Happy Australia Day!!

I don’t want to get into the political bun-fight that has become part of the Australia Day celebrations, I just want to say Happy Australia Day to everyone.

I love this country. She is a precious jewel that draws people from all over the world to her bosom. Australia is the place they want to live. Australia is the place I always hope to live.

She is beautiful, ugly, lush, barren, comforting and deadly. She is home to so many of the deadliest creatures on the planet as well as the most unique. She has everything. Forests, beautiful beaches and lakes, deserts, mountain ranges and land so flat that you believe the earth could stretch on forever.

Australia is my home.

January 26 is the day we celebrate being Australian.

January 26 is the day I celebrate being an Aussie.

I don’t think about what happened in the decades after the British landed their boats on these golden shores. I think about the opportunities that I and millions of others have enjoyed simply by living in this wonderful country and in my marvellous Melbourne.

Today I wandered parts of Melbourne and saw people of every nationality enjoying and celebrating being Australian. Australian flags adorned prams, hats, faces and bodies everywhere I turned. Today I saw happy Australians and I was one of them.

Happy Australia Day!!!

 

***Technically, I should have written this in past tense as it is now 12:48am January 27, but I’m still awake so I’m still in January 26 mode.   🙂

Finally!!!! Hopetoun weekend completed

 

Thursday night and I have finally completed the editing process for all the shots from the ‘Bigger than Ben Hur” Hopetoun weekend.

I started the process with well over 600 photos, which I managed to reduce to 423 through some ruthless culling. My final but perhaps not final, total is 133 edited photos, of which about 100 have made it into a Facebook album. This edited number may increase a tiny bit because there are some of the motorbike boys that I’d like to look at more closely and forward on.

I think 133 is a pretty conservative number. I have been much more selective in my choice of what stays or goes which can only be a sigh of my growing understanding of what is worth looking at and what’s not. I’ve become more discerning. 🙂  And one can’t forget that there were an incredible amount of photography experiences to be documented over the two days, therefore it is not possible to pick a top 10. (But I will try to pick a top 20.)

So I will leave you with one of my favourites.

A man and his dog.

Yes, I do take requests.

Today’s photo is by special request.

My very best friend in the world, who has been my very best friend since 1980, was more than a little excited when she heard that I was heading out to the country for a photography weekend.  Her favourite photos of mine are those where I have gotten up close to barbed wire and dilapidated farm fences. They were the type of photos that I was really ‘into’ when I first got my camera. I was fascinated by the detail of things rather than the BIG pictures that show the whole object. When everyone else was taking pictures of the whole statue or building or landscape, I had focused, quite literally, on one element of the image that had caught my attention.

Sadly, I don’t do that as often as I used to and perhaps I should bring myself back to my basics more often, but when there are so many opportunities to learn new things and to experiment with new techniques………….

So Helen, this one’s for you.   🙂

 

How many techniques can one use in a weekend?

Now before you get all excited and start imagining that I am going to talk about sex………………….

…………It’s been so long I’ve forgotten most of the fancy ones and I’d be struggling to remember the basics. (Though I have heard said that it’s like riding a bike…..)

No, you naughty people, I’m talking about photography techniques. I think I used most of the techniques in my photography repertoire and picked up the ins and outs of a few more over the course of the last weekend.

There was landscape photography, long exposure, panning, photo journalism, animal portraiture, sports, sunrise shoots, sunset shoots, light painting and probably a few more that I’ll think of later. That’s pretty good for a weekend away in the country.

Sports photography, and motor sports in particular, was definitely not a style of photography I thought I’d be attempting on the weekend. After all, we had been invited to a quiet country town to shoot landscapes and farms and the like. However, when your excursion to what’s left of an inland sea is hijacked by a group of ‘boys and their toys’ one must think on one’s feet. The expected pristine, windblown sand dunes had become a motor-cross track and we landscape photographer morphed into enthusiastic motor-sports photo-journalists.

To say that I was happy with the shots I got on Saturday afternoon would be an understatement.

I won’t let them tarnish my love of my marvellous Melbourne

It is no secret that I love and adore my marvellous Melbourne. She is the best city in the world and she is my home. She is art, music, festivals, people, cultures, education, architecture, rivers, gardens, beaches, galleries, museums and so much more.

What she isn’t, is a place for young thugs to flex their muscles and create mayhem thereby frightening men, women and children during a major cultural festival. That behaviour has no place in my city at all.

I am ashamed to think that gangs of men from two different cultures, who professed strong desires to live in my city and country as Australian citizens, have decided that they are going to brutalise each other on the streets of my home town.

How dare they!!!

How dare their parents, elders, friends and family not be aware of the violence that their youth are building a culture of. How can they remain oblivious to  what their young men and women are wanting to achieve? These kids and young adults are forming aggressive packs willing and wanting to fight and draw blood …………for what?? So that they can say that their native culture is better than the other?

Guess what boys and girls? Your native culture is going to get you killed or maimed. And where is that going to leave you? Your native culture will not be paying your medical bills when you’re recovering from stab wounds as a result of a ‘my cultural heritage is better than yours’ pissing contest. The country that you or your parents chose as home and a better place to live has to foot the bill.

If you were born here, you are now an Australian. If you’ve been naturalised, you are now an Australian.

Grow up……..man up…………..stop being fucking stupid and BE Australian.

 

***The photo today was taken while two rival gangs of youth decided to fight it out less than a kilometre away from where I was standing. Police knew that there was going to be a fight. The news reported that there was going to be a fight. Thousands of visitors to Melbourne wanting to enjoy the Moomba festival were on tenterhooks wondering whether they and their loved one were going to be in danger from the fight. I am ashamed to say that the fight took place. I hope the instigators are found and punished appropriately.

 

Deep shit………..the candle ends met.

A little something from White Night. The Royal Exhibition Building

Not deep deep shit, but wading in shit……in sturdy gumboots.

I’m not going to say that it was the culmination of 8 weeks of intensive excursions and photography that has resulted in this sorry state that I am in today. I could just as easily blame the fact that I am ‘at that age’ (menopausal, if you need it explained) and my body is doing strange things. I could even place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the general public with whom I work every day. But today I ache.

My muscles, my joints, my abdomen, they all ache. They ached and screamed yesterday but I soldiered on and just managed to get through the day at work. But I couldn’t soldier on today. I had to stop. I had to rest. I had to sleep.

I have felt so below average today that I have barely looked at the backlog of photos that are calling out for editing. I’ve done some. I’d have to be dead to not take advantage of the peace and quiet at home. But the soft, gentle, persuasive call of my bed has seen the hours melt away.

At what point do you say that you need to see a doctor? How the hell do I explain that I ache? I have no fever. I have no unexplained rash. I’m not bleeding anywhere. I can eat. I’m not vomiting. I simply ache. My muscles and skin are hypersensitive. My spine feels malleable. My abdomen is only tender on the non-appendix side. A general practitioner would be as confounded as I am. I don’t feel right wasting their time on aches.

Sleep is an amazing panacea. I have slept a lot today. I might need to take advantage of the sleep cure more regularly.

“Tickets please.”

“Tickets please.”

I’m showing my age when I can tell you that I remember the days of tram conductors and buying your ticket from him or her as they wandered up and down the length of the tram.

Not that I dislike the current Myki system, but it seemed that riding the tram felt safer back then. There was that ‘someone’ in authority who kept everyone in line.

It was also a hell of a lot harder to get a free ride when there was someone noticing who was getting on and off the tram.

Ah, the good ol’ days. Now let me get a hot cocoa and my slippers while I pull out my knitting and sit down in front of the television and watch “Days of out Lives”.  Hahahahahaha

 

 

This Xmas decorating is serious business

I’m all for a bit of bling at Xmas time. I love seeing homes that put out Xmas lights for everyone to enjoy. It was almost a ritual in my childhood home to go for a drive to see the best  Xmas lights and I still feel a buzz of excitement when I find a home or group of homes that have made that extra effort.

Until last year, a home in Airport West held my personal title for the best dressed Xmas home. A beautiful, two-storey, white, weatherboard home with numerous bay windows. Every window had something special to look at and the exterior of the house as well as the entire front yard was decorated with lights and Xmas animations. But it was in no way cheap and tacky. This was elegantly done from top to toe. And every year the crowds would come to stand and delight as this beauty.

The elderly couple who put on this display went to many hours of effort getting their home looking truly amazing and they delighted in talking to the visitors and sharing their Christmas energy.

There is another home that I pass on my way home from work who also put a lot of effort into their Xmas display but I was shocked to discover that they bring in the big guns to do the decorating for them. As I drove home the other night I discovered men in a truck assembling the 25 foot tree. Men who have been hired to hang the garlands, set the lights, place the full-size toy soldiers at the door…..

Men who will probably be hired again at the beginning of January to pull it all down, pack it away neatly and transport it back into storage in their truck.

The rest of us have to spend hours doing it all by ourselves; finding the boxes in the garage or shed, rearranging the house to set it all up, putting the tree up, decorating it, cleaning up all the empty packaging and vacuuming up bits of tree with the full knowledge that we will have to do everything in reverse come January.

And that’s just the inside. We still have to get up on ladders and hang the lights on the gutters, wrap the lights around the tree at the letterbox and throw the net lights over the big bushes……….

…….All by ourselves.

 

“Strictly Private”

Members only.

I didn’t think that private clubs still existed……………but I was wrong.

Today as I explored the streets of the rural city of Ballarat looking for photographic inspiration I happened upon a set of beautiful timber and leadlight doors tucked inside a little alcove. It seems that not everyone can walk through these doors. Entry is only permissible if you belong to ‘the club’.

What sort of club is this?

Do you need to be well-connected or well endowed?

Do you need to possess both the x and y chromosome to be allowed membership?

Can you be a member if you do not live in Ballarat?

Does the utterance of a secret password allow entry?

Must club members know the ‘secret handshake’?

Is membership passed down from generation to generation?

*Gasp!!!* Is smoking permissible within the walls of the club?

Would I find staff dressed in upper-class servant livery and white gloves serving brandy and cigars?

So many questions without answers. But knowing that I was not permitted entry only made my desire to enter that much stronger.

Girl power………(and friends)

Friends, old and new.

On the day of ‘the race that stops a nation’ I, like many others, enjoyed the Melbourne public holiday with friends. We ate, we drank, we laughed, we ran little betting sweeps on the big race and we enjoyed each other’s company.

Today was a pretty momentous day. One that will go down in history for so many reasons, not the least being that for the very first time in its history the winning jockey was a woman.

An Australian female jockey, riding a horse that was backed at 100-1 odds, being strapped by the jockey’s brother who has Downs Syndrome. You couldn’t write a tale like that without being laughed all the way out of the door.

However, I fear that this woman’s achievements, especially considering she is still riding following a riding accident that nearly killed/paralysed her a few years back, will be completely overshadowed by the word ‘chauvinistic’ to describe the racing industry. Uttered by her in her first post-race interview that one single word that may destroy her career. Please, let us hope that it doesn’t come to that.

Today was a day when the women of Australia stood up and cheered as one of our own smashed the glass ceiling of the Victorian Racing Industry into a million little pieces and told it like it is. Woo Hoo!!!!!