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Heart of the Nation
Our best of
As part of our 50th anniversary celebrations, we present this gallery of the best of The Weekend Australian Magazine’s photo-feature page, Heart Of The Nation. A weekly snapshot of modern Australian life, Heart Of The Nation is a showcase for the country’s best photographers.
Stories by Ross Bilton.
Melbourne 3000
9 February 2013 Photography Andrew Chapman
Melbourne 3000
Photographer Andrew Chapman was wandering the lanes around Federation Square in Melbourne last month when he chanced upon this scene. It’s what he loves about street photography, the serendipity of it. “You never know what you’re going to find,” he says. What he found here looked straightforward enough – a couple on their wedding day – but something puzzled him: it was 8.50am on a Tuesday. Who gets married then?
Denis and Milina Dirks, it turns out, actually tied the knot last March in a big church wedding in their hometown in Germany, and when they were packing for their honeymoon – a year-long trip around Australia – they had the wonderful idea of taking their wedding outfits with them. Well, why not? “It’s better than wearing the dress once then packing it away for the rest of your life,” says Denis, 25, a carpenter.
Fitting it all into their backpacks was tough – they had to remove the dress’s hoop and cram the beautiful tulle creation into a sleeping-bag sack – but it has enabled them to compile a quirky album of “wedding” photos on their travels. Their favourite so far was at the Devils Marbles
near Tennant Creek, where Milina teamed the dress with runners in order to climb the amazing rock formations. This Melbourne shot, where the “bridesmaids” were played by Australian friends, is a close second.
The couple, who met four years ago at their local Baptist church near Hanover, lived with their parents until their wedding day. For the past 10 months, home has been a ’91-model Toyota HiAce campervan that they bought in Brisbane for $3500. They’ve circled the continent in it – living, sleeping, cooking and eating together in that tiny space. How has that worked out? “You get to know each other really well,” says Milina, 21. Before heading back to Germany at Easter they’ll have to sell the van; that’ll be a wrench. “It’s been our first home together,” she says.
They’ve got the domestic chores sorted. She cooks, he washes up. With no fridge and a tiny gas stove to work with, Milina says she’s only able to make “very simple dishes”. Her husband quickly adds: “But it’s always really tasty!” He’s learnt a thing or two already.
Flinders 3929
11 July 2013 Photography Richard Wylie
Flinders 3929
Marine biologist Richard Wylie says he never ceases to be amazed by the variety of reproductive techniques in the ocean. There are fish that change sex, and others that are both male and female at the same time; there are hermaphrodite flatworms that get it on with a sort of sexual swordsmanship known as “penis fencing”, and giant squid that inject packets of sperm into the arms of (unwilling) females. Then there are the Weedy Sea Dragons under Flinders Pier, near his home on the Mornington Peninsula. These delightful creatures, 35cm long and related to seahorses, pair up in spring and perform a synchronised dance – an aquatic pas de deux – prior to mating. Wylie photographed this one replete with pink eggs. The weird bit? This is a father-to-be: it’s the male that does this job.
Wylie, who lectures at Monash and RMIT, decided to be a marine biologist at the age of eight, after the films of Jacques Cousteau and Ben Cropp fired his imagination. He’s ended up in academia by a roundabout route: after uni he joined a UN fruit-fly project in the Solomon Islands, then worked for Fisheries, then did a stint on pearl farms in Indonesia and Thailand. He’s paid dearly for those years in the tropics: a bout of cerebral malaria and a virus that affected his heart left him with long-term health issues that necessitated a complete hip replacement at the age of 35. “My doctor told me when I was 30 that I’d never see 40,” Wylie says. Well, he’s 42 now – and four months ago he had an even nicer surprise when he became a dad for the first time, after believing for years that he and his wife couldn’t have children.
The life of a marine biologist isn’t all full of wonder, by the way. Wylie once had a job on a salmon farm near Port Arthur, which involved diving in 8ºC water to pick up rotting fish carcasses from the floor of the pens. “It was very glamorous,” he says, deadpan. “To this day I can’t stand the smell of salmon.”
Restoration Island 4871
7 May 2011 Photography Brian Cassey
Restoration Island 4871
David Glasheen never saw the stock market crash of 1987 coming. The Sydney businessman lost $10 million in a single day – he was in up to his neck with mining shares – and the aftermath cost him his marriage, his homes, the whole life he knew.
These days, he trusts the turtles to warn him of trouble ahead. “When there’s a cyclone coming they nest much higher up the beach than usual,” observes Glasheen, who for the past 18 years has been the sole resident of Restoration Island, a 40-hectare blip off Cape York which he shares with his dog Quassi, a pair of sea eagles, a colony of northern quolls and the odd saltwater croc.
The 68-year-old calls it his “Garden of Eden”. He collects bananas and coconuts, as well as native fruit such as wongai and yilti, and grows his own organic vegies. Fish and crabs are there for the taking. And a good feed of prawns can usually be had from his network of mates on passing trawlers (he repays such favours with a case or two of his home-brewed beer). He’s quick to point out, though, that life on a desert island is no holiday: there’s plenty of hard work, and getting sick is “not an option”. Then there’s the loneliness.
That’s offset during the dry season at least by a steady trickle of visitors – passing yachties and kayakers, volunteers from the Willing Workers On Organic Farms scheme, and people curious about the island’s historical claim to fame (Captain Bligh and his loyal men found desperately-needed food and water here in 1789, during their 48-day journey to safety in an open boat after the Bounty mutiny).
A solar-powered internet connection also lets Glasheen stay in touch with people all over the world. He even posted his profile on a dating website a couple of years ago, which briefly garnered lots of media attention. (Nothing much came of it; hundreds of women responded but “half of them were crazy”, he says.) And old habits die hard; he’s got an online CommSec trading account. “I still like to play the markets,” he says. “Uranium stocks mostly – there’s great value in them – but also iron ore, gold, silver...”
Manly 2095
17 November 2012 Photography Braden Fastier
Manly 2095
Andrew McKinnon has put on weight since he had his suit of armour made 18 months ago, and he’s a bit concerned about it. “I can’t get too porky because it’s not very forgiving,” he says of the 38kg steel ensemble, a copy of a 15th-century Milanese design. Armour should move in harmony with your body, he explains, “and it won’t articulate properly if you overfill it”. He needs every ounce of poise and flexibility when he’s on his horse with a lance under his arm, charging at an opponent.
Jousting might seem like an odd sort of hobby for anyone in 21st-century Australia. Indeed, the 47-year-old father of three, who runs a PR firm with his wife Andrea, estimates there are only a dozen other people in the country who do it. He says he can offer “no rational explanation” for why it captured his imagination when he stumbled across photos of a jousting tournament while surfing online seven years ago.
