Benjamin Hardman’s Iceland love affair

They drink Black Death and eat rotten shark in Iceland. So why has this young Perth photographer emigrated there?

TWAM 5 Sep 2015

Two weeks ago, 21-year-old Benjamin Hardman packed up his old life – a suburban home under the harsh Perth sun, and a job in accountancy that bored him to tears – and emigrated to the strangest country on Earth.

Iceland is a place of wild extremes: it has volcanoes and glaciers, black-sand beaches and waterfalls framed in a hundred shades of green. In midsummer it’s light at midnight; in winter the sun barely kisses the horizon. It’s a country of only 330,000 people and most of them live in the capital Reykjavik, where social life revolves around soaking in geothermal pools, drinking shots of brennivin (a tipple nicknamed “Black Death”) and eating hákarl. Hákarl? “Rotten shark meat,” he laughs. “The smell is indescribable.”

Actually, there’s one important part of Hardman’s old life that he can’t leave behind – Amy, his girlfriend and artistic muse. Here she is in an op-shop wedding dress, curled up in the roots of a Moreton Bay Fig in Perth’s Kings Park. The pair met at Somerville Baptist College and got together two years ago; she’ll join him in Iceland once she finishes uni.

Heart of the nation

Hardman is now learning the lingo in Reykjavik, and plans to make a career in landscape photography, his great joy in life. It was photography that first brought him to Iceland in 2013 – he wanted to shoot its famous aurora borealis, the mesmerising display of “northern lights” in the night sky – and it has drawn him back twice since, this time for good. “I just fell in love with the place,” he says.

Of course, all love affairs have hitches. That first time, he booked his flight halfway around the world on impulse, so fired up with the idea of seeing the aurora that he overlooked one tiny but important detail: “It was mid-summer,” he says sheepishly. “So it never got dark.”