We haven’t been back to Kangaroo Island since the 2019-20 summer bushfires that affected half of the island. From memory the bushfires were started by lightning strikes and that most of Flinders Chase National Park had been destroyed. Suzanne had finished walking the newly completed Wilderness Trail through Flinders Chase a few months earlier before the bushfires.
In 2013 we spent a lot of time walking along the beach at Red Banks with Ari, our standard poodle, as the tide in the late afternoon was low. Tourists, if they venture to Red Banks from American River are underwhelmed. You need to walk the beach if it is accessible. It is about walking.
We had been to Kangaroo Island earlier in 2013 — in January. It was warm enough for Suzanne to go swimming at Pennington Bay Beach.
It was on the January trip that I made a number of abstracts of the water from the jetty at American River. The tide was coming in and the sea water swirled around the jetty.
I was fascinated by the colours and the clarity of the sea water in the lagoon. Clearly abstraction was a viable option for photography in the post-historical era ( ie., the end of the narratives of art history).
I recall thinking at the time that this subject matter would have been very suitable for video or a time lapse of the water’s movement. I was intrigued by the movement but I didn’t have the equipment, software or the skills to make moving images.
I’ve only ever looked at the archival files of the film photos I made from 2013. Strange isn’t it. This implies that the digital images that I’d made were seen as snaps which I didn’t take seriously. They had no value.
Judging by the archives I have a lot of photos of KI — both film and digital — and I’m not sure what to do with them. It makes little sense leaving these files on the computer’s hard drive and the back-up disc.