He didn’t even know how to ride a horse back then. “I just thought, I have to try that,” he says. These days, it offers him “something that’s completely removed from my normal, day-to-day life; it’s about having a piece of yourself outside all the family stuff”.
What does Andrea think of it? “She’s not what you would call an enthusiast,” he says carefully.
McKinnon, who’s pictured in Sydney’s Manly, near his home, took part in six international tournaments last year. “You score points by hitting your opponent’s shield with the lance – then you try to follow through and smash him in the face, to really rattle his cage,” he says. It’s not all about the biff, though; he also loves the camaraderie, and the history. He takes great care to be faithful to the equipment and techniques of medieval times, although he doesn’t do the whole play-acting thing that some people – mostly Americans, he notes – go in for. All that shtick about mead and wenches gets “a bit grating”, he says. “You’ll be putting on your armour and someone will say, ‘May I help you with that, my Lord?’ I’ll be like, ‘Knock it off, mate. Just call me Andrew.’”
Daly River 0822
4 June 2011 Photography Darren Clark
Daly River 0822
The group of children taking an afternoon swim at the Daly River Crossing, south of Darwin, got out of the water sharpish when this two-metre saltwater crocodile hauled itself up onto the bank. Then a strange thing happened: the croc promptly died in front of their eyes. The kids spent a few minutes throwing rocks at it, and poking it with sticks, just to make sure. Then nine-year-old Sahkira Miler, the youngest of the group, suddenly marched up, lay down on its back and cracked a beatific smile for Darren Clark’s camera.
“It blew me away,” the photographer says. “All the other kids were hanging back but she was just fearless. What got me was the beautiful, calm look on her face. It was really eerie.”
So what killed the croc? The local policeman, who took its body away so he could present its skeleton to the local school for educational purposes, found the smoking gun: there was a fresh cane toad in its stomach. These toxic pests, which began to infiltrate the Daly River Crossing area six years ago, have wreaked havoc on local populations of goannas, quolls and freshwater crocs.
It’s rare, but not unheard of, for a saltie to come a cropper after snacking on one.
Clark was at the Daly River for a spot of R&R after spending time in the nearby community of Wudikapildiyerr, where he’d stumbled into the crossfire between two warring families and copped a lot of what he calls “reverse-racist” flak. The photographer, who’s originally from Geelong, set out in 2000 on a 10-year project to travel around the country documenting the theme of belonging and “what it means to be Australian”. Eleven years later he’s still going. (“And the longer I’ve been doing it, the more confused I’ve become,” he admits with good humour.)
Here’s another thing he can’t get his head around: half an hour after taking this picture the kids were back in the water again. “They all know people who’ve been knocked off by a crocodile but it doesn’t stop them,” he says. “I just can’t understand that mentality.”
Auburn 2144
11 August 2012 Photography James Horan
Auburn 2144
If Inge Sildnik’s face looks familiar, that’s because you’ve probably seen her crashing motorbikes, falling off galloping horses, getting knocked down by speeding vans, leaping off cliffs and three-storey buildings, being punched, strangled, picked up and slammed into coffee tables, flipping and rolling cars at 60kmh, and running down the road in high heels.
Running down the road in high heels? “Not all the jobs are challenging or dangerous – it’s just that the actors won’t do them,” says the stuntwoman, whose work has appeared in everything from Home and Away and All Saints to 60 Minutes re-enactments and the horror movie Wolf Creek. She recently doubled for Carey Mulligan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, which involved a little bit of driving and quite a lot of falling into swimming pools while clutching a mint julep. Nice work if you can get it.
Sildnik, who lives in Cremorne on Sydney's north shore, is pictured with her 90-year-old gran Laine, who has a rather different experience of danger, having fled her native Estonia when the Soviets invaded in 1940. "She's my mentor, and a huge influence on my life," says Sildnik. "She thinks I'm crazy, but she also boasts to all her friends when I'm on TV."
The 34-year-old started out as a contemporary dancer but decided to switch career paths 10 years ago while laid up with a hip injury. Stunt work, it turned out, was a natural fit for someone with a black tip in Shaolin kung fu and a taste for adrenalin. It's a funny old life, though: one of the things Sildnik must practise regularly is "knock-downs" - getting hit by a car. "You start off slow, and build the speed up until you're rolling over the roof," she says. "There are ways to minimise the damage to your body." Note that word, minimise. "I'm not going to lie, it hurts," she says.
She much prefers being behind the wheel - as she will be for the next four months, doing driving stunts on the new Mad Max movie on location in Namibia. Imagine being paid to roar around the desert in those crazy cars: is that the best job in the world, or what?
Burketown 4830
5 November 2011 Photography Barry Slade
Burketown 4830
Rick Bowie has seen some amazing things in his 20 years as a glider pilot. He’s looked down on Mount Cook in New Zealand from a height of 9000m; he’s ridden thermals for hundreds of kilometres across the Swiss Alps and the American Rockies. But nothing could have prepared him for experiencing the Morning Glory.
“It’s like surfing a tidal wave in the sky,” he says of soaring this weird meteorological phenomenon, an immense “roll cloud” that sweeps over the Gulf of Carpentaria on a handful of mornings each spring. “It’s a cylindrical cloud that stretches from horizon to horizon, and it rolls like a barrel as it moves along. It’s amazingly beautiful.”
Beautiful, and dangerous too. As the Morning Glory advances at 50kmh, it pushes the air in front of it upwards; by staying in this smooth “lift”, as glider pilots call it, they can hitch a ride.
But if the cloud overtakes them, the extremely turbulent air in its wake could knock them out of the sky. “I suspect that’s how quite a few aircraft have disappeared over the years,” says Bowie, 55.
The retired yacht skipper, from Byron Bay, snapped this photo by remote control from the cockpit of his single-seater glider, after photographer Barry Slade had mounted the camera on its tail. The pair had gone up to Burketown in search of the Morning Glory, and waited five long days before this one finally arrived. Bowie was all over it like a rash – swooping down its mountainous face and even throwing in a few aerobatic moves. “Surreal,” is how he describes the experience, the memory of which still thrills him as he recovers at home from a bout of cancer. “It’s amazing to think of the energy coming off the Earth to create this thing – and that we can tap into that energy in order to fly."
Point Lowly 5600
16 June 2012 Photography Darren Jew
Point Lowly 5600
Is there any animal as wonderfully bonkers as the cuttlefish? They have three hearts, and green blood, and can change the colour and texture of their skin in an instant to mimic rock, weed or sand in order to hide from predators or stalk their prey. And when it comes to sex they get really weird.
This pair of Giant Australian Cuttlefish (the male is at the front) are pictured at Point Lowly, near Whyalla, on a reef where the animals have traditionally massed in huge numbers every winter to breed. The male puts on a dazzling light-show to woo a potential mate – his body pulses and flickers with blue, green and yellow patterns – and at the opportune moment he hands her a little packet of sperm, like a gentleman leaving a calling-card, which she tucks under her mantle. She’ll collect sperm packets from several suitors before selecting one to fertilise her eggs with.
