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Richo started doing his winter missions a few years back during lockdown. “It was my walkabout thing to do,” he remembers of the time. He “let the world go mad” while he was posted up out there for weeks alone, and if there’s nobody there today, there were even less people back then. He spent his days that year whale watching and listening to Rufus Du Sol. “One arvo in particular; really calm, super glassy, no swell and I was sitting in the back of my car on the cliffs, and I could hear a swoosh. There were six southern rights below me. I ended up running along the top of the cliffs after them, singing and yelling. For a good mile I ran with them. It was an awesome experience. I ran along the cliffs for a good month I reckon, chasing the whales. I was actually pretty teary running alongside them. They were turning on their sides and looking up. I was sure they could hear me.”

“One of the reasons I get away I suppose is to have nothing on my mind at all,” he offered. “Out there I'm not thinking about bullshit. I'm just looking and observing and touching and embracing.” Over a few winters now the desert mission has become part spiritual reboot, part landscape immersion... but also part of what he’s always done. Richo grew up on the coast and has explored it all his life. The Bight and beyond is so vast though, he reckons in 40 years he’s only seen five per cent of it at best.

But while the area is dry and sparse and the human population is in single figures, the coastline teems with life if you know where to look. It also has ghosts, and if you’re out there alone for long enough in that ancient realm, you’ll not only sense them, you might also summon them, Overlook Hotel style. “It's hard to put into words,” he says of the experience, “but being out there I get these crazy feelings and emotions.”

To everyone at home in Elliston, Hayden is simply ‘Richo’ or ‘Rich’, but to people around the world who follow his photography, he’s better known as ‘SA Rips’. A career change at age 35 saw him switch from chicken farming and collecting native seeds, to following in the footsteps of his grandfather and picking up a camera.

The result in the years since has been a stunning body of work that’s captured a coastline few people truly ever see – the dusty red billiard table of the Australian continent falling abruptly into the Southern Ocean. Through Richo’s lens we’re seeing an ancient coast we’ve never known. It’s beautiful, but also a little unsettling. Like, where is everyone?

This year’s desert mission started in early June and took him onto country he’d never seen before. It took him way out there. He’d camp in an area for a couple of days, look around, then move on. “I think 12 days was the longest I went without seeing another human,” he says. “In those 12 days there was a lot of surfing on my own, a lot of exploring, a lot of observing. And did I get lonely? No, I didn't get lonely at all.”

There’s a quality with Richo’s photos where, if you imagine yourself in the frame, it feels like you’re being watched by some vaguely sinister presence. Richo’s solution has been to head so far west that the waves have no names, and there’s nobody up on the cliff.

“Every time you're surfing around home at Elliston or over at Sheringa, in the back of your mind, there's always cars on the cliff and people watching you. There are always people there, but this winter, some of the spots I was surfing for days on end I was completely alone. You sit there and come to the realisation there is nobody watching. I can be out surfing, screaming and bellowing out all kinds of yahoos. You’re just embracing it and loving life, surfing these beautiful waves. When I’m surfing, I notice I seem to concentrate a lot more on my style, too. I'm not worrying about anyone watching. I can just slow things right down and feel a lot more. Then there’s the sea life that swims around; the dolphins and seals and schools of salmon. It’s beautiful.”

Despite a run of fatal shark attacks back at home, surfing alone doesn’t bother him. He overcame his fear of big whites long ago, but surfing alone on an empty reef posed other dangers. “The biggest the left got was eight foot and I was eluding the barrel. I was shoulder-hopping. Getting dragged across the reef with nobody there wouldn’t be real good. I don't think anyone's ever surfed there. Who knows. It’s a long way off the road. Surfing that wave to myself was probably the highlight of my life I reckon.”

After waking up at dawn, he’d boil the kettle and then the day was his. When asked what he was actually doing out there, he replies, laughing, “Looking for my camera mostly. I’d put it somewhere on a bush, get sidetracked then walk around in circles for two hours looking for it.” He’d spend his days walking through a landscape that for the most part hasn’t changed in thousands of years, when a different highway cut through this place.

“You’d find these shell middens and you’d stand and start visualising what’s happened there in the past. They certainly must’ve lived a good life back then,” he says of the area’s original people, the Mirning. “They'd be travelling to get food, whether it's shellfish or whatnot, and they would stop at places with fresh water close by under the sand. How amazing though to be able to see all this firsthand, untouched – shells, rocks, carving stones. I was finding these granite carving stones in areas where there's no granite. I don't take anything or walk on anything or disturb anything. I might just pick up a carving stone and hold it, thinking that it could be thousands of years since the last hand picked it up. Maybe give it a kiss and put it back down.”

Rich holds the same reverence for the landscape itself. “Even building fires, some of the twisted old mallee stumps were so beautiful, I couldn't even touch them. I was finding other wood for these fires instead. It's real prehistoric scene you're melting into out there. It's unbelievable.”

But this old land baked in time is also brittle and always changing. Most of the time the change is slow and imperceptible as it wears down into dust. Occasionally however, it’s more violent. “I did observe a lot of cliff collapses along that stretch,” recalls Rich. “And we're talking serious cliff collapses. There are parts where it's collapsed right down to the water, and it wasn’t just one collapse, there was a few of them.”

His supplies in the truck would be topped up every week with a run to the roadhouse, which he’d supplement by fishing and diving. “I’d be eating fish and heaps of stuff off the reefs; shellfish, seaweed. I'm not a good fisherman, but I take a little rod and catch some salmon.”

It was while diving one day that he had his first human encounter of the trip. “I was sitting, listening to a little bit of music, and I turned around and a Fisheries Officer was right there standing next to me. ‘How are you doing, mate?’ He was the first person I saw in 12 days. He saw my wettie and flippers, but he soon realised I wasn't some serious abalone poacher. We got talking and ended up being mates in the end.”

By night, Richo would fire up the bush television, and when the campfire burned down, he’d curl up in the swag, slow the Italian EDM down to 80 beats per minute, look up at the stars and fall upwards into them. “I’d stargaze for a couple hours before I got sleepy. The stars are so bright out there. I remember a trip we’d done with Rasta a few years back, and he was talking about how we always look at the stars as these bright points and we join the dots together to make an image, whereas he looks at all the shadows between the stars. I'm always doing the same. It's quite interesting, all the stuff you start seeing. There was one bright light out on the horizon one night, which I can't explain. There was something in the way it moved. Whatever it was, I can't explain that.”

“Even when you close your eyes, when you're in your swag and whatever the conditions – some nights it's fucking blowing 50 knots out there – you close your eyes and you get all the visions of what you've seen through the day: the sunrises, sunsets, the birds, the ocean. That's a really nice feeling.”

This story features in the first print edition of Roaring Journals: order your copy here.