felinemind

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Musings written for the Australian Travel and Photography Group’s LifeStyle’s Best Shot! Challenge
Note: click images to view larger versions

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Reflections on my first ‘Photographic’ Road Trip

In the pre-cheap airfare days the road trip was the ubiquitous way to travel to visit family and friends for holidays. Remember the days when you would drive for hours and stop at pre-determined servos to relieve the bladder and grab a greasy meat pie? when you’d pop ‘No Doze’ like hard boiled lollies? or make an impromptu stop to see the Dog on the Tuckerbox or the Big Banana? I feel nostalgic for these days and sometimes I feel almost unAustralian when I fly.

So, when we received news that because of my husband’s job, we would need to leave our new home, Melbourne, and return to the far-flung, tropical city, Darwin I saw my opportunity. We hadn’t had a holiday for a while, so I planted the seeds about how this was the perfect chance to travel the Great Ocean Road, as we’d always planned, and to do the ‘canon ball’ run through the centre. After my pestering … no, nagging (let’s call a spade, a spade) ... he agreed to clock thousands of kilometres on the Ford Falcon for the trip.

We packed our suitcases in preparation for the full spectrum of Australia’s weather: from freezing on the Victorian coast, thanks to the Antarctic winds in December (yes, in summer) through to thongs and shorts once we were passed Adelaide, and the week before Christmas 2008, we set off. Oh, and I had a new digital SLR camera – my first digital SLR – that I wanted to break-in by capturing some of Australia’s greatest landscapes.

So, my first practice at taking a landscape picture was in Apollo Bay at dawn on Boxing Day. I warned my husband I’d get up to take the shot and so duly set out, with scarf on, to experiment with my new camera. After an hour or so, and with the beach pedestrian and dog traffic increasing, I went back to bed for a few hours. My beloved was not happy with me when I showed him my results – – because I had gone out, in the dark, in a ‘foreign’ town, on my own!

The next dawn expedition was at the Twelve Apostles. I’d tried to get a sunset shot the day before but had been thwarted by clouds on the horizon, so I was determined to go back the next day. This time, my husband roused himself early, on his holiday, to make sure I was accompanied. My tentative steps into the landscape genre produced – .

So, we continued driving west, stopping at port towns, trying our hand at carnivals setup to entertain kids (surely they were designed for old kids?), where my husband, after much teasing, eventually played a carnival game and won me a toy. Then we spent new year’s in Adelaide with some of my family and set off north, through the ‘red centre’. One place my beloved was very keen to stop at was Cooper Pedy; to stay in an underground hotel room of course! After an overnight stay, we departed shortly after dawn and I managed to snap, from inside the car – because I was fed up with swatting the kazillion flies that inhabit the outback – one of the signs that are strewn along the Stuart Highway as you approach the town. The sign is to warn wayward tourists who might wonder about wandering among the moonscape i.e. the piles of sand that are a by-product of opal mining – .

Then, we arrived at the one place I’ve always dreamed of going – Uluru. You can learn about the geological story as to why Uluru is there, but, to see the flat plain with this rock suddenly jutting out (excusing Kata-Tjuta to the west) is truly astounding. The local Aboriginal people have their creation stories to explain its existence, but while I was gazing on the magnificent red monolith I felt an ancient, spiritual rhythm that perhaps no human story could truly capture to explain the mystery of nature. Meanwhile, as a dutiful hobby photographer, I (and my husband) joined the crowds in the sunset viewing area to watch the changing colours of Uluru. We overheard a tour leader, with dread locks and a clear Australian accent, remark to one of his groupies – Oh, I see you have a Ny-kon. I shrugged and continued to take a shot every thirty seconds on my Nick-on, and captured this – .

After stopping in Alice Springs and following the OTL (overland telegraph line) to the Devils Marbles, Tennant Creek and Nitmiluk (Katherine) Gorge, we arrived in Darwin. I had about 300 images to sort through and my secret plan to have the opportunity to photograph some of Australia’s stunning landscape helped revive our thirst for the road trip. We are busy planning the next trip: hopefully to Broome, through the Kimberley, on our quest to see areas of Australia that few Australians ever get to see with the naked – or rather camera lens – eye.

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