By Jacinta Hannaford
September 2007

McManus grew up in Kalangadoo, a small region in South Australia in the heart of red gum country. It was footy, not photography, that occupied his time as a teenager. With no darkroom or photography classes offered by his school, McManus had no inkling of his future. It wasn’t until he worked as a wool classer and occasional sheep shearer in many shearing sheds throughout australia that McManus found his calling for photography.

Living the shearer’s life awoke a passion to capture the day-to-day toil and camaraderie of his fellow workers. Frame by frame, he strove to portray the poetry he saw in their lives in the outback. “I’ve always enjoyed the visual aspects of life,” he says. “There’s a very aesthetic and romantic lifestyle to working in a shearing shed.” But it was after a year spent travelling the east coast of Africa, photographing its wonderous life and landscapes that McManus decided he wanted to make a career of photography. Once that was decided, he enrolled in a photography course in Adelaide, and has not looked back since.

After working, travelling and snapping his way around some of the outback, McManus left Australia to travel and photograph the world, indulging his interest in photo-documentation. He worked for a number of broadsheet and tabloid newspapers across Britain and Argentina before starting his first shift for The Sunday Age almost two years ago. His first assignment was to cover The Falls music and arts festival on New Year’s Eve in Lorne. “Landing the front page picture in the next day’s paper kicked things off rather nicely.”

While there might be some tense moments during assignments, McManus says those times are outweighed by the truly inspirational people that he gets to meet on the job. One particular moment that sticks in his mind was hearing Michael Long and Pat Dodson speak at the Long Walk, an event that aims to bring indigenous issues to the forefront. McManus feels privileged to be able to photograph people who inspire. “It was just a real pleasure to hear people speak so passionately about black-white relations in Australia. It’s best summed up by michael long’s great quote: ‘This isn’t about indigenous Australia and white Australia — this is about all Australia’.”

McManus’ true passion is taking pictures of people as they go about their daily lives. sometimes that particular love can spill over into his work. While driving back to Melbourne after a holiday in South Australia, McManus passed a drover moving his herd of cattle along the side of the road. After stopping to take some photographs, McManus asked the drover what he was doing. “He had bought all these cattle in northern South Australia and planned to bring them to south-western Victoria, which is normally a drought resistant area. He was going to fatten them up and sell them.

“After it didn’t rain and the drought hit the area, he didn’t have any feed on his property to fatten the cattle, so he had to take them out on the roads to graze on the roadside grass. Otherwise he was going to be financially ruined.

“He had lots of run-ins with shire authorities, rangers, motorists and local farmers. It seemed that his healthy disrespect for authority and his larrikin cowboy attitude helped him through these tough times. He was one of the great characters and quintessential Australians that l’ve met since I’ve been working at The Age.”

On returning to work, McManus told The Sunday Age picture editor, Simon O’Dwyer, of his encounter. he was sent back the very next day to spend the night taking more pictures of Craig Porter, the drover, for The Sunday Age.