It gets stranger. Such is the competition at Point Lowly – the males outnumber females by nine to one – that smaller males, who can’t hope to fight it out, often adopt a very crafty tactic: they mimic the mottled brown skin and stumpy arms of a female, then approach a courting couple and sidle up to the female. The alpha male thinks, “Whoah, I’ve pulled two!” and while he is engrossed in putting on his light-show the cross-dressing interloper slips his own sperm packet to the female.
Point Lowly is the only known place in the world where cuttlefish gather like this – they are usually solitary creatures – and the phenomenon remains little understood. Worryingly, there’s been a dramatic drop-off in numbers recently, down from 250,000 in years past to some 50,000 in 2011, and just a few thousand so far this winter. Is it part of a natural cycle, or something more ominous? Nobody really knows.
There’s a poignant postscript to the Giant Australian Cuttlefish’s love life: as soon as they’ve bred, they die. Marine scientists studying the mass winter spawning at Point Lowly have given an evocative name to this epic tableau of sex and death. They call it the Big Bang.
Canberra 2602
20 August 2011 Photography by Simon Davidson
Canberra 2602
Testosterone, alcohol and horsepower: it’s the holy trinity for hoons. Burning rubber is their incense, the roar of a souped-up V6 their psalm. Beer is their holy wine. It’s a volatile, dangerous mix, and anyone who’s sensible gives it a very wide berth indeed.
Photographer Simon Davidson can’t help himself, though. He’s drawn to trouble, and at Canberra’s Summernats car festival in January he always knows where to find it – behind the main grandstand at Exhibition Park, on a short section of road that’s become a magnet for the event’s fringe hoon element. It’s known colloquially as “Lunatic Lane”.
“It’s a flashpoint,” Davidson says. “You put together a crowd of young men who’ve been drinking, and powerful cars, and you’ll always get mayhem... it’s a happy hunting ground for me as a photographer.” Indeed, his shot of a festival-goer performing a burn-out for the crowd – a finalist in this year’s Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize – brilliantly captures the raw energy and excitement of the moment.
The danger, too. Davidson has been shooting burn-outs for years and says he can tell in the first few seconds if a driver knows what he’s doing. Even so, the only way to get a photo like this is to stand right in the firing line. “If you don’t put yourself there, you don’t get the shot,” he says. “I’ve always got an escape route in mind.”
He doesn’t condone hoon behaviour (and neither does the festival; the driver was chucked out by security) but says: “It’s a part of Australian car culture. It is what it is. I’m not there to pass judgment on it, I’m just there to record it.”
Such was the frenzy in the scene he recorded here, the bloke at the rear left wheel didn’t even notice the flash fire that fleetingly engulfed him. Recalls Davidson: “I went up to him afterwards and asked, “Are you OK?’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘You were on fire.’ I showed him the photo. And he was like, ‘That’s awesome.’”
Principality of Hutt River
14 September 2013 Photography Andrew Quilty
Principality of Hutt River
It's been a tough few months for His Royal Highness Prince Leonard I of Hutt. The 88-year-old ruler of the Principality of Hutt River, a micronation 600km north of Perth, lost his wife, Princess Shirley, in July. “It’s been a struggle,” he says. “I miss her. In 66 years of marriage we never had a bad word.” Only now is the heavy pall of grief lifting a little, he adds. The closeness of his family – he has seven children, 20 grandchildren and 32 great-grandchildren – is a huge comfort.
Also, duty calls: he has a country to run. The place has come a long way since 1970, when Leonard Casley, as he was then, seceded his wheat farm from Australia in a row over production quotas that would have put him out of business. His 75sqkm realm has all the trappings of statehood. It issues its own currency, stamps and passports (13,000 are held by dual citizens living overseas; only about 30 people live in Hutt River). It has its own tax system, and laws issued by a government of five ministers. What it lacks, though, is recognition: apart from consular relations with the Ivory Coast and Benin in west Africa, no other countries have acknowledged its sovereign status.
And relations with Canberra remain “strained”, the prince says; but then, he did declare war on Australia briefly in 1977.
Born in Kalgoorlie, the son of a Commonwealth Railways engine stoker, Casley left school at 14 to work as a clerk in a Fremantle shipping firm, where in quiet moments he would read Acts of Parliament “for the fun of it”. His self-taught legal nous has served him well in the battles with state and federal governments that followed secession – battles that, he admits ruefully, “have cost me half my life”. He would much rather have spent his time researching subatomic physics, a passion of his. So why did he pick the fight? “I don’t like to be pushed around.”
Woe betide anyone who imagines it’s all an elaborate joke; he inhabits the role of sovereign ruler completely. He is baffled when asked his thoughts on the federal election. “We don’t comment publicly on other countries’ politics,” is all he’ll say.
West Cape 5575
28 January 2012 Photography Nate Smith
West Cape 5575
Professional surfer Dion Atkinson spends half his life chasing points and prizes in far-flung corners of the world. But when it comes to chasing pure joy, he drives three hours from his home in Adelaide. It’s at the tip of the Yorke Peninsula, off the exposed beach at West Cape, that he finds what he’s looking for: big, beautiful barrels.
He’s always been addicted to the feeling of surfing inside a barrelling wave. “You’ve got all this stuff going on around you – you can hear and feel the power of the water going over your head – and yet where you’re standing in the middle of it it’s actually peaceful,” he says. “Time seems to slow down a little bit. It’s quite surreal.”
That sense of calm at the centre of the storm is beautifully captured in this image, a finalist in the Living Australian photo competition. Atkinson is trailing his hand in the water to slow himself down a little; he has to constantly fine-tune his speed inside a barrel because there’s a thin line between staying in the sweet spot and getting smashed.
“It’s like a game of cat and mouse between you and the ocean,” he says. “You don’t want to get caught. There’s no better feeling than doing a long, deep barrel then coming out the end.”
The 25-year-old, who turned pro at 19 after dropping out of a business marketing degree, has a big year ahead of him: he’s currently ranked around 40th in the world, but if he can finish 2012 in the top 32 he’ll qualify for the elite ASP World Tour. “That’s my goal, and my dream,” he says.
He’ll always have West Cape, though. He’s surfed there since he was a boy, and built up a stack of great memories. What does he remember about this wave, pictured? “I almost made it out the end,” he says. “But then I got eaten up.”
Alexandra 3714
28 January 2012 Photography Andrew Chapman
Alexandra 3714
Ted Hall made the best throw of his life 50 years ago in a lonely farm outbuilding in rural Victoria. He’d been pushing fish carcasses into a big mincing machine when his arm got caught. It tore off his fingers, chewed up his hand and began grinding away on his wrist-bone. No one else was around – and the machine’s off button was three metres away, on the wall. Trapped and bleeding heavily, he was facing a horrible death. But as luck would have it there was a piece of scrap metal lying at his feet which he was able to pick up.
