ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

‘Legends of the High Country’ is the theme for the 2026 Man from Snowy River Bush Festival.   While similar to the 2025 Festival theme it differs from ‘The Man or the Myth’.  This time instead of it being myth it is a legend.  Legends are usually based on events that actually happened while myths can have an element of truth but many are entirely fiction.

Legends are usually great stories that inspire others to tell and retell or read and re-read them.  The 2026 theme encourages you to push the boundaries and write some of your best ever photo stories. Originality, good grammar and spelling are all important and your photograph needs to be well composed and eye-catching.    We want everyone who sees your photo story to remember it.   When enough people enter memorable photo stories, they are contributing to the Bush Festival to becoming the epicentre of legends and photo stories. And why not?  We are looking for photo stories that do our people, landscape and culture proud.

‘Legends of the High Country’ encourages you to go out and find legends for yourself.  Start the conversations, read some of the local histories and anthologies.  Go out and photograph a site or person or object that inspires a story.  Visit your local museum and find something that begs you to research and write its story. Or, go back through your photographs and find one about which you want to write.   Equally you might go out into the High Country and find a hut that inspires a hitherto unknown tale.

If you don’t live near the High Country, you could find the nearest high ground and let it suggest its story to you.  Sometimes the smallest hills have some of the biggest stories.  Think of our ancestors and the challenges they had to face before ever they could settle and build a home.  Make sure the story you tell is told in your own words and the photo you use is a photo you have taken yourself.   Art is a wonderful form of inspiration for writing.  Entrants may photograph their artwork and write their entries from the photograph.  The photograph can then be copied digitally and pasted into the entry above the writing component.  Ensure you use a high-resolution photograph.  The photograph and the written component must be the entrant’s own work and they must complement each other.  If the entrant wants to submit an entry inspired by someone else’s artwork, for example a sculpture, the entrant must photograph the work and acknowledge the artist or sculptor.   The written component can also be written as poetry. You can enter up to five photo stories in The Man from Snowy River Bush Festival Elyne Mitchell Photo Story Awards.

‘Legends of the High Country’ encompasses poetry, stories, art, photography and sculpture.  It is about the people who pit themselves against the challenges of the weather, the seasons and landscape.  Go out and build a relationship with your high country environment. Find those special stories and enjoy them so much that you want to write and illustrate them in photo stories.