Resident of Yarraville
There’s a lot of beauty here in the Inner West
While there is substantial industrial we also have the bay, the river, beaches, lakes and great views of the city. There are endless photography opportunities all within a short drive.
I really only got seriously into photography a couple of years ago. I had no intention of taking it up as a hobby but did want to take some photos of the moon for my astrology website so I went into a camera shop in town and asked to see a suitable camera. The salesman took me out to Elizabeth Street and zoomed the camera in on the full moon. For an affordable price, I could buy a ‘point and shoot’ camera with a 2000mm lens that could clearly capture the craters on the moon. I was sold!
I realized pretty quickly that there are only so many moon crater photos I could take. A friend and I did an introductory photography course at the Yarraville Community Centre although I was very busy at work at that time and it was close to Christmas so I didn’t have a lot of energy to focus on it.
A few months later when on holidays I decided to get up early one morning to capture the sunrise and a new addiction was born. Living in Newport means I only have a five-minute drive to the Williamstown foreshore which is perfectly situated for sunrise photography as it faces the east. It is also a great spot to capture the rising moon or some sunset colour over the city.
With yachts, jetties, the Spirit of Tasmania and cruise ships, swans, pelicans and hot air balloons there is a lot to work with.
Some of my favourite places to shoot are the Ferguson Street Pier, just under the West Gate Bridge in Spotswood, the Williamstown Time Ball, Jawbone Reserve and the along the Altona foreshore. Did you know there is a jetty at the bottom of Frances Street? I like the down-river view of the Westgate.
I did actually do some photography as a school activity. My very first camera was a Kodak Polaroid camera given to me for Christmas when I was about 13. it was one of those cameras where you took the picture, ripped out the film, waited for 30 seconds or so then peeled off the cover sheet to reveal the picture. Mine only took black and white pictures so it was pretty basic. I can remember during one of the lessons holding the camera at an angle to take an ‘arty’ shot.
We also learnt about SLR cameras and how to develop black and white film which I remember thinking was quite fiddly. Purists will die when they hear this but I much prefer digital to film as it is so easy, immediate and very forgiving. Rather than send a film away to be developed then wait two weeks to get it back to see if there were any decent shots with digital photography you can check the image on the back of the camera, re-shoot if required, upload to a phone and post to Instagram all within a couple of minutes.
Sharing photos on social media is also so much easier and has much greater reach than setting up a film projector for a family ‘slide’ night as my father used to love to do. Instagram allows you to share your photos with other photographers who, after a while, are often more appreciative of your images than friends and family.
For those not with slides, they were individual film negatives from which pictures could be printed. Each individual negative is then inserted into a cardboard frame about 5cm square. Each slide is then put in a slot in the projector for viewing on a screen. We had millions of them all neatly packed in special storage boxes, mainly of family events…often, as you see from the picture above, with the top of our heads cut off!
Water is a dominant theme in my photos and I think my love of water views stems from my childhood. I was born in Sydney but at age 9 when we moved to the NSW Central Coast (near Gosford) where we lived in a house on a hill looking at a lake. Swimming in the lake wasn’t great as there was a lot of weed but we learnt to fish and canoe and, of course, it was beautiful to look at.
We also lived about a 10 minute drive from some nice beaches and were there often there as kids even though thanks to my Irish heritage, I am fair and freckly so definitely not suited to lying on a beach baking in the sun for hours.
To my mind being near the water is very therapeutic. Nothing beats a walk along the beach, even in winter, to clear the head.
Working life
I got over the fantasy of trying to make a living from landscape photography very quickly. These days everyone with a camera sells their photographs so it is extremely competitive.
I have worked for a government department for the last 11 or so years. I currently administer funding for language services which are interpreting or translating services. It is vital that clients can communicate with their health professional and vice versa to ensure the best outcome.
Government is a completely different experience after working in finance and stockbroking for many years. I started at my local Commonwealth Bank branch after leaving Year 12. Only about 15% of those I attended Year 12 with went to university as people usually got a job then and worked their way up through the company. I did eventually attend university as a mature age student.
