a slow decay

My time recently has been spent working on the website’s various galleries Two of the earlier portfolios are now pretty much in place—Bowden and Port Adelaide. They look pretty good. The next step is to reconfigure the rest of the portfolios in this carousel style.

The daily poodle walks in both the morning and evening have been just quicker walks with little time being spent on scoping photography. The grasses are rapidly drying out on the coast and they represent a real problem as they hook onto the standard poodle’s coats, and then quickly work their way into the skin. So I am avoiding areas where there are lots of grass seeds.

Rambler, old dump, Victor Harbor
Rambler, old dump, Victor Harbor

The Rambler picture in the old Victor Harbor dump was one of the last scoping photos that I’ve done. Rambler is slowly falling apart from neglect. Rambler was built by Peter Sharp at Cruickshanks Corner, Port Adelaide in 1875 and it was possibly Australia’s oldest racing yacht.

It used to on the slips at Searle’s Boatyard–in the historic boatyards in the Central Basin of the Port River–before Port Adelaide’s oldest surviving boatyard was closed down to make way for the residential waterfront redevelopment of Port Adelaide. The redevelopment at Newport Quays failed to regenerate Port Adelaide. The development of the expensive dog boxes on the waterfront was scrapped but not before it had successfully destroyed the fabric of the history of the port.

It is sad to see Rambler just being left in the ex-dump site to rot. It needed have been so, since it just wasn’t necessary to destroy the Port Adelaide’s oldest surviving boatyard for expensive dog boxes that never eventuated.
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on the road to Ballarat

I was due to go on a photo trip that was to be tacked onto driving to Ballarat for the Atkins Artist’s ‘Time’ exhibition at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2015 early this Thursday morning. But the thermometer in the Mazda 626 stopped working yesterday thereby causing the engine to overheat, just as I started driving to Adelaide to take the film from the Canberra road trip to Atkins Photo Lab to be processed.

The car is now in the local garage waiting to be checked out, the road trip has been postponed and, at this stage.  It looks as if I will be driving the Subaru to Ballarat on Friday. Suzanne can then pick up the Mazda when it is ready, as she will have finished the Victor Harbor camp section of her 3 year Heysen Trail walk.

With some luck I will be able to take photos on the way back to Adelaide. It was to be a similar scenario to the Canberra trip—a photo trip centred around large format photography focused on silos, architecture around Creswick in Victoria and old garages in small country towns.

ruins, Peake
ruins, Peake

With some luck I will be able to take photos on the way back to Adelaide. It was to be a similar scenario to the Canberra trip—a photo trip centred around large format photography focused on silos, architecture around Creswick in Victoria and old garages in small country towns.
Continue reading “on the road to Ballarat”

on the Nepean Highway

The last poodlewalk in Melbourne was done by car. On my previous visits to Melbourne I’d seen some architecture on the Nepean Highway that caught my eye, whilst I travelling on the Frankston train to the CBD. So we–Suzanne, Ari and myself— cruised the Nepean Highway from Frankston to Mordiallic looking for “Custom Framing” and a big bold blue building.

Nepean Highway, Melbourne

It was the day that we had Agtet, our grey standard poodle, put down. We were to drive back to Adelaide early the next morning, and we had heavy hearts and time on our hands. A phototrip in the car was my way of filling in the afternoon. Suzanne drove the car whilst I looked out for the building.

Agtet: in memoriam

Our poodlewalks will probably be very different from now on, given what has happened to Agtet at the very end of our Tasmanian trip.

Agtet had a serious accident arising from stomach bloat and he will propably not recover. He has been recovering from the surgery but, as he also suffered from cardiac arrest just after the surgery, his neurological functionality was impaired. Unfortunately, the neurological improvement has been extremely slow.

This picture was taken on location in Zeehan, an old mining town on the west coast of Tasmania:

Agtet’s stomach had twisted 360 degrees after we arrived in Geelong from Tasmania on the ferry last Monday–the 2nd of April. He has been at the Vet hospital in Werribee since then, and his recovery during that week has been small step by painful step. We have been staying with my sister at Safety Beach on Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula during that time.

industrial ruins

I leave Queenstown early tomorrow morning to pick up Suzanne from her Cradle Mountain walk at Quamby Estate near Launceston. These mining ruins are from the slag heap site at Zeehan.

industrial ruins, Zeehan

The site is rich both in terms of the ruins of the Tasmanian Smelter Co and the landscape. It is a site that I will have to return to. My time in Queenstown was too short.