Cover Art: A Sydney Phone Booth at Night 1997

As noted in the essay by Demelza Hall in this issue, this newspaper photograph by Quentin Jones figures significantly in Alexis Wright's "After the Storm," where the character Gibbo, an Indigenous man from a remote community, carries a newspaper clipping of it "like a talisman."

I have been working as a professional photographer for over twenty-five years, working for Fairfax Media for publications including the Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend Magazine, and the Sydney Magazine.

I have had cucumber sandwiches with Queen Elizabeth II; I have a fossil site named after me at Riversleigh in Queensland (Quentin's Quarry); I have landed on the deck of the USS Independence aircraft carrier; and I have been under the Pacific Ocean in an Australian submarine. In the year 2000, I covered the Sydney Olympic Games, and in 2010, I covered the New Delhi Commonwealth Games.

The photography of the telephone box was shot while I was covering a stakeout for the Sydney Morning Herald, in October 1997. I think I was bored and saw the phone boxes and thought it was a nice shot, one that could be used to illustrate a communications story one day. Of course, nowadays, there are very few phone boxes, as most people have mobile phones.

I love photography so much that I shoot images every day, because every day, there is something new to cover, new people to meet, new experiences to behold. Life is rarely boring when your work is something that you love.

—Quentin Jones