Editor’s Note: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action.
CNN
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When Lisa Michele Burns set out to photograph Australia in 2022, she didn’t quite realize how enormous it was.
She recalled a growing sense of panic on the second of her two four-month road trips as she drove down the never-ending highway to the outback, surrounded by nothing but rust-orange dirt, spiky spinifex grass, and the occasional gray-green mulga tree.
“That road, it’s just — it’s so straight,” said Burns. “There was a point where I had to pull over and go, ‘What are we doing? This place is so big.’”
Despite growing up in Australia — moving from its southern coastline, where bushland rolls into the sea, up to the Whitsunday Islands in central Queensland — Burns, 40, has spent most of her career abroad, capturing images of Alpine peaks, serene bamboo forests and Mediterranean coastlines.
“I probably knew more about Greenland than I did the center of Australia,” she said.
But during the coronavirus pandemic, she found herself at home, unable to travel abroad. “It became an opportunity for me to see Australia.”
Focusing on the “vibrant color palette” of Australia’s landscapes, Burns traversed the country, accompanied by her partner, to capture its diversity, from ocean blues to white sand beaches, dense green forests to rich red desert plains.
Exploring places she’d never visited, Burns found a new appreciation for her birthplace — and hopes that the images, compiled in her photobook, “Sightlines,” published last December by Images Publishing Group, can preserve the “indescribable magic” of Australia’s landscapes while sparking conversations about how to protect much-beloved natural wonders.
“I think it’s important to appreciate the variety of landscapes across Australia, but to also document them as they are today, because they are changing,” said Burns.
Exploring hidden gems
Due to pandemic restrictions and seasonal weather, Burns planned the trip in two halves — the first around the East coast, covering Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, and the second half across South and Western Australia, and the Northern Territory — spending around eight months of 2022 on the road.
While Burns plotted the route on Google Maps and researched locations ahead of the trip, she found that on the road, often different “palettes and patterns” grabbed her attention.
“A lot of the places that became my favorite spots weren’t actually ones that I’d researched,” she said.
After finishing up early at a location in Southern Australia, Burns turned down a small road that led to Sheringa Beach, a location that became a highlight of her trip. “There was nobody else there, just us and these dunes that just roll into the turquoise sea,” she recalled.
In Western Australia, Burns visited Gantheaume Point, a “touristy spot” famous for its fossilized dinosaur footprints that surprised her with unusual patterns and vibrant colors formed in the sandstone over millennia. “I was mesmerized for days,” she said.
The photos in “Sightlines” focus more on the “smaller details within a landscape,” said Burns, providing a deeper understanding and connection with the environment. For example, the desert often appears barren and inhospitable, a huge stretch of empty sand and sky with “nothing really surviving,” said Burns: “But once you take a closer look, there are so many beautiful flora and fauna that exist in these extreme conditions.”
A changing landscape
While Burns describes herself as an optimist and focused on the beauty of the country’s landscapes, she could see the impacts of climate change.
In the past decade, Australia has seen increasingly extreme weather events as a result of environmental damage, including intense droughts and storms, bushfires and rising sea levels.
For Burns, this was most visible around the reefs and coastlines, where rising temperatures cause coral bleaching, which reached “catastrophic levels” in the Great Barrier Reef in 2024. Last year was the hottest year on record globally, and Australia’s average temperature has increased by 1.51 Celsius since 1910, when records began.
And while driving through Southern Australia, Burns saw the aftermath of the 2019-2020 bushfires, during which more than 10 million hectares of land burned and over a billion animals are estimated to have died. “That was incredible to see. That’s where my family’s from, and I knew how huge the fires were and the impact that they had,” she said. But across the scarred landscape, Burns could “see the forest regenerating.”
“I think it is important to form a collective visual of what these landscapes look like today,” she said, adding: “Photography can raise awareness about climate change, even if it’s through beautiful imagery rather than hardcore documentary imagery. A good balance of the two across media is really important.”
Even for a landscape photographer, though, some scenes cannot be captured.
When Burns finally reached the Red Center, a landscape she’d heard so much about but never seen for herself, she felt the indescribable awe of Uluṟu — one of the world’s largest sandstone monoliths and one of Australia’s most iconic landmarks — and its red hue against the blue sky: “I didn’t realize how significant that would feel.”
Nearby, in the Valley of the Winds, no photos are allowed because it is sacred to the Aṉangu people: but for Burns, it was “one of the highlights of the entire trip,” giving her a new level of connection with the landscape.
“We lay on a platform and listened to the wind funneling down between the domes, and the birdsong,” she said. “That was really magic, because you do need to look around and observe to get those creative ideas. You just need to put the camera down, sometimes.”