Mare Carter

Mare Carter was a journalist, author, script writer and ‘model’ who, established a wildlife sanctuary and tourist attraction at Foxground, near Berry.

In 1952 Mary Thompson-Read-Young (known as 'Mare'), ‘an expatriate American pulp-fiction author and occasional photographic model’, began a de-facto relationship with one of Australia’s most celebrated photojournalists, Jeff Carter. She eventually became his wife and they were to have two sons, Goth and Vandal. (Jeff had two other children by his previous marriage – Karen and Thor.)

Mare and Jeff were to travel all over Australia as ‘bush journos’, gathering stories while living out of their Land Rover. They were trailblazers in many ways, writing about people often ignored by the city press, including Aboriginal people.

On these trips Mare carried a suitcase of ''straight'' clothes which she would change into for Jeff's photos when no other suitable human subject was available.

Jeff saw himself as ‘the photographer of the poor and the unknown’ - cane cutters, drovers, Aboriginal workers, fossickers, hop pickers, rabbit shooters, quarry workers, camel drivers, steel workers, tree fellers and cannery workers.

Mare and Jeff’s stories and photographs regularly appeared in newspapers and in magazines such as Walkabout, Wheels, Pix, People, Women’s Weekly, Woman’s Day and National Geographic.

In 1962 they settled on a 45-hectare abandoned dairy farm at Foxground which they named Wild Country Park. It became, as well as being their own family home, a refuge for endangered and injured native animals and a major tourist attraction that drew over 25,000 visitors per year.

Later they became documentary filmmakers. From 1972 to 1974 their Wild Country series was screened by the Seven television network and was shown widely on overseas television.

For four decades, the couple’s professional collaboration was acknowledged with a byline "Story by Jeff and Mare Carter".

In 2001 Mare wrote and published a book, A Wild Life: bringing up a bush menagerie. It was her account of coming to Australia and meeting Jeff, buying the Foxground property and developing it into Wild Country Park, and it described her very unconventional family and the harsh and hilarious realities of living in the ‘wild’.

This was followed in 2007 by Landmarks: in a travelling life which she originally wrote for her family and was illustrated with many of Jeff's photographs.

Jeff, suffering from liver cancer, took his own life in 2010.

Over 600 of Jeff’s photographs are preserved in the Jeff Carter Collection in the National Library of Australia, along with recordings of a number of interviews including several with fishermen in Bermagui and Eden.