Hall had one shot to save his life, and he didn’t hesitate. He threw it at the button, and scored a direct hit: the mincer stopped. He then pulled the machine apart with his good hand and freed himself.
He was in his 20s when the accident happened, and had only ever done farm work before. He had three small children to support. How could he do that with only one hand? He recalls the answer to that question today in a single word: “Determination”.
With the aid of an artificial arm-piece, he took on a job with VicRoads and spent the next 33 years building and upgrading highways. And every September he’d take a month off to shear sheep for his dad and his neighbours, just as he’d done since he was a teenager. “Losing the hand made everything harder, but you get round it,” he says. “And whenever someone said, ‘You can’t do that’, I’d want to prove them wrong.”
He’s 75 now, and a great-grandfather, but he still shears sheep on farms near his home in Alexandra, northeast of Melbourne. (“All you need for shearing is a strong back and a weak head, and I’ve got both,” he says with a chuckle.) And for relaxation, he knits. How? By securing a needle to his arm-piece with elastic bands. His finest work to date is a jumper emblazoned with Elvis Presley’s face, which he knitted for his wife Val. “I got the pattern out of the Women’s Weekly,” he says.
Sydney 2000
10 August 2013 Photography Craig Walsh
Sydney 2000
For the past 79 years, a platoon of stone soldiers on the Anzac Memorial have cast their sombre gaze over anyone walking through the southern end of Hyde Park in Sydney. For a few weeks last year, though, an altogether different type of presence loomed over passers-by: the moving images of three huge faces, projected into the trees.
Artist Craig Walsh conceived the work, Emergence, as a way to present alternative histories of a public space – alternative, that is, to the statues, monuments and plaques that tell a city’s official story. Hyde Park has long been a focal point for protest and civic unrest, which he wanted to acknowledge. So he found three people who fitted the bill for his project – “ordinary citizens who, off their own bat, have made a strong commitment to social justice” – then took each of them into a studio and filmed their faces. He directed them to smile, to blink, to look around them, to close their eyes for a few minutes as if asleep; sometimes he told them to simply stare straight ahead as if in contemplation.
The edited footage, looped and slowed down by a half, was projected into the trees and accompanied by a soundscape of whistled protest songs. The effect was haunting, magical.
“People would just stumble upon it and be seduced by these monumental presences,” says Walsh, 47, who’s based in Sydney and has an exhibition at the MCA next month. “I like the idea that the artwork is viewing the audience, too; they’re engaged.”
The face pictured here, by the way, belongs to Jenny Curtis, a friendly mother-of-three from the city’s inner west. A landscape architect, she says the experience of becoming a parent opened her eyes to the looming crisis of climate change; it led her to co-found a vocal campaign group that’s fighting to stop the coal industry and championing renewable energy. She took her kids to see Emergence. What was their reaction to seeing her giant face like that? “They were totally freaked out,” she laughs.
Fremantle 6160
26 October 2013 Photography Tony McDonough
Fremantle 6160
It was a pivotal moment in last month’s Grand Final at the MCG. The Fremantle Dockers, who’d looked beaten at half-time, were making a late comeback when one of their players took a mark within range of the Hawthorn posts. It looked like an easy goal, but he fluffed the kick. And 2700km away, in Freo’s South Terrace, the crowd watching the big screen wailed en masse for their mummies and daddies.
“It’s called the ‘parental embrace gesture’,” explains body language expert Allan Pease, referring to the upwards movement of the arms that you see replicated through the crowd. It harks back to our early life: whenever we were really upset we would reach up to our parents like this, looking for comfort, for a cuddle. Hard-wired into us as infants, this same response resurfaces in later life during moments of acute distress, such as witnessing a terrible accident, or getting caught up in a natural disaster. Or seeing your footy team waste a crucial chance in its first grand final. The gesture typically ends with people patting or hugging their own heads – imitating the same touch of that reassuring parental embrace. It’s all subconscious, of course, says Pease.
Perth-based photographer Tony McDonough spent the entire match shooting the reactions of the crowd. It was “an interesting experiment”, he says; usually his lens is turned the other way, towards the action on the field. The 57-year-old, who speaks with the Scouse accent of his native Liverpool, understands the anguish he observed as the Dockers’ chances ebbed away. In Liverpool they revere a bloke called Bill Shankly, who steered a team to greatness in another code, another era. “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death,” Shankly once said. “I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it’s much, much more important than that.”
Deniliquin 2710
26 October 2013 Photography Nick McGrath
Deniliquin 2710
From the vantage point of a helicopter high above the paddock, the “Circle Work” competition at the Deni Ute Muster takes on an ethereal quality, like a piece of abstract art. But on the ground it’s a different story. “Your heart’s going a thousand miles an hour, and the adrenalin is overwhelming,” says Brad Smith, who’s pictured gunning his V8 Holden to victory in the final of the event in 2010. “You can hear the cheering even above the noise of the engine – and the harder the crowd goes, the harder I go.”
Smith, who grew up on a dairy farm at Scone in NSW’s Hunter Valley, has always had a thing for utes – and going round in circles in them. He saved up for ages to buy his first one back in 2006, when he was an apprentice mechanic on L-plates, and every evening after work he and his mates would take it into a paddock and “flog the guts off it”. Why? “It was just fun,” he says. “It felt like freedom.”
These days, at 22, he’s got more responsibilities. He and his fiancée run their own dairy farm in the Hunter – a “starter block”, he says, with 80 head of cattle. It’s proving a tough way to make a living: he pays himself $500 a week, and often works 100 hours for that.
It doesn’t help that most of his mates are in the coal mines, making big bucks; but still, he has no regrets. “I’d rather be earning stuff-all and doing something I love than getting paid 150 grand a year for sitting in a truck,” he says.
Most of his money goes into his 2003 Holden Maloo. It’s his show ute, his pride and joy. He has customised it with big chrome wheels, a straight-through exhaust (“very, very loud”), and a really huge bull-bar. “I just thought, let’s go nuts with the bull-bar,” he says. “I rang up the bloke in Orange who makes them, and gave him the measurements. He went, ‘You know that’s going to be ridiculously big,’ and I said, ‘Good!’”
Smith will be going for another Circle Work title at this year’s Deni Ute Muster, next weekend. Among the other contenders will be his fiancée, Amanda, who’s entering for the first time. She’s been practising for hours on the farm. “There’s a fair chance she’ll beat me,” he acknowledges. “I tell you what, I’ll never hear the end of it if she does...”
Franklin River
24 September 2011 Photography Matthew Newton
Franklin River
Kayaking the length of Tasmania’s Franklin River is a serious undertaking. If you’re quick, and skilled enough to run its gnarly rapids, the 120km journey takes four days. And that’s four days through a remote wilderness, with no chance of turning back. Once you start, you’re committed.
