Life Trove

August 19, 2026

Travel research: Mungo and surrounds

I'm getting excited about my trip on 28 August. There's been a lot of rain and Mungo and Kinchega Lakes are currently closed but I'm hoping that they will be open again by the time I leave next week. Fingers crossed. There are other things to explore but Mungo in particular is one of the main reasons I wanted to see this area.

Map of places of interest

Things to see & photograph

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August 19, 2026

Experimenting with a "toy camera" app in Newtown

The theme at our Photography Meetup outing in Newtown was "toy camera". I experimented with the Hipstamatic app. Afterwards, we went to a delightful pub there was a $29 special for a rump streak and drink. Excellent value and delicious.

Photo taken by Stan

Taken by Jason

August 18, 2026

Memorable moments: From the Crossfire to Cairo

We all experience distinct highs and lows across our working lives—roles that light us up with purpose and ones we desperately wish away.

The absolute lowest point of my career came in London back in 2001. I was living with Ally when the dot-com bubble burst in dramatic fashion, taking my job at Siegelgale down with it. With the tech market frozen, finding another role proved impossible. As weeks stretched on, I found myself battling both a depleted bank account and deep, unrelenting boredom.

Desperate for an outlet, I spotted an advert in our local paper for a marshal at a nearby paintball range. Having always loved playing paintball, I applied on a whim and was hired.

It was nothing like the expansive, sunlit forests I had played in back in South Africa. The venue was a grim, dimly lit, dilapidated warehouse. My primary responsibility was to stand pressed against a concrete wall in the dangerous no-man's-land between two opposing teams, ensuring players followed the safety rules.

I quickly discovered a harsh workplace reality: as far as the players were concerned, the marshals were entirely fair game.

I spent shifts being relentlessly pelted by high-velocity paint pellets, winced through genuine physical bruising, and had paint constantly dripping from my overalls. When the battles finally ended, the misery didn't. The marshals then had to strip and clean the jammed guns. Nearly every marker had malfunctioned, filling the barrels with thick, sticky sludge that took endless scrubbing and rinsing in icy water to dislodge.

For this bruised ordeal, we were handed a paltry five pounds an hour—the lowest wage I had ever earned in my entire life. Trudging home through the freezing London dark, covered in drying paint, I felt completely grounded at rock bottom.

Needing a radical change of direction, I threw another application into the wind—this time to overland expedition companies. Through an extraordinary stroke of luck, despite having zero prior tour experience, I landed a role as an expedition leader running overland trips across the Middle East between Istanbul and Cairo.

The pay was a mere ten pounds a day—technically even less per hour than the warehouse—yet it was instantly the most exhilarating, life-affirming job I had ever known. In a single leap, I had gone from taking stray shots in a damp London basement to navigating desert crossings, ancient ruins, and unforgettable horizons.

After five months on the road, Ally called me home. I returned to the UK transformed: my confidence was sky-high and euphoric. With that renewed energy, I walked straight into a fantastic role as an e-business project manager for Volvo, traveling extensively across Europe.

Whenever life hits a difficult trough today, I cast my mind back to that cold London warehouse. It serves as an enduring reminder of how life actually moves: our greatest periods of reinvention and euphoria often lie waiting just on the other side of our lowest moments.

Stories from my life

"A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it." Fred Allen

I've been having so much fun remembering and writing the stories from my life and some of the stories of the people I love. Lots more stories to come. When my memory gets going, there seems to be an endless supply!

Stories by theme

Stories by life stage

People involved

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August 17, 2026

Memorable moments: The mountain hugger

I have always had a healthy, visceral terror of heights. I suspect I inherited it from my gramps, who had it so bad he was wary of climbing even two rungs up a step ladder.

My hiking mates, on the other hand, are utterly fearless. Whenever a trail skirts a sheer drop, they skip along nonchalantly while I instinctively press my entire body against the rock face, hugging the mountain with every ounce of grip I possess. Curiously, my fear comes with a strange paradox: if there is deep water below, the terror completely evaporates. In fact, I love nothing more than leaping off high cliffs into a river. But sheer drops onto solid rock? Absolutely not.

Lately, this acrophobia has taken on a life of its own, reaching its absolute zenith whenever I am in a car traversing a narrow mountain pass with no guardrails—especially when I’m sitting in the passenger seat staring straight down into the void.

Not long ago, Russell and I headed up into the Cederberg for a weekend hike. As the road snaked higher and higher up the pass, with nothing between our tyres and a sheer thousand-foot drop, panic took hold. It got so bad that I couldn't take it anymore—I made Russell pull over so I could take the wheel myself.

My brilliant survival strategy? I immediately veered across the road to hug the solid cliff wall on the right-hand side, crawling along at a snail's pace on the complete wrong side of the road.

By every objective measure of road safety, I had replaced the mild, theoretical risk of sliding off an edge with the immediate, high-probability danger of an oncoming car obliterating us head-on around a blind corner.

It was a stark, comical reminder of a deeper truth: the thing we truly have to fear most is fear itself. It arrives disguised as wise self-preservation, whispering that it is keeping us safe, when in reality its blind panic often steers us directly into far greater danger.

Technology

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke

I love technology and feel extremely blessed to have lived through the digital revolution and to have experienced all the incredible technological devices that have been invented during my life time including the personal computer, Internet, smart phone and AI.

Posts related to technology

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Building web sites

Stories relating to technology

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Lighthouses

"I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve." George Bernard Shaw

Lighthouse photos I've taken in Australia

Why I love lighthouses

There has always been something about lighthouses that draws me in. They carry the weight of history, standing through storms, wars, changing coastlines and countless human stories. Each one has watched generations come and go, quietly fulfilling the purpose for which it was built. They are monuments not to power or glory, but to service.