Three years of retail banking was enough for me so I quit my job, broke up with my long-term boyfriend and moved to Melbourne in 1985. Mum had suggested Melbourne as my sister had just transferred here with her work. I knew nothing about it but I packed up my car and drove down.
My first job in Melbourne was with a wholesale superannuation fund manager. It was an interesting time to work in the finance industry as the mid to late 1980s was a period of great extravagance. There were a lot of people earning huge salaries that they happily splashed about especially on socializing. Friday night drinks were massive!
It was the era of the business lunch when even we administrative staff took our counterparts at the stockbroking firms we regularly dealt with to lunch at some of Melbourne’s nicest restaurants all on the company expense account. Christopher Skase (one of Australia’s most wanted fugitives) would pop into our office on occasion to chat with our Managing Director as we held a significant amount of stock in his company Qintex Ltd.
The Black Monday stock market crash of 19 October 1987 triggered the end of this era. I had been in the office on the Sunday before, typing up an assignment for the Stock Exchange course I was then doing. One of our senior fund managers had come in as he knew the Dow had closed substantially down on the Friday before. The Monday trading was even more dramatic than he had anticipated with the greatest stock market falls since 1929.
The crash led to the eventual downsizing, re-structuring or takeover of many fund managers and stock brokers by the banks. About 18 months after the crash I was offered a redundancy package and happily took this and headed off in late 1989 on the great Aussie adventure that was the 12-month working holiday in London.
I stayed in London for 15 months where I worked for a Swiss bank, attended lots of shows (my favourite show was Private Lives with Joan Collins) and travelled as much as I could. I spent a month backpacking solo around Portugal and Spain, two weeks skiing in Austria and four weeks touring Russia and Westen Europe plus a variety of smaller trips.
We often went to France for lunch. This was a mind-blowing concept for an Aussie. It involved an early morning ferry trip to Boulogne, a lovely, usually inexpensive, lunch at a nice restaurant followed by a trip to one of the huge supermarkets near the port to pick up as much duty-free alcohol as you could carry before catching the ferry back to the UK late in the afternoon.
My second winter in London (1990-1991) was not as relaxed as the first. Lots of snow meant the city ground had ground to a halt due to public transport issues and there were concerns over possible food shortages. This apparently happened every time London had a big snowfall which is about once every four years. I decided then that snow is only fun when you are on holidays.
More concerning was the increasing threat of terrorism in the lead-up to the start of first Gulf War with Iraqi suicide bombers threatening to plough into London. Air raid sirens were tested for the first time since World War II.
I was on an overnight bus to Belfast in January 1991, heading off to spend a couple of days to check out where my father was born when the fighting actually commenced in Afghanistan. It was a sombre trip spent listening to the radio reports as we drove through the night to the ferry.
On my return to London, as I was unemployed at the time, I spent a bit of time at home watching the war on CNN which was a surreal, and slightly addictive, experience. I decided staying in London was all too hard at that time so I returned to Melbourne in February 1991 after an icy February five day stop-over in New York.
America was really my only travel option at that time between the war and unappealing European winter weather. I had booked a tour of Egypt for the January (the last of the five must-see places on my travel list) but after the war started the airline couldn’t guarantee getting tourists out of Cairo so my return flight was cancelled. I have still not been to Egypt.
I lived with a friend in East Malvern after my return from London. I was only meant to stay there for a couple of days but her boyfriend had broken up with her the day before I go back home so I stayed on, initially because she was so upset but later because she needed a housemate.
I moved out a couple of years later into the single fronted period house I had bought in Footscray. I knew the area because my sister had bought a house in Yarraville in about a year prior.
I lived there for three years before moving to Hobart. Yes, my house in Hobart had a view of the River Derwent! While I enjoyed living in Hobart I missed Melbourne’s cultural events.
What motivated my return was the cancellation of three shows I had tickets to (Joe Cocker, The Corrs and the Chinese circus). I never did find out why any of them cancelled the Tassie section of their tours!
I have been happily settled in Newport since my return.