It’s at the Great Ravine – two days into the trip – that things can get a little dicey, says photographer Matthew Newton, who paddles the Franklin with his mates every year. The river bottlenecks at this point through a deep gorge (pictured) that’s choked with giant boulders. But it’s not the thundering whitewater that bothers these guys. It’s the threat of water from the sky. The river can rise 15m in a couple of hours in the Great Ravine during a downpour – and then you’re really up the creek without a paddle. “It’s one of those places where we all get nervous every time a cloud goes over the sun,” says Newton.
“It’s not a place to linger.” They got caught by a sudden flood once and had to wait it out for three days, scrambling with their gear ever higher up the steep, forested slopes as the river rose “like a giant stormwater drain”.
The Great Ravine aside, life becomes wonderfully distilled on the journey down the river, Newton says: you simply wake up in the morning, point your kayak downstream and go; at night you sleep under the stars.
A day’s paddle from where this photo was taken brings the group to the site of Peter Dombrovskis’ famous photo Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, which was such a potent publicity weapon in the fight against the proposed Franklin Dam. The significance is not lost on Newton. “For me and my mates this place is just the greatest gift,” he says. “And it wouldn’t be here now if that fight 30 years ago hadn’t been won.”
Darwin 0820
30 June 2012 Photography Daniel Hartley-Allen
Darwin 0820
Cara Angel weighs 42kg and stands 1.56m tall in her socks. But what she lacks in size she makes up for with steely determination. You need that single-mindedness to succeed as an apprentice jockey, of course. It’s a quality that Angel readily admits she didn’t always have.
After leaving school in Darwin she’d drifted into jobs that paid the bills but didn’t fulfil her – working at Bunnings, as a bartender, and as a cook – until in 2008, aged 22, she reached a crunch point. “I felt lost,” she says. “I didn’t have any direction in my life, any plan, and I was sick of floating between jobs I didn’t enjoy.” She had always dreamt of becoming a jockey, although Lord knows where that came from – she wasn’t from a horsey family, and had only had a couple of riding lessons as a kid. The ambition felt “really far-fetched”, she says, but she applied anyway for an apprentice jockey position in Perth. She got it.
Suddenly, the young woman who’d always struggled to get out of bed before noon was starting her working days at 3am in the stables, and learning to ride powerful racehorses 10 times her size. She discovered she had a knack with the animals – and a taste for victory. She now has 30 winners under her belt. “The feeling is indescribable,” she says of finishing first. “Your adrenalin is pumping, it’s just ecstatic.” (Angel is pictured after a race at the Fannie Bay dirt track in Darwin, where she’s doing the final year of her apprenticeship; she finished well down the field in that race – a story that’s written all over her face.)
It hasn’t been a smooth career path. At a country meet in 2009 she was thrown into a tree at a full gallop, fracturing her spine in four places; she spent six weeks in hospital and was out of action for a year. Just as bad, she says, was a four-month “drought” without a winner. “It’s a tough life, physically and mentally,” she muses. “The highs are really high, and the lows are really low.” But would she change a thing? Hell no. “Racing taught me motivation,” she says. “It gave me ambition.”
Donnybrook 6239
27 April 2013 Photography Mark Watson
Donnybrook 6239
The sun is setting over Donnybrook, an apple-growing town south of Perth, and all is calm and quiet on the Sheehan family’s 80ha orchard farm. Well, all except for the hard revving of son Josh’s 450cc Honda as he soars above a corner paddock. He’s practising a trick called the Ruler Flip: launching off a dirt ramp at 50km/h, he and the bike perform a backward somersault as they trace a three-second arc through the air to the landing ramp 23m away; to spice things up, he leaves the seat, so that he’s hanging under the bike at the apex of the jump.
It looks crazy – but then you have to be a bit bonkers to make it to the top as a freestyle motocross (FMX) rider. Sheehan, 27, grew up on the farm with three sisters and a brother, and always preferred doing “stupid and extreme things” on bikes to picking fruit. It was the Ruler Flip that first got him noticed by FMX promoters, in his early 20s, when he was working as a driller in a local bauxite mine. At that time he’d only been abroad once in his life, on a school trip to New Zealand; since turning pro with the Red Bull X-Fighters and Nitro Circus Live he’s performed around the world from Dubai to Paraguay, from China to the Czech Republic.
It’s a demanding lifestyle; touring leaves him no time for a love life, he says, and the nature of the sport is that “you have to constantly push the limits to stay ahead of the pack”. Aerial stunts that once wowed the crowds – the Indian Air, the Nac Nac, the Whip Flip and the Superman Seat Grab – just don’t cut it any more. Sheehan’s upping the ante: he’s one of only four riders in the world to have performed a double backflip.
It’s a dangerous job, no question; an X-Fighters team-mate was killed in February, and Sheehan has broken his wrists, jaw and collarbone. He uses a “foam pit” – a huge, custom-built soft landing – when perfecting a new manoeuvre, but it’s always a “huge mental step” to take it onto a hard surface for the first time. He admits he gets scared. “But if you don’t conquer your fear, you don’t conquer the trick.”
Faulconbridge Lookout 2776
23 March 2013 Photography Paul Mallam
Faulconbridge Lookout 2776
Harl Mallam was born in 1934, just as Australia was emerging from the Great Depression, and he grew up on a farm at Eden Creek in northern NSW, milking the cows by hand before school and ploughing the paddocks with horses. It was a hard life, but it was all he ever wanted to do. After National Service in the Air Force, he even turned down a job offer as a trainee pilot in order to return to the land. Then he met Marie at a dance; they married when she was 18, and for the first three years they lived and raised an infant son, Paul, in a canvas tent in woop woop along the Queensland border, where he was a cattle tick inspector.
Aged 27, while working on a friend’s sheep property and trapping rabbits as a sideline, Harl faced up to a difficult truth: without the money to buy into land, his dream of one day becoming a grazier was just that, a dream. So he and his young family decamped to Sydney with his parents’ Depression-era wisdom ringing in his ears: Get a government job, something safe and secure, with superannuation.
He joined the Mounted Police in Redfern, where his duties ranged from directing cars (“There were no traffic lights until the late ’60s,” he says) to leading guards of honour during visits by the Queen and US President Lyndon Johnson. After 14 years he transferred to general police duties, working his way up to become Chief Inspector at Bondi before retiring at 60.
Harl and Marie have seven grandchildren and live in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. This shot of him – a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize – was taken in the Blue Mountains by his son Paul, who’s now an artist and lawyer. The mounties’ parade uniform holds special memories for Paul and his two siblings, who as children would spend days polishing dad’s boots, buckles, buttons and tack in the lead-up to the Royal Easter Show, where the prize for best-turned-out officer was fiercely competitive. What did they get in return? “Nothing!” says Harl, who seems surprised by the question. “Kids just did what they were told in those days.”
