Heart of the Nation: Adelaide 5032
Nano and Bash playing on some Bunnings gear with the sprinkler going on a hot summer’s day ... how Australian is this photo?
Can you feel the change in the air? The days are getting a little longer, a little warmer. Summer’s coming, people! Soon, scenes like this image – a finalist in the Heritage Bank Photographic Awards – will be playing out all over Australian suburbia.
Melissa Crisa and her husband Frank, their two boys Cristiano and Sebastian, two dogs, a cockatiel and a budgie live at Brooklyn Park, out near the Adelaide airport. The couple own and run four laundromats and an eco-friendly dry cleaning store, on top of which Melissa has a thriving wedding photography business. Life is super-busy. But she always finds a little time each day to photograph her boys: to document their childhood. “It can be really mundane, everyday things – but these little snapshots of our family life make my heart happy,” says the 38-year-old.
They don’t have the luxury of a pool at their place, and the aircon in their house “isn’t the best”, Melissa says, so when it gets hot Cristiano and Sebastian will put the sprinkler on in the yard and just frolic in the water. “Like we all used to back in the day!” says Melissa, who grew up in Gawler, a country town north of Adelaide. Her image is titled First Taste of Summer.
The boys, by the way, are named after soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo and former Formula One champion Sebastian Vettel. (“Frank is Italian,” she says, by way of explanation.) But they’re known to all respectively as Nano and Bash. And see that strap strung up between the posts of the veranda equipped with the swing and the hand-holds, a key bit of apparatus for their waterplay? “Frank bought all that at Bunnings,” Melissa says, laughing. “How Aussie is that?”