With my new website has come a new sense of excitement. I’m particularly excited about the idea of nurturing my personal work a little more and allowing more of my ponderings to show themselves to the world. Quite often (especially the last couple of years) I’ve been so busy racing from one job to the other, I’ve forgotten to do the most important thing for creativity – allow myself the space & time to wander, to explore, or to just sit and take it all in. My landscape photography is often opportunistic grabs between shoots, but I’m working on giving it more time. Mostly our society makes it far too easy to be be busy and far to difficult to justify being still.
I think I moved to Ballarat – however unintentional & spur of the moment it was – to allow the country to continually remind me to go slow. I feel incredibly lucky when work takes me into nature & in all it’s majesty, forces me to stop & just be in awe.
This week, work took me to Horsham & Halls Gap in regional Victoria and I’m so happy that I’ll be back there again in the coming weeks & months. Both places struck me with their beauty, but it wasn’t until I got to Halls Gap that I really stopped to take it in. Wandering around the incredible landscape of Boroka Downs with owner Steph, I just couldn’t have been happier being anywhere else at that moment. Kangaroos, Wallabies, Emus & Deer all went about their business of eating, lazing & hopping about the place. Almost as intrigued by me as I was by them. We watched each other from a respectful distance, them methodically chewing grass, and me with a very big “I grew up in Sydney, this is awesome” grin on my face.
I left that property with such a clear head. A reminder that as humans (particularly Western-style humans) we desperately need to be so much more connected to this land & it’s creatures. Not far from Boroka Downs I had to pull over as the sunset exploded pinks over the mountain ranges. This country is incredible… can we please do better to protect it?