Oyster Bridge 6701
23 March 2013 Photography Nathan Wills
Oyster Bridge 6701
It’s tough being an ocean-loving kid when you grow up in the Pilbara mining town of Newman, marooned 400km inland in a desert of red dirt and dry, searing heat. Jamie-Lee Marshman always longed for the holidays, when her parents, who worked for BHP Billiton, would pack their three kids into the car and head to Broome or Exmouth. The sensory novelty of “beautiful white sand, lush green trees and blue water” made a deep impression on her.
Jamie-Lee is 22 now and lives in Busselton, on the coast south of Perth, so getting a fix of the ocean is not a problem. She and her partner, photographer Nathan Wills, took a trip up to Ningaloo Reef recently and spent two weeks snorkelling with whale sharks, manta rays and turtles. At a secluded spot called Oyster Bridge he was floating over the reef with his Canon 5D in a waterproof casing, waiting for Jamie-Lee to put her fins on, when a green sea turtle suddenly glided into the frame. With his camera half under the water, he captured this serendipitous moment.
Nathan, 26, hopes one day to open a gallery in Busselton selling his landscape photography, but for the moment he’s paying the bills as a projectionist in the town’s cinema. He met Jamie-Lee five years ago at the unisex hairdressing salon where she worked – a meeting that, unbeknown to them, had been set up by friends. They’ve got a lot in common, sharing not only a love of the ocean but also an artistic streak (she’s a painter), a Christian faith and a penchant for tattoos.
The trip to Ningaloo was their first proper holiday together – the first time they’d had the money, and the time – and Nathan had a special reason for taking Jamie-Lee to the spot pictured. His late grandmother, who lived in the nearby township of Coral Bay, loved to swim and walk on the beach at Oyster Bridge. “It’s a magical spot,” says Nathan, who has always known it as Nanna’s Lagoon. “It’s a place that’s important to my family, and when I have a family of my own it’s going to be important to them too. That’s why I wanted to take Jamie-Lee there.”
Kalgan's Pool 6753
6 July 2013 Photography Luke Peterson
Kalgan's Pool 6753
Michelle Mogridge says her friends are always telling her she should write a book about her life. She’s beaming with happiness as she plays with her granddaughter Tiny on an outing to Kalgan’s Pool, near her home in the Pilbara town of Newman, in this image from World Vision’s new book Vision of Hope. But the 47-year-old hasn’t always had reasons to smile.
Born in Moora, north of Perth, she was orphaned before her teens and brought up by older sisters. By 22 she was a single mum. She and her baby, Sheila, travelled around a bit – Perth, Port Hedland, Jigalong – before settling in Newman, where Michelle met her de facto, Steve, at a bridge where they used to drink; she treated him to takeaway chicken and it went from there. They’ve been together 14 years now.
Her drinking was getting really bad, she admits, until a turning point came in her life one morning five years ago. She was walking to the Centrelink office with her cousin Tania, a mother of 11, to fill in the benefit forms for Tania’s youngest baby Markus.
Out of the blue, Tania said to her, “Do you want to fill in his forms?” – meaning, do you want to adopt him. “I said, ‘You’re joking’,” Michelle recalls, “and she said, ‘No, I’m not. You can have him if you want to’.” Michelle did want to, very much; she cried and said, “Thank you.” After introducing her new son to Steve, who was then in prison, Michelle was at home preparing the baby a bottle. She had a beer in her hand, as usual. “And I looked at Markus, and I looked at the beer, and I just thought, ‘Nah, I don’t need this’.” That was the end of her drinking, right there. She can’t even stand the smell of the stuff now.
“He pulled me out of the gutter,” she says of Markus, who’s now five. And things got even better with the arrival of grandchildren Waylyn and Tiny. “My three amigos,” she calls the little people in her life. She showers them with love, and receives their love in return like a blessing. “Without them I would be nothing,” she says. “I’m back in a good life.”
Leongatha 3953
11 February 2012 Photography Andrew Chapman
Leongatha 3953
Ian Hengstberger caused a bit of a stir at Sydney Airport when he got off a flight from Russia with this brown bear among his luggage. As he laid out his hunting trophy for Customs officers to examine, a huddle of curious fellow travellers formed that soon swelled to a crowd of about 50 – “all taking photos, really excited,” he says. Customs were relieved to wave him through and ease the bottleneck after seeing all his paperwork was in order.
The 48-year-old Gippsland farmer shot the 600kg bear as part of a sustainable cull in the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia’s far east. “A magnificent wilderness,” is how he describes the place. “Miles of rolling, snow-covered mountains, birch forests and volcanoes… it’s incredible.” He and his fellow hunters camped out for two weeks, braving minus-20ºC temperatures and getting around on cross-country skis – a novel mode of transport for Hengstberger – as they stalked their quarry.
The father of five began hunting as a young boy, trapping rabbits on the family farm. Lately it’s become his way of broadening his horizons. In 2001, having been abroad only once before (on a farm tour of New Zealand), he took himself off to Mongolia and spent several weeks travelling with nomads, hunting elk and ibex. He was hooked. He’s been back to Mongolia again since, then Russia, and recently to Alaska. “I just love being out there with Mother Nature at its finest,” he says. As a hunter, he sees himself as part of the “natural cycle” of these wilderness areas.
Hengstberger admits that his wife, Richelle, isn’t too keen on all the stuffed trophies adorning their farmhouse, but he buys her a nice necklace after every trip, just to keep things sweet. He’ll have to do better than that after his recent Alaska adventure, though, when Richelle was left to deal with the busy calving season. “She’s holding out for a new horse this time,” he says.
Alice Springs 0870
1 December 2012 Photography Peter Carroll
Alice Springs 0870
When Michael Karaitiana’s boxing tent rolls into town and challenges everyone to a punch-up, how could any red-blooded male resist? If you’re game enough to go three rounds with one of his fighters – known by pseudonyms such as the Humpty Doo Warrior, Man Dingo and Budgie Smuggler – you’ll at least walk away with some have-a-go glory. And if you win the bout you’ll walk away with a couple of hundred bucks, too.
That’s Karaitiana in the black, microphone in hand as he begins his spiel at Alice Springs. He was born into this game. His grandfather, Roy Bell, started the boxing tent in 1924 and it’s been in the family ever since. Aged six, Karaitiana began boxing local boys wherever they went and audiences would shower the mat with coins. Later, he learnt to spruik by studying old footage of Bell, who died in 1971. “It’s in my blood,” the 49-year-old father of five says. “It’s who I am, it’s what I am.”
