Category: flora

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walking on a country road

When we were down at Victor Harbor last weekend Ari and I walked along the back country roads on one of our afternoon walks. It was quiet and peaceful with very little traffic–a healing walk through nature. It had been raining and the roadside vegetation looked green and refreshed. As we walked along I started taking a few photos whilst I waited for the sun to go behind a cloud for a large format shoot I had in mind.

There were no conversations on the country path but there was a poetic receptivity to place.

roadside eucalept, Victor Harbor

I find the Australian bush very hard to photograph and so I tried to simplify things as much as possible. ‘Walk down a country road on the Fleurieu Peninsula and take ten modernist photographs of pink gum and a Xanthorrhoea’ was the rule I set up. Ari was more interested in taking on the bulls.

In performing this instruction I thought that most writing on Australian photography was in the art history mode that assumed artistic autonomy, authorial agency, medium specificity and its conventions. The photographic art historians –eg., Helen Ennis and Gael Newton— make little or no reference to conceptual art and its core idea that the locus of the work was deemed to be the idea or statement with the work being a performance of that statement.

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returning to Wirranendi Park

Ari and I returned to a familiar haunt on yesterday’s afternoon walk—the West Terrace Cemetery and the Wirranendi Park section of the of Adelaide’s parklands. The rain had eased, it was overcast, and the sunlight was soft.

We had initially gone to the western parklands to see if a transitory aboriginal camp was still standing. I’d taken some photos before going on the Tasmanian trip but, as the early morning light was now quite different, I wanted to see what had happened whilst we’d been away. I was thinking of re-shooting the camp with more of the scrub.

transitory camp, western parklands Adelaide
transitory aboriginal camp, western Adelaide Parklands

The camp had gone–been dismantled by the Adelaide City Council no doubt. None last long. So we walked through the West Terrace Cemetery looking for picture possibilities then through the Wirranendi section of the parklands.

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Gormanston cemetery

Gormanston is an old mining town near Queenstown in Tasmania that has pretty much died. There are only a few people living there now. There are more abandoned and derelict houses than lived in ones.

Gormaston Cemetery

The cemetery is on a side of a hill and is unmarked. There is just a low grade gravel road off the Lyell Highwav as you head towards Lake Burbury. What is fascinating about the cemetery is the way that it has become overgrown with the native flora. You need to dig around to even find some of the graves.

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Wirranendi Park project

As mentioned before one of our favourite evening walks is Wirranendi Park. This part of the Adelaide parklands is adjacent to the West Terrace Cemetery and is undergoing bush restoration.

Morton Bay Fig
Adelaide, Wirranendi Park , film , Rolleiflex SL66

This is an earlier photo from the Wirranendi project. It is underexposed compared to this latter image. I’d forgotten to change the film speed on the light meter when I switched film backs on the Rolleiflex SL66. Silly me.

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roadside vegetation revisited

The dry heat gave way to muggy heat with some cloud cover. Ut was still hot–around 36 degrees– but the cloud cover the morning provided me with an opportunity to do some photography.

I was unsure how long the cloud cover would last this morning so I played it safe: I returned to the shade of the unsealed back country roads and explored the roadside vegetation with a 5×4 Linhof. It was the first time I had used the camera this year.

roadside vegetation

This picture was from an earlier shoot–when I was exploring how the Rolleiflex 6008 operated in the field. What is noticeable with this region is the destruction and loss of native habitat for farming. Approximately 13% of the original native vegetation remains. Biodiversity is in decline due to threats from invasive species and landscape fragmentation.

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roadside vegetation

During the Xmas break at Victor Harbor I did some photographic studies of the road side vegetation on the back roads. These arose from searching for a place with some shade to walk the dogs away from the intense heat in the late afternoon. I just started looking at the shapes of the vegetation whilst walking down the dusty unsealed road. I was seeking new content–souping up my creativity or design juices.

roadside vegetation

The country side is basically all farmland—cattle and sheep– and what remained of the native vegetation was a strip along side the road. Even then a lot of that roadside vegetation had been cleared , and what remains is gradually degenerating.

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Xmas holiday comes to a close

The Xmas holiday at Victor Harbor is now over. We return to Adelaide and the routines of work this afternoon. The two weeks have given me the space and the time to find my photographic stride, to explore some new ideas and to wait for the suitable weather conditions for photography.

sea shells, Kings Beach

We’ve never spent two weeks at a time in Victor Harbor—its always been either 2 days on the weekend or the 4 days over the Easterbreak. Those two weeks gave me time to find new photographic locations, namely roadside vegetation and the rocks and foreshore around from Kings Head.

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meandering on the seashore

The poodles and I meandered along the foreshore near Petrel Cove on our evening walk yesterday. I had the old Kodak Easyshare camera in my pocket and I used it to play around with a variety of closeups of the flora on the coast.

spiky grass

These are the kind of pictures that I cannot get with my film cameras as working from the tripod does not allow me to access the various knooks and crannies amongst the rocks. Yet some of the more interesting pictures can be found in the detail of the seashore.

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walking along a country road

It is too hot to take photos at the moment. It’s extremely bright, with full sun, no clouds, and the temperature is around 40 degrees. It’s summer beach weather for the crowds of holiday makers I guess. I’ve given up walking along the coast on the later afternoon or early evening walk –it’s just too hot.

The picture below was taken whilst the temperatures were a temperate 25 degrees and there was some cloud cover in the morning and afternoon:

Heysen Trail, near Kings Beach

During the high temperatures of the last few days we’ve been walking along the coastal backroads. They are dusty but the remnant bush vegetation provides some sort of shade for us from the heat of the late afternoon sun. I can put up with the dust for some shade.

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walking without a digital camera

I’m not posting many pictures from our poodlewalks since my digital camera was stolen in Melbourne. Although I’ve decided to go without one whilst I continue to just shoot film to see what happens, I do miss not having a digital camera with me.

Without one I don’t have any images from the daily walks, or from the photoshoots that I’ve been doing with the large format cameras. So I am relying on pictures –such as the one below—that have been taken on earlier walks.

lagoon, Hindmarsh River

I was exploring the lagoon near the mouth of the Hindmarsh River in Victor Harbor yesterday. I hadn’t been there for a while, and though it was around 6.30 pm, it was still hot and sunny. I recalled the above image and remembered that the bush was in the shade at this time of the day.So I went looking for the bush as part of the poodlewalk.

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