Australia is still very wild,” Green said, casually manoeuvring his helicopter through the golden light. It’s another understatement. The Australian continent is roughly the same size as the United States, yet it’s the third least densely populated nation on Earth, with most of the 22 million-strong population living on its coastlines. Australia’s interior isn’t just wild – it’s almost entirely devoid of modern human life.  “Ninety percent of Australians will never even go there in their lives,” Green asserted, shaking his head. “We’re very lucky to have seen the things we have.”  Of course, there’s more to Green’s story than luck. A happy fortune in the flourishing computer industry meant retirement at the sprightly age of 49, and “the rest you can blame on Crocodile Dundee,” he half-joked. “My kids were almost grown up, my ex-wife and I were separating, and I saw what [Paul] Hogan was doing and thought ‘God, that’s for me’.”
Meet the photographer who travels in a helicopter turned campervan, capturing parts of Australia that most people have never seen.