The tent is on the road for eight months a year, working the country show circuit through Queensland and the Northern Territory. Karaitiana carries eight permanent fighters and also picks up temporary blokes looking to earn a quid – miners from Mt Isa, ringers from Katherine, ex-pros, even backpackers. “They come from all walks of life but they’re all hard men,” he says. (No kidding: that fighter below him manages to look formidable even while dressed up like a punchy Santa.)
It’s tough being away for so long from his wife Mandy, who stays at home near Parkes, NSW, to put their girls through school, but their two sons, aged 16 and 20, fly up every year in their holidays to fight for him. Like all his men they “know how to do the right thing”, he says – which means going easy on punters who aren’t much good at boxing, but hell for leather with those who are, and always shaking hands at the end.
It’s an anachronistic spectacle, but the appeal is primal. “When I’m spieling and the drum’s beating, the atmosphere is electric,” Karaitiana says. “The young blokes in the crowd, half of them have earrings and are dressed like bloody girls, and we’re challenging them to put their hand up for a fight. They can’t quite believe what they’re seeing.”
Port Douglas 4877
1 December 2012 Photography Murray Anderson-Clemence
Port Douglas 4877
It was just another day at the office for Gulliver Page when he put on a mask, snorkel, fins and skydiving gear, and leapt from a chopper 5000ft over a sand quay off the coast of Port Douglas. After landing in the drink, he jettisoned his parachute then swam down and put on scuba gear that was cached on the reef.
It sounds like the stuntman was shooting a Bond movie, but in fact he was making his own two-minute piece for the 1 Day in Paradise competition, in which Queensland tourism bodies gave GoPro cameras to 20 filmmakers and asked them to do something with the “wow” factor.
Page, 35, knows all about the “wow” factor. When he was growing up in Sydney’s Avalon, his dad Grant – a pioneering stuntman – would hold a training session on the first Sunday of each month for the “stuntie” community. “It was a melting pot of knowledge and experience,” says Page, who joined in from the age of 12.
So that was a normal Sunday for him as a kid? “Yeah, pretty much,” he says.
His first TV gig, at 13, was falling through a roof on Police Rescue. He’s come a long way since then: his film credits include X Men Origins: Wolverine and Life of Pi. (Remember when Gérard Depardieu falls out of the boat? That was Page, wearing a “fat suit” and a prosthetic nose).
It’s a precarious profession in Australia, he says – there are “big peaks and troughs” in the amount of work – but when things are quiet he no longer stresses, he just goes skydiving (his passion is skimming around the edges of clouds while wearing a wingsuit). He could really use the $75,000 prize in the short-film competition, but it’ll be judged online, by viewers on YouTube, and he knows how fickle that can be. “It’ll probably be won by someone fishing with their cat,” he says.
Mount Taylor 2606
9 March 2013 Photography Darren Clark
Mount Taylor 2606
When Ngambri elder Shane Mortimer looks out over Canberra, he doesn’t see a city. He is attuned instead to the “spirit woman” lying in the landscape. He sees her face and abdomen, and her breasts – Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain. He sees her womb, the hill where Parliament House now stands. He takes it all in through the eyes of his people, who’ve lived here for more than 80,000 years. No wonder he’s so dismissive of Canberra’s centenary. “That means absolutely nothing to me,” the 57-year-old says. “It’s a nonsense, a contrivance.”
Mortimer had no inkling of his own aboriginality until early middle age. The son of a successful engineer, he’d enjoyed a “life of privilege” growing up in Sydney’s north; weekends were spent at the Ku-ring-gai Motor Yacht Club, or game fishing, or ice-skating. At the age of 34, when he was living in Manly and working as a theatre publicist, he was looking one day at a family photo album with his wife when she mentioned that his Aunty Vi looked Aboriginal.
No, he said, my mum’s side are of Pacific Islander stock. But it piqued his curiosity, and led him to the Office of Aboriginal Affairs, where he discovered an amazing thing: a maternal line going back to his great-great-great-grandmother Ju Nin Mingo, who was born to a Ngambri woman and pastoralist James Ainslie in 1827. His grandmother had been among the Stolen Generations. It turned out his mum and aunties knew all this; the “Islander” story was a convenient family fiction, a way to bury their complex feelings of pain and shame.
Mortimer has lived in Canberra for 20 years now. He’s divorced and has no kids (“I chose not to reproduce”), and he performs Welcome To Country ceremonies at civic events. He made headlines recently for his $6 million lawsuit against a white professor who blogged that Mortimer looked “about as Aboriginal as I do”. Mostly, though, he’s known for that fabulous cloak. Thirty six possums died for it. He had it made after seeing a painting of a 19th-century ancestor wearing one. Things have changed since those days though. “Possums are a protected species now,” he laments. “I had to order it from New Zealand.”
Tasmania 7212
15 December 2012 Photography Stu Gibson
Tasmania 7182
Shipstern Bluff: it’s a name that sends shivers up the spine of any surfer. No other wave in Australia – indeed, few other waves in the world – can match the power, unpredictability and danger of this break on the Tasman Peninsula, an hour’s boat ride from Port Arthur. For Marti Paradisis and his mates, who grew up near Hobart, it has long been a place to test the outer limits of their skill and courage. They’re drawn to it like moths to a flame.
That’s Paradisis, 29, in the photo. You’ve noticed he’s dressed as Santa Claus; we’ll come to that in a minute. For now, contemplate the awesome thickness of the wave at its crest, and the fact that it rears up like this in the blink of an eye as Southern Ocean swells emerge from deep water and suddenly hit a shallow rock shelf.
Paradisis is airborne after launching off the “step” – the bulge in the face of the wave, running diagonally behind him. It’s a unique feature of Shipstern and the critical moment of the ride, he says. If you land well you’re set up for the deep, sweet barrel that comes next. If you stuff it up, the consequences can be dire.
He’s been held down for 30 seconds here; he’s come within a whisker of being smashed against rocks at the base of the 150m-high sea cliff which gives the wave its name. As for the Great Whites that prowl these waters, attracted by the nearby seal colony, he laughs and says: “Sharks are the least of your worries.”
So why the Santa suit? Well, it was Christmas Eve in 2010, and Paradisis and his friends were larking about because they couldn’t quite believe their luck: Shipstern is usually “on” only in the colder months when thick wetsuits, gloves and hoods are required. Some of the others rode it that day in boardshorts, for the novelty; one even cracked a can of beer inside the barrel and took a swig. Now that’s chutzpah.
You’ll be glad to know Santa nailed the step, and rode the barrel until it spat him out safely. Then what? “You breathe a big sigh of relief, every time,” Paradisis says. “Then you go round and do it again.”
Eucla 6443
21 January 2012 Photography Liz Rogers
Eucla 6443
One hundred and twenty metres beneath the Nullarbor Plain, Liz Rogers was finning slowly along Warbla Cave when she stopped to take this photo of her three fellow divers. She was struck by the way their exhaled air was pooling in the roof, shimmering like little puddles of mercury.
