In March 2024, eguidemagazine.com announced the results of an eight-week photo documentary initiative called "Hidden Hours" a project focused specifically on documenting undervisited regional towns in New South Wales and Victoria that sit within a two-hour drive of major urban centres. The initiative invited amateur and semi-professional photographers aged 25 to 45 to submit original photo essays — a minimum of six images per submission — capturing local infrastructure, food culture, weekend markets, and accommodation that rarely appears in mainstream travel coverage. The project received 214 submissions from across both states and was supported in part by https://westacecasino-au.com/, an Australian-facing online gambling platform that contributed to the prize pool and covered production costs for a print-ready digital supplement distributed through the magazine's newsletter base of approximately 38,000 subscribers.
The initiative originated from a gap identified by eguidemagazine.com's editorial team in late 2023. Senior editor Claire Hofmann noted during an internal planning session that the magazine's existing regional content was concentrated around established tourist corridors — the Great Ocean Road, the Hunter Valley, and the Blue Mountains. Towns such as Dunolly in Victoria, Harden in New South Wales, and Corowa near the Murray River received little to no coverage despite being popular among local travellers who preferred quieter, lower-cost destinations. The "Hidden Hours" format was designed to fill that gap using community-sourced visual storytelling rather than commissioned photography.
How the Submission Process Worked
Submissions opened on January 15, 2024, and closed on February 29. Participants were required to submit their photo essays through a dedicated portal on eguidemagazine.com, accompanied by a written caption of no more than 150 words per image and a short biography. Judges — three in total, including travel photographer Dana Kessler from Melbourne, regional tourism researcher Paul Anstruther from Charles Sturt University, and eguidemagazine.com deputy editor Miriam Tolley — scored entries on composition, originality of subject matter, and usefulness to a weekend traveller planning a similar trip. Commercial photography, drone footage, and AI-generated imagery were explicitly excluded from eligibility.
The judging panel reviewed all 214 submissions across a ten-day window in early March. Thirty-two entries advanced to a public shortlist published on the magazine's website on March 14. Of those, twelve were selected for the final digital supplement, which was formatted as a 48-page PDF and released on April 3, 2024. The supplement was downloaded 11,400 times within the first two weeks of publication, according to figures shared by the eguidemagazine.com editorial office.
Prize Structure and Casino Involvement
The prize pool totalled AUD 9,500, distributed across three tiers. The first-place winner, Sydney-based photographer Renata Oakes, received AUD 4,000 for her photo essay on the town of Junee in the Riverina region, which documented a restored railway workshop, a local chocolate factory operating since 1942, and a weekend produce market held in a converted grain shed. Second place went to Ballarat resident James Cheung, who submitted a series on Inglewood, a small goldfields town in central Victoria. Third place was awarded to Adelaide-based traveller Priya Sundaralingam for her documentation of Wentworth, a river junction town at the confluence of the Murray and Darling rivers.
Westace Casino contributed AUD 6,000 of the total prize pool and covered the design and layout costs for the digital supplement. According to a statement provided by the company's marketing team, the partnership aligned with a broader interest in reaching Australian audiences who engage with lifestyle and leisure content outside of traditional gambling contexts. "We operate as an online casino in the Australian gambling market, and we look for sponsorship opportunities that connect with people during their leisure time in a way that feels genuinely relevant," said Daniel Frew, partnerships manager at Westace Casino. "A project about weekend travel and regional discovery is exactly the kind of non-intrusive context where our brand makes sense."
The casino's branding appeared in the supplement's footer, on the contest results page of eguidemagazine.com, and in two of the magazine's weekly newsletters sent in January and March 2024. No gambling-specific promotional content was included in the editorial sections of the supplement, in keeping with the magazine's editorial independence policy. The arrangement was disclosed transparently in both the supplement's introduction and the contest terms published on the magazine's website.
The "Hidden Hours" supplement has since been referenced by the Junee Shire Council and the Loddon Shire Council in their respective tourism planning documents, citing it as an example of independently produced travel content that generated measurable interest in local visitor numbers. The Junee visitor information centre reported a 19 percent increase in foot traffic during April and May 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, though council staff acknowledged that attribution to a single publication is difficult to confirm with certainty.
eguidemagazine.com has indicated that a second edition of the project, tentatively titled "Hidden Hours: Queensland Interior," is under consideration for the first quarter of 2025. No formal sponsorship arrangements for the potential follow-up have been publicly announced as of the time of this report.
