Musings from a Heart-Shaped Island
Journal Entry… noon “…The mist has come in here at the falls. I feel lucky to be in the heart of the Tiers, 1100 metres up, surrounded by cloud and wet pencil pines and mountain and waterfall. You can’t see the mountain at the moment though. It’s a total whiteout from about 20 metres up […]
Hills Hut was built in the 1960s by Bruce Hill and was used for a short time as a base for loggers in the area. After the loggers left it became pretty dilapidated with bits missing here and there, and the Deloraine Walking Club did some work on it in the late 70s. Weather and […]
Ever since I can remember I’ve loved being out in the bush. It was our backyard in Reedy Marsh when I was younger. I remember finding fallen trees full of dried bush honeycomb and my brother and I pretending we were explorers, discovering our surroundings for the first time. I have a memory of getting […]
…the light. Tri-X | Nikon F2 | Deloraine
Bit of a bush bash to get here, but gorgeous to sit behind the waterfall with my cup of tea. Haven’t had much luck with Delta 3200 in the past. It always seemed to lack contrast and be very grainy when developed with Ilford DDX. This particular film was metered at 400 (as it was […]
Devils Gullet, Mersey Forest | Portra 400 | Hasselblad 500cm
For the past few weeks, in fact for most of July, it has been raining. Deloraine has had 170mm this month and the ground is spongy. The Meander River recorded its highest total July rainfall on record of 224mm, and has broken its banks several times. 2021 Floods | Deloraine | Tri-X & F2
We depend on nature not only for our physical survival. We also need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds. We got lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating – lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems. We have forgotten what rocks, […]
I can’t remember a lot about this day a month ago, except that it was very windy and the clouds were rolling across the mountain bringing occasional showers and rainbows. I followed one of the few sets of cairns to this spot and wondered where they all go. One of them leads to Ironstone and […]
Journal Entry… 11.40am Cold. Sitting beside an unnamed creek on the Grail Falls Track, Walls of Jerusalem NP. Moss on everything. Sun shines weakly through the myrtle and sassafras tops. Can hear a single bird above the flow of water. A single sporadic whistle. I’ve fallen in mud and walked through a creek, hiked past […]
It was a Friday. It was the first snow of the season, so I went where I usually go when it snows. The first part of the track to Lady Lake Hut was fairly ordinary, Dale Brook was flowing fast beneath the bridge and scatterings of unremarkable brown fungi were visible along the rooty rocky […]
…with snow. Pencil Pine | Higgs Track, Great Western Tiers | Hasselblad 500cm | Tri-X
Journal Entry …Syds Track. Searching for my final image before heading back down. Here amongst the dwarf myrtles the moss is verdant and bright green. The sky is overcast, light showers come and go. I would focus on the plethora of greens were I shooting a colour film such as Portra 160 (that would do […]
Spiderwebs on my arms and in my face. Black cockatoos flying together shriek their delight. Water moves below. Yellow, brown and purple fungi whisper their first hello. There are three waterfalls on the Smoko Creek track in Meander. The first (shown above) is reached within about 45 minutes walking and is pretty speccy. Many brightly […]
Snow was forecast on this late winter day so we decided to keep the kids home from school and spend a night in Hills Hut up on Parsons Track. Overnight the snow fell as rain where we were and it was loud on the thin tin roof. I woke every hour or so to put […]
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your […]
And the way to the forest. Bridge over Meander River | Split Rock Track | Meander Forest Reserve
It’s easy to miss the smallest blessings. It was a Tuesday, one of the last days of the year. I woke up to tree shadows against the caravan window. This tiny detail made me smile, I grabbed the camera to remember.