It’s the surreal, beautiful things you see while cave-diving that enthrals Rogers, 26, who took up the sport eight years ago. And the joy of weightlessness, too. “It feels like you’re flying through space,” she says of exploring a flooded cave system’s interconnected tunnels and chambers, which can extend for many kilometres.
The team had a special scientific permit to enter Warbla, which was first explored in the early ’70s but is now closed to recreational cave-divers in order to preserve the unusual bacteria that colonise its walls.
Access was tough: they had to lower all their gear, and themselves, down ropes into the gaping hole in the desert near the Eucla Roadhouse, then swim through a thick guano soup floating in the top few metres of water. But after that, she says, the rewards were great: “It’s a dream cave for photography because the walls are pure white and very reflective, and the water is so clear.”
Rogers, who lives in Melbourne, works in risk management, advising companies “what might go wrong before it does”. It’s a good mindset to have in cave-diving, too, which has claimed three lives in the past couple of years in Australia. In Warbla, at least, she had her back covered by two special dive buddies, both veterans of the sport: that’s her mum, Cheryl, in the foreground, with dad Peter bringing up the rear (and visiting US diver Forrest Wilson in the yellow helmet). How’s that for a family holiday snap?
Surfers Paradise 4217
Surfers Paradise 4217
A sign from God led David Mulder to become a human statue in Surfers Paradise. In 2008, he and his wife were racking their brains for a way to fund their first missionary trip to India. With five kids at home, his job as a maintenance man covered the bills but no more. That’s when his bible fell open at Psalm 46:10 – “Be still, and know that I am God.” Hmmm, he thought. Be still. He went down to Cavill Avenue in the flowing white robes that he’d worn to his church’s Christmas pageant, posed like a statue, and coins rattled into his tin like manna from heaven. Within six months he was spreading the gospel to poor villagers in India.
The 51-year-old Gold Coast native has expanded his routine since then. The cowboy, pictured, is one of a dozen characters he performs in Surfers and at country shows. His schtick is to simply “lock in position”; the thrill for punters, he says, is in trying to work out if he’s a real person. That’s quite a feat, given it’s just ordinary grey house paint on his outfit.
Standing still for two-hour shifts isn’t as easy as you’d think. On hot days he’ll sweat off 1.5kg, and he might have ants crawling down his neck or flies buzzing his face. It requires discipline. He learnt all about that in the army – after school he served eight years as an infantryman with 8/9 RAR – but what’s harder to deal with are the drunks. He’s had blokes kick him in the groin, blow pepper up his nose; one cheeky bugger even graffitied his back. Last month, he snapped and walloped a young man who’d been tormenting him; the YouTube clip went viral.
Andrea, his wife of 31 years, is always there in the background. He’ll give her a signal if he needs attention, but communication is limited to her guessing what might be wrong (e.g. “Is there sweat in your eyes?”), and him grunting for “yes”. It sounds like a measure of how serious he is about staying in character, but there’s a more compelling reason: the thick face-paint she applies means his lips are sealed shut. “Actually,” says Andrea, “that’s a pretty good tip for a happy marriage.”
Manly 2095
18 May 2013 Photography David Maurice-Smith
Manly 2095
Photographer David Maurice Smith was shooting in the early morning light at Sydney's Manly beach when a stranger emerged from the surf and asked him to take her picture. This was a little surprising, he says; usually it's the other way around. But it turned out that Di Davis-Rice wanted to have a significant moment in her life recorded: she'd just been swimming in the spot where she'd scattered her husband's ashes the previous evening.
Di had been married to Gerry for 25 years. They'd met at a party on Sydney's north shore when she was a 38-year-old widow with two young kids - her first husband had died of cancer - and Gerry was a divorced life insurance agent with four of his own. The mad keen surfer, 10 years her senior, was "laid back, a deep thinker and a real gentleman", she says; they fell in love and blended their two families.
They shared a passion for skiing, for travelling, for the ocean. "We had an amazing marriage," she says. "We did everything together. We had such fun." And then, one day in February this year, Gerry was taken from her, dropping dead from a heart attack that came without warning.
In a whirlwind of grief and shock she organised a traditional surfer's send-off at Manly's Fairy Bower, where as a youth he had learnt to ride his longboard. The family paddled out on boards at sunset on Valentine's Day, formed a circle, then began slapping the water and calling out his name - "Gerry! We love you Gerry!" - as Di scattered the ashes. "It wasn't even sad," she says, with something like wonder in her voice. "It was just such a special, powerful moment."
Three months on, she admits she's "not coping very well"; the first time she was widowed it was easier, in a way, because with two little ones she just had to keep going. At least now she has six grown-up kids and 15 grandchildren to fall back on. And she was touched by the chance encounter with the photographer, whose portrait captures her in the element where she finds some solace from her grief. She has swum every morning since Gerry died. "The ocean is helping me immensely at the moment," she says. "It soothes me. It heals me."
Howard Springs 0835
30 November 2013 Photography Nathan Dyer
Howard Springs 0835
Chris Peberdy has a perfectly ordinary relationship with nine of the 10 saltwater crocodiles he keeps at his home near Darwin. "I look after them, and they want to eat me," he explains. But with Stampy it's different. He swims with her in the family pool, and takes her to friends' barbecues ("She loves chicken wings"), and tickles her neck until her eyes roll back in ecstasy like a dog. Stampy even appears in his wedding photos, posing with the groomsmen.
Peberdy, 30, is a reptile wrangler contracted by the NT government - he's the guy you call in the middle of the night when you find a snake in the bathroom or a croc in the yard. He picked up Stampy in the grounds of a suburban primary school eight years ago. She was then a very sick hatchling, and he felt sorry for her; instead of sending her off to a crocodile farm for eventual processing into "boots, bags and belts", he started nursing her back to health. And as he did so, he noticed a curious thing: she clearly enjoyed human contact.
"She never tried to bite or resist. She never showed any anger - she doesn't have an angry bone in her body," says Peberdy, pictured in a shot from the new book Animal Tales (R.M. Williams Publishing, $20). He says they share "complete trust", even though "she could bite off my fingers with one snap of her jaws if she wanted to".
The ill health as a juvenile has stunted Stampy's growth, but she'll probably end up around 2.5m long. How things work out with Peberdy's baby daughter Katherine - whom Stampy has only met "at a distance" so far - is yet to be seen. But he's committed to the croc's lifetime care. His wife Claire, a nurse, doesn't mind. Which is just as well, because salties can live for 100 years. It affords Peberdy a unique study opportunity. "Something has undone millions of years of evolution with this animal," he says.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in the family pool. There's a spa at one end, which Stampy adores. Peberdy admits it's an odd sight. "She's a primitive animal that's supposed to strike fear into people's hearts - and she's wallowing in bubbles."