Perhaps that is why they feel so deeply symbolic. A lighthouse does not force its light on anyone; it simply shines, offering guidance to those who choose to navigate by it. There is something profoundly beautiful in that image. And then there is their sheer visual presence. Perched on rugged cliffs, lonely islands or windswept headlands, they are among the most photogenic structures ever created—where engineering, landscape, history and metaphor come together in a way that never fails to stir my imagination.

Lighthouses I've photographed

South Africa

Cape Point (Cape Town)
Green Point (Cape Town)
Kalk Bay (Cape Town)
Port St Johns (Transkei)

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Art and Culture

Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see. Paul Klee

Art

Shows & Concerts

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August 16, 2026

Favourite photographers: David Doubilet

David Doubilet’s photographs fill me with an almost childlike sense of wonder. For me, no one captures the extraordinary underwater world of the ocean more beautifully—whether he is photographing the brilliant colours and teeming life of a coral reef or the cold, mysterious blue beneath the Antarctic ice. His images reveal a hidden world that feels vast, fragile and profoundly alive, making us see the ocean not as an empty expanse but as one of the most beautiful and miraculous realms on Earth.

I especially adore Doubilet’s split-level photographs, in which half the image lies above the water and half below. He has perfected this technique both technically and artistically, transforming the waterline into a threshold between two worlds—the familiar world of sky and land above and the secret universe beneath. I was introduced to his work when I attended a presentation he gave at the Sydney Opera House in 2014, and I was completely blown away. Seeing his images on that scale, while hearing the stories behind them from Doubilet himself, left an unforgettable impression on me.

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The artist at work, immersed in his medium

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August 16, 2026

Favourite photographers: Frank Hurly

Frank Hurley is one of my greatest inspirations as a photographer. He was the official photographer on Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Endurance expedition to Antarctica, which became one of the greatest survival stories ever told and has inspired generations. Yet I often wonder whether the story would have retained quite the same power without Hurley’s photographs. Shackleton’s leadership and the endurance of his men were extraordinary, but Hurley gave their ordeal a face. His images allow us to enter their frozen world, turning an incredible historical account into something immediate, intimate and unforgettable.

It seems miraculous that the photographs survived at all. After the Endurance had been abandoned, Hurley returned to the flooded wreck and plunged into freezing, slushy water to retrieve his glass-plate negatives. He and Shackleton then selected 120 plates to carry with them and smashed roughly 400 others because their weight threatened the men’s survival. Hurley sealed the chosen negatives inside a soldered metal container and somehow protected them throughout the ordeal. Considering the enormous cameras, glass plates and other equipment he had to transport, it is astonishing how inventive he remained—climbing the ship’s rigging, venturing onto the ice and photographing from extraordinary angles to create images of breathtaking drama.

His photographs captured far more than the Endurance trapped, splintering and finally being crushed by the ice. Hurley also recorded the exhausting work of pulling sledges and lifeboats, but he was equally attentive to the quieter life of the expedition: the men reading, playing music and whiling away the endless hours aboard ship; the friendships and humour that sustained them; and the huskies, seals and penguins that shared their strange white world. These beautiful, intimate images give the story its humanity. Hurley was not simply documenting an expedition—he was creating an extraordinary visual portrait of people living together at the very edge of survival.

My appreciation of Hurley was deepened by a presentation Sue and I attended at the State Library of New South Wales in 2016. It also connected profoundly with my own journey to Antarctica in 2013 as a photographer for Upschool. We sailed past Elephant Island, where 22 members of Shackleton’s crew endured four bleak months while he attempted to return and rescue them. Seeing that desolate, windswept place made their survival seem almost impossible. That all 28 members of the Endurance party eventually returned alive remains one of history’s most remarkable testaments to courage, resilience and extraordinary leadership—but it is Frank Hurley’s photographs that allow us to feel the story, rather than merely know it.

Photos Hurly took in Antarctica

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First World War

Hurley carried that same courage and visual imagination into the First World War, serving as an official Australian war photographer on the Western Front. His photographs captured the almost apocalyptic horror of battle—the shell-torn earth, blasted trees, endless mud, smoke and exhausted soldiers moving through landscapes stripped of life. Yet he never lost sight of the human beings caught within that devastation. He photographed soldiers resting, caring for the wounded and finding brief moments of companionship amid the terror. This combination of horror and humanity makes his war photography so powerful: he showed both the terrible destruction human beings can inflict and the courage, tenderness and comradeship that can survive even in the darkest circumstances.

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Other photos

Hurley’s restless curiosity later took him to Papua New Guinea, where he photographed its dramatic landscapes, remote communities and richly varied cultures, before turning his camera closer to home and creating an extensive record of Sydney—its harbour, beaches, architecture and rapidly changing cityscape. I find it wonderful that I have also been able to photograph two places that held such fascination for him: Antarctica and Sydney. They could hardly be more different, yet both are deeply special to me. Knowing that I have stood with my own camera in places where Hurley once searched for beauty, drama and human stories gives me an even stronger sense of connection with the photographer who has inspired me so greatly.

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August 15, 2026

Anna Glynn 'Unbridled - The Year of the Horse'

Anna Glynn’s Unbridled – The Year of the Horse was a wonderful exhibition: exuberant, imaginative and full of life. Xenia and I were lucky enough to meet Anna and speak with her, and she was as warm and engaging as her work. Having grown up on a farm surrounded by horses, she brings an obvious affection and intimacy to her equine subjects; her love of Chinese art adds another distinctive layer of grace, pattern and movement. As someone who loves both horses and birds, I was especially drawn to the way she combined them in beautifully surreal, flowing forms—creatures that seem at once familiar and dreamlike, alive with freedom and spirit.