Down Under, Up Close
Visually transforming the Australian Game
When Sam Tolhurst brings his lens on a basketball court, he does more than document a game. He reveals how basketball becomes a language of place, identity, and memory.
From humble beginnings capturing mountain biking to shooting NBA games and working with the Sydney Kings, @_tollywood has shaped a visual archive of hoops that captures the raw energy and quiet humanity of its Australian and overseas protagonists.
The vibrations of Aussie basketball spaces—and of their sons and daughters, even those who have reached the promised lands of the NBA and WNBA—have become the core material of his creative research. Tolhurst is not merely documenting a movement rising at near-photonic speed; he is helping to fuel it, placing Australian basketball—its features, its protagonists, its communities—squarely before the global eye and revealing it as an intriguing constellation of intimate, colorful, and unmistakably present verses, exactly as the identity of his country demands.
We’ve got a lot of people committed to growing the game at every level, and the work is starting to show. Basketball in Australia has had a huge revival; it was massive in the mid 90s and those who were around for that boom say it’s similar now.
All of it forms a single poem: the evolving poem of the Australian Game. We have paraphrased only a small stanza of it, and there is still so much more left to discover. Dive into the words and vision of one of its most renowned interpreters.
