A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY THROUGH MY JOURNEYS

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I came to photography by chance, but travel was probably a foregone conclusion.
My maternal grandparents were grey nomads, decades before the term existed. My father’s mum was the ABC’s first camerawoman, as well as a decorated amateur film maker. As a young lad, I remember watching Ella in the cutting room, editing film from Bali and beyond.


My parents were not great travellers, although we were piled into the station wagon and lugged across the Nullabor at a young age. Dad travelled for work, however. He stayed in palace hotels in Europe and went to the great American cities. I remember him saying how he was jealous of the young people he saw, backpacking around Europe.

Taiwan mountains Taroko Gorge

As a youngster, my TV diet was full of David Attenborough docos, Harry Butler, and The Lleyland Brothers. Alby Mangel’s “World Adventure” stirred something in my tiny, tiny mind. I guess then it is no surprise that after my second overseas trip, a school trip to Papua New Guinea, as the hair grew longer, I wanted to travel. I was drawn to the exotic, the foreign, the unknown.

Tasmania winter beach birds

I had plans to write. Travel writing. To back that up, I was advised that I would need good photos, to make selling my writing easier. Armed with a second hand Pentax K-1000, I left Australia for Indonesia on a one way ticket, in 1992.
Despite some hazy attempts, the writing didn’t happen until 2000, when I had my first piece published in the Asahi Weekly in Japan. In the meantime, I had collected a trove of slides, colour negs and black and white prints, mainly from South East Asia, but also Japan, Russia and Morocco. Two years in Cambodia and Vietnam in the mid-90s was particularly prolific.

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I finally went digital in2005, for an overland journey from Pakistan to Egypt. By then I had owned at least seven cameras, often carrying two bodies, three lenses, motor drive, flashes and of course film. Rolls and rolls of film.
Now I could switch between colour and black/white, without unloading and reloading a half exposed roll of film! Unfortunately, I had no idea that images could be manipulated from to colour black and white with software! The result is that I have a large body or black/white work from that trip. Oh well.

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There are no pictures of me in here. No perfect infinity pools or #hashtagworthy hotel rooms. I have tried to capture what I saw, what I felt. People. Markets. Daily life. A man changing a tyre is to me far more interesting than a cocktail.
I hope one day to get the thousands of pre-digital images scanned, and a selection of those loaded for your viewing pleasure. In the meantime, I am working through the 39,000 image files I have.
Bus To Nowhere